Archives: Morning Breakouts

The Minnesota attorney general says the company has some overly-aggressive billing and collection practices.

Doctors and insurers are considering how best to combat obesity in America including screening kids early via blood pressure checks and using body mass index tests in adults to monitor weight and potential problems.

Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe all have launched national campaigns urging men to undergo circumcision to help reduce their risk of contracting or transmitting HIV infection, but "all the countries are lagging far behind their targets," Agence France-Presse reports in an article focusing on efforts in Botswana. A three-year-old campaign in Botswana, aimed at convincing 460,000 men to get circumcised, "has reached only seven percent of this figure," the news agency notes, adding, "Now the government has enlisted the help of top musicians and launched a new series of advertisements touting 'safe male circumcision' as a lifeline."

Medical research advocates warn Congress about the dire impact that automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect in January would have on efforts to control disease and develop life-saving treatments. Also in the news, how the concept of "fast-track" Food and Drug Administration approvals is playing on Capitol Hill.

The PBS NewsHour on Friday featured an interview of Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), by Senior Correspondent Ray Suarez, in which they discussed an FDA panel's recommendation that the antiretroviral Truvada be approved for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV among healthy people at risk of contracting the virus. If approved, Truvada "can be potentially very effective" as a prevention modality among specific populations at high risk of contracting HIV, Fauci said, according to the interview. Fauci also discussed the medication's cost and concerns about adherence to the drug regimen, PBS notes (Suarez, 5/11).

After announcing it plans to spend an additional $1.67 million over the next two years, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Board on Friday at the end of its 26th meeting in Geneva said (.pdf) its "secretariat will present at an upcoming board meeting in September new funding models drafted in consultation with recipient countries and other stakeholders," and the board will "announce funding decisions no later than April 2013," Devex reports.

The House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations subcommittee on Wednesday approved, without changes, its version of the FY 2013 U.S. international affairs appropriations bill, Devex reports (Mungcal, 5/10). The bill provides $40.1 billion in regular discretionary funding and an additional $8.2 billion in funding for ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and if enacted would represent a 12 percent cut from the President's request and a five percent cut from 2012, according to a House Committee on Appropriations press release (5/8). "Despite the cuts, the legislation won bipartisan backing from the Appropriations foreign aid panel, though it's sure to draw a White House veto threat because it's in line with a broader GOP spending plan that breaks faith with last summer's budget and debt pact with President Barack Obama," the Associated Press/Washington Post writes (5/9). "The bill now goes to the full House Appropriations Committee, which is expected to vote on it next week," Devex notes (5/10).

"Most deaths of young children around the world are from mainly preventable infectious causes," according to a study published in the Lancet on Friday, BBC News reports. A team led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at mortality figures from 2010 and "found two-thirds of the 7.6 million children who died before their fifth birthday did so due to infectious causes -- and pneumonia was found to be the leading cause of death," the news service writes. "They found child deaths had fallen by two million (26 percent) since 2000, and there have been significant reductions in leading causes of death including diarrhea and measles -- as well as pneumonia," BBC notes (5/11). However, the authors "caution the decline is not sufficient enough" to achieve the fourth Millennium Development Goal, "which seeks to reduce child mortality by two-thirds in 2015," a Johns Hopkins press release writes (5/10).

"For many years, in large parts of West Africa, the percentage of women who use contraception has stalled at less than 10 percent, leading many to declare that there is very little or no demand for family planning (FP) in the region. This couldn't be farther from the truth," Catharine McKaig, project director of family planning at the Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP), the USAID Bureau for Global Health's flagship maternal, neonatal and child health program, writes in a post in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Impatient Optimists" blog. "Among women -- young and old, those who have had many children and those who have had few or none -- there is a sea-change happening. These women are expressing their desire for family planning methods, and our approach towards integrating maternal and child health care services with FP is producing results," she writes, concluding, "It is an optimal moment to unite as a community supporting women's health worldwide to ensure adequate supply and minimal cost for family planning services to the hundreds of thousands of women in West Africa who are seeking care" (5/10).

"Over the next few weeks, appropriators will be engaged in the challenging task of evaluating U.S. foreign assistance funding, including how effectively Congress' global health investments are being used," Charles Lyons, president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation; Molly Joel Coye, interim president and CEO of PATH; Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children; and Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, write in this Roll Call opinion piece. They continue, "As organizations funded in part by the U.S. government to implement global health programs in the field," we "see firsthand how U.S. global health programs are working, and why now is not the time to cut multilateral and bilateral funding for these efforts."