Archives: Morning Breakouts

A three-day meeting of the WHO African Program for Onchocerciasis (River blindness) Control (WHO/APOC) opened in Abuja, Nigeria, on Tuesday, PANA/Afrique en ligne reports (12/8).

"Bad immunisation strategy has been blamed for an outbreak of polio, which has killed nearly 200 and is believed to have caused paralysis in more than 2,000 others across Angola, Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)," the Mail & Guardian writes in a story examining the emergence of the disease in the three countries and efforts to control it.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) "moved rapidly Wednesday to put her mark on U.S. foreign policy as the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee," McClatchy reports (Clark, 12/8).

The Republican lawmaker who will take the chair of the House's main investigative committee has made clear his interest in examining the overuse of expensive medical procedures while a newly tapped GOP subcommittee chief pledges to undo the health law.

A New Jersey federal district court judge issued the latest dismissal in the ongoing legal challenges to health reform. Still, all eyes continue to watch for a ruling from a Virginia court sometime this month.

More than 2,000 people have died of cholera in Haiti since late October, Haitian officials said on Monday, the Associated Press/Washington Post reports (12/6). According to Haitian health ministry figured, a total of "2,013 people have died from the water-borne bacterial infection and 88,789 cases have been recorded," Agence France-Presse writes (12/6).

HP and the African social enterprise mPedigree on Monday announced a new service that will enable patients in Ghana and Nigeria to verify the authenticity of their medications, Fast Company reports. "Counterfeit drugs are estimated to be a $75-billion-per-year business, [and are] implicated in the deaths of something like 700,000 people around the world annually," according to the article (Zax, 12/6).