Archives: Morning Breakouts

CongressDaily reports that Republicans are busy tying their health reform repeal hopes to big gains in the midterm and 2012 elections.

G8 countries should make use of low-cost, effective tools to prevent hunger, disease and premature deaths among women and children in developing countries, Bev Oda, Canada's international cooperation minister, said on Tuesday. Leaders defended Canada's pledge not to fund abortions in the developing world.

"Conditions in Zambia's prisons are so overcrowded and medical care so inadequate that they are breeding grounds for disease and pose a serious threat to public health, says a new report by Human Rights Watch, produced in association with the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa and the Prisons Care and Counselling Association," BMJ News reports. "Researchers report that similar conditions prevail in much of Africa, where prisons risk becoming reservoirs of HIV and drug resistant tuberculosis"(Moszynski, 4/27).

Sierra Leone is launching a program to provide free health care for mothers and children in an effort to reduce high maternal and child mortality rates, Ernest Bai Koroma, the country's president, said on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports (4/27).

"As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins mark up today of the first foreign affairs authorization bill in five years, all eight living former U.S. Secretaries of State have written a letter [.pdf] urging Congress not to cut the international affairs budget," Politico's Laura Rozen writes on her blog.

Late Tuesday, China's State Council lifted a decades-old restriction that banned foreigners with HIV/AIDS from entering the country, Reuters reports. The amended rules, which appear on the government website, also lift a travel ban on foreigners with other sexually transmitted diseases and leprosy.

Thirteen more lines of human embryonic stem cells are now officially eligible for federal funding since approval by the National Institutes of Health.