Archives: Morning Breakouts

"Cash-strapped Swaziland's state hospitals have only two months' supplies of AIDS drugs, the country's health minister has told parliament in an assessment that AIDS patients and activists took as a death sentence," the Associated Press/Seattle Times reports. More than 60,000 Swazis receive antiretroviral medicine at no cost from state-run hospitals.

"Annual funding for research and development (R&D) in the fight against malaria has quadrupled over 16 years, generating the strongest pipeline of potential treatments in history, according to a report [.pdf] on Tuesday," Reuters reports (Kelland, 6/28).

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday in Rome announced the eradication of the cattle disease rinderpest, "the only other disease besides smallpox to achieve the gone-for-good status," HealthKey/Los Angeles Times' "Booster Shots" blog reports (Cevallos, 6/28).

Ambassador Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, said that a recent $75 million pledge from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chevron and Johnson & Johnson could help "eliminate new HIV-infected children by 2015 and keep mothers alive," McClatchy/News & Observer reports.

In a Daily Independent opinion piece, U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Terence McCulley writes that after "truly historic" elections in April, "[t]he Nigerian Government faces complex challenges in the post-election environment. Security, electricity, good roads, education and reliable health care top most people's lists of immediate concerns."

SciDev.Net reports on the 7th World Conference of Science Journalists, taking place this week in Qatar, where participants discussed how the number of clinical trials in developing countries is surging despite legal and ethical frameworks often not being in place.

Guatemala's "vast inequality" helped it land "on the list of eight 'plus' countries in the Global Health Initiative (GHI) that President Barack Obama is focusing on as part of his expansion and revision of how the U.S. is funding and rethinking global aid," GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog reports in an article examining malnutrition in Guatemala, the wealthiest of nations in the first round of GHI plus countries.

Researchers from Scynexis Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Anacor Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto, Calif., sponsored by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, on Tuesday reported in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that a new experimental drug kills the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness in mice and will enter human clinical trials this year, ScienceNOW reports (Leslie, 6/28).