Archives: Morning Breakouts

With the State Department's reassurance to aid groups on Tuesday that they "will not face prosecution if they are forced to pay bribes to al-Shabab or if militants divert some food supplies," organizations still have "the problem of gaining access to famine victims and ensuring the safety of their personnel, a number of whom have been murdered by the militants," a Washington Post editorial says. "But the crisis may be causing al-Shabab's cohesion to break down; some commanders have been cutting deals with aid organizations to receive food supplies," the editorial states.

"[A]s the worst drought in 60 years again devastates the Horn of Africa, throwing as many as 12 million into desperate hunger

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe writes in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece that "amid all the good news" about HIV prevention recently presented at the 6th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention, "one stubborn fact was hard to ignore: AIDS remains a metaphor for inequality." With discrepancies in access to HIV treatment and prevention between developed and developing countries, "[i]t is hard not to conclude from all this that life is not valued equally across the world. This is morally wrong and unacceptable," he writes.

Concentrated HIV epidemics are emerging among men who have sex with men in the Middle East and North Africa, "and high levels of risky sexual behavior threaten to spread the AIDS virus further in the region, researchers said Tuesday" in a study published in PLoS Medicine, Reuters reports. The researchers "found evidence for concentrated HIV epidemics

"Scientists have identified an emerging 'superbug' strain of salmonella that is highly resistant to the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, often used for severe salmonella infections, and say they fear it may spread around the world," according to a study published online Tuesday in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Reuters reports (Kelland, 8/3).

Hundreds of parents "are defying threats of jail time by refusing polio vaccines for their children in a high-risk northern Nigerian state," according to Muhammad Abdu Zango, Kano state coordinator of Journalists Against Polio, the Associated Press/Seattle Times reports.