Archives: Morning Breakouts

Al Jazeera reports on the public health situation in South Sudan, which gained its independence on Saturday, and profiles Juba Teaching Hospital, the new country's largest medical center. "A lack of proper primary care facilities in South Sudan means the doctors here are often overworked: Many of the doctors at the hospital come to work seven days a week," Al Jazeera writes. "The health ministry has plans to open a network of primary care centers

In a New York Times opinion piece, Robert Jensen, an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Nolan Miller, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggest an alternate strategy for measuring hunger, called the "staple-calorie-share approach," which "can give us a radically different view of who is hungry and who is not."

Also, The Wall Street Journal reports that the pharmaceutical industry's pipeline is showing a reinvigorated level of energy.

Ronald Brus, CEO of the Dutch vaccine maker Crucell, said Haiti did not accept an offer of tens of thousands of cholera vaccine doses late last year, the Financial Times reports. Brus said Crucell offered significant donations of its Dukoral cholera vaccine, but Haitian health officials passed on the offer, according to the newspaper.

Scientists have isolated a new strain of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea that is resistant to all known antibiotic treatments in biological samples from a Japan woman, according to Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, Reuters reports. Unemo is set to present his findings at a conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research in Quebec on Monday.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program and Oxfam issued a joint appeal on Friday asking the international community to provide the "political, moral and financial means" necessary to fight the severe drought affecting more than 10 million people in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Uganda, the Associated Press reports (7/8).

USAID and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Thursday launched the Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) initiative to "provide grants to developing world partners of NSF U.S. grantees," with the goal of supporting "applied research