Archives: Morning Breakouts

But medical device companies get less love from Morgan Stanley health analysts.

Sarah Kline, executive director of Malaria No More UK, writes in the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog" about World Mosquito Day, which is recognized annually on August 20 to commemorate the discovery 114 years ago that female mosquitoes transmit malaria among humans.

Minnesota Public Radio reports that some bills in Congress would lift certain limits placed on flexible spending accounts and how they can be applied to certain over-the-counter medicines.

The cost of addressing the effects of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa "has soared to $2.5 billion, just to keep malnourished children alive, and the number of people requiring humanitarian aid has doubled" since "November last year, [when] it would have cost $500 million to prevent the situation from deteriorating," Jo Khinmaung, a food security policy adviser for Tearfund, writes in the Guardian's "Poverty Matters Blog."

"More than 2,600 humanitarians and policymakers meet in Stockholm this week to hash out ideas about how to tackle escalating problems surrounding water scarcity and access to sanitation, particularly in urban environments," AlertNet reports.

NPR's health blog "Shots" interviewed Laith Abu-Raddad of the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, co-author of a recent study published in PLoS Medicine that showed "[m]ore than five percent of men who have sex with men are infected by HIV in" the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), about "the challenges of researching such a taboo topic." Abu-Raddad discusses his motivations for pursuing the study, data collection challenges and surprises in the data, the blog notes (Thrasybule, 8/19).

"Shifts in the world's climate and responses to those shifts, including construction of more irrigation systems, threaten to increase the spread of malaria, health experts say," AlertNet reports. "Because malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, its distribution patterns can be altered by changes in weather conditions, including changes in temperature, humidity, rainfall and the general availability of fresh water, said Suad Sulaiman, a malaria expert and health and environment adviser with the Sudanese National Academy of Sciences," according to the news agency.

UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake told reporters on Friday that "[m]ore than 300,000 children in the Horn of Africa are severely malnourished 'and in imminent risk of dying' because of drought and famine," the Associated Press/Washington Post reports.

Research of the common tuberculosis (TB) drug pyrazinamide, which is used in combination with other medications to treat the disease in a six-month regimen, "has now revealed that the drug does kill the latent form of the microbe, which does not cause observable symptoms," VOA News reports.