Archives: Morning Breakouts

In this Huffington Post editorial piece, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Thomas Nides writes about "10 things you should know about the State Department and USAID" and what the department does "on behalf of the American people."

"The rotavirus vaccine introduced in Mexico in 2007 still appears to be preventing diarrhea-related deaths in children, despite speculation that years later the vaccine may not be as effective," according to the Los Angeles Times' "Booster Shots" blog. "In a letter released Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report that the vaccine still seems to be successful in reducing mortality rates among children," the blog writes, adding that rotavirus "is responsible for 527,000 childhood deaths per year" worldwide.

The new report, which is more than 600 pages long, will still probably not put to rest the contentious debate that surround vaccine safety.

"The number of people living with HIV in South Africa has dropped slightly to 5.38 million, and the number of AIDS deaths is finally starting to fall, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said Thursday ... in a written reply to a question from parliament, where lawmakers had asked for an update on the success of the anti-AIDS fight," Agence France-Presse reports. "South Africa has more HIV infections than any country in the world, previously estimated at 5.6 million by the United Nations in its global report on HIV in 2009, released late last year," the news agency writes (8/25).

A selection of opinions from a variety of places.

"In what appears to be a repeat -- on a limited scale -- of the 2010 flood disaster in Pakistan with northern areas affected mainly by flash floods sweeping down from the mountains after heavy rain, at least 16 people have died in the remote Kohistan District of Khyber Pakhtookhwa Province (KP)," IRIN reports. One official said the death toll could rise to 35 and "dozens" of houses have been washed away in the flooding, the news service notes. "According to media reports, hundreds of people are still stranded in remote areas of the flood-hit region," IRIN writes (8/25).

Though the Asia-Pacific region "has seen impressive gains" in the fight against HIV/AIDS "-- including a 20 percent drop in new HIV infections since 2001 and a three-fold increase in access to antiretroviral therapy since 2006 -- progress is threatened by an inadequate focus on key populations at higher risk of HIV infection and insufficient funding from both domestic and international sources," according to a UNAIDS report (.pdf) released on Thursday at the 2011 International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) in Busan, South Korea, a UNAIDS press release states (8/26).

"Obesity rates worldwide have doubled in the last three decades, even as blood pressure and cholesterol levels have dropped," according to a series of papers published Friday in the Lancet, the Associated Press/New York Times reports (8/25). According to the researchers, "1.5 billion adults are overweight and another half-a-billion are obese," and "the rise in obesity is likely to lead to an increase in the number of people afflicted by diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other illnesses, adding to the cost of healthcare," VOA News' "Breaking News" blog writes (8/25).

ABC News on Thursday posted six videos in its "World In 3" health series. The three-minute videos examine malaria in Uganda, neglected tropical diseases in Niger, pneumonia in the Philippines, sleeping sickness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, tuberculosis in South Africa, and parasitic worms in Brazil (8/25).

At a meeting of the African Union (A.U.) in Ethiopia on Thursday, "African governments ... pledged $46 million for the crisis in the Horn of Africa amid warnings that the emergency stretches far beyond hunger to encompass health, security and livelihood," the Guardian reports. The amount fell short of the $50 million asked for by the aid group Africans Act 4 Africa, the newspaper adds, noting that "the African Development Bank announced a $300 million donation for long-term development in the Horn of Africa" (Tran, 8/25). Reuters reports that money is "to be spent over a four-year period, not to be used to bridge a $1.4 billion shortfall aid groups say they need for the emergency" (Malone, 8/26).

GlobalPost reports on President Barack Obama's Global Health Initiative (GHI) in Nepal, one of eight GHI focus countries, and examines whether "a long-standing U.S. law" that "prohibits U.S. funds from being used for abortion services overseas for the purpose of family planning ... is hurting its efforts to improve health care" in the country.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that rebounding revenue, combined with the force of the debt-reduction deal that became law earlier this month, will reduce the deficit by an estimated $3.3 trillion.

Injecting mosquitoes with the Wolbachia bacterium "can block them from transmitting the dengue virus and help control the spread of a disease that kills 20,000 annually in more than 100 countries," a team led by Scott O'Neill, a geneticist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, reports in two papers published in Nature on Thursday, Reuters reports. The "researchers in Australia showed how female mosquitoes infected with the Wolbachia bacteria passed the bug easily to their offspring, making them all dengue-free," according to the news agency (Lyn, 8/24).