Archives: Morning Breakouts

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum continues to attack rival Mitt Romney's Massachusetts' health reform record, arguing that it weakens his ability to run against President Barack Obama and the federal health law. Fellow candidate Newt Gingrich also is not escaping Santorum's criticism.

"Scientists, stymied for decades by the complexity of the human immunodeficiency virus, are making progress on several fronts in the search for a cure for HIV infections," but "[a] major stumbling block is the fact that HIV lies low in pools or reservoirs of latent infection that even powerful drugs cannot reach, scientists told the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, one of the world's largest scientific meetings on HIV/AIDS," in Seattle last week, Reuters reports. "Promising tactics range from flushing hidden HIV from cells to changing out a person's own immune system cells, making them resistant to HIV and then putting them back into the patient's body," the news service writes.

The Daily Beast reports on a panel discussion at the third Women in the World summit on Friday in which Barbara Bush, CEO and co-founder of Global Health Corps, and Gabi Zedlmayer, head of Hewlett-Packard's (HP) global social innovation program, talked about "how to harness technology to solve world health problems." According to the news service, Zedlmayer "called for a full 'eco system': Pharma, [research & development], the works," adding, "Much of HP's approach is through partnerships, which the company has established with many organizations, including Global Health Corps." Bush "talked passionately about her company's accomplishments, ... explaining that Global Health Corps was created on the Teach for America model: recruit the best and the brightest, just out of university, and send them into the field -- wherever there's a need -- for one year," the news service notes (Schwartz, 3/9).

PSI's "Healthy Lives" blog presents global health-related excerpts of USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah's annual letter that was published on March 9. Shah touches on programs to improve infant and child health; water, sanitation and hygiene; malaria prevention; HIV/AIDS care; and health care in several countries, including Afghanistan, Ghana and Ethiopia, according to the blog (3/9).

Representatives of 40 member countries of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as senior officials from the agency, on Monday opened the 31st FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific in Hanoi, Vietnam, to "discuss in depth the issues of food security and rural poverty reduction," Xinhua/China Daily reports (3/12). Hiroyuki Konuma, FAO assistant director general, "sa[id] rising food prices and frequent natural disasters are making it harder to ease hunger and malnutrition in the Asia-Pacific region," VOA's "Breaking News" blog writes, adding he "said the challenge of eradicating hunger has also been complicated by the effects of climate change, trade policies, soaring crude oil prices and the growing use of food crops for biofuels." According to the blog, "ministers [at the meeting] will review a report on measures to speed up progress toward the goal of cutting hunger levels in half in Asia-Pacific by 2015," a "target was set at a World Food Summit in 1996" (3/12).

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) "on Friday appealed for an extra $69.8 million to aid 790,000 vulnerable households in the drought-hit Sahel region in West Africa," Agence France-Presse/Vanguard reports (3/10). "In a news release, the [FAO] said that at least 15 million people are estimated to be at risk of food insecurity in countries in the Sahel, including 5.4 million people in Niger, three million in Mali, 1.7 million in Burkina Faso and 3.6 million in Chad, as well as hundreds of thousands in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania," the U.N. News Centre writes (3/9). FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said, "We need to act to prevent further deterioration of the food security situation and to avoid a full-scale food and nutrition crisis," according to AFP (3/10).

"With its health-care system increasingly eclipsed by rivals, India has a plan to nearly double public spending on health over the next five years," a goal that would "lift annual spending on health to 2.5 percent of the country's economic output, from 1.4 percent," the Washington Post reports. The scheme is "aimed at giving free medicine to all Indians at government facilities, setting up free ambulances in rural areas, doubling the number of trained health workers, and lifting millions of young children and women out of chronic malnutrition and preventable deaths," the newspaper writes.

"[T]he United States, with its high salaries and technological innovation, is ... the world's most powerful magnet for doctors, attracting more every year than Britain, Canada and Australia -- the next most popular destinations for migrating doctors -- combined," the New York Times Magazine reports in a story on how the promise of a better salary and working conditions is drawing newly trained doctors away from their countries to the U.S.

Also in the news, a study in the journal American Politics Research quantifies in percentage points the support Democratic incumbents lost as a result of voting for the 2010 health overhaul.

USAID on Thursday published a Global Health E-News Mini March Edition in commemoration of International Women's Day, which was celebrated on Thursday. Topics covered in the special issue include USAID's new gender policy, launched last week at a White House event; the sixth International Women of Courage Awards, hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues Melanne Verveer on Thursday; and the role of family planning to reduce poverty (3/8).

In this interview in World Politics Review's "Trend Lines," Peter Navario, an adjunct associate professor of public policy at New York University and a former global health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, discusses the evolution South Africa's HIV/AIDS policy over the last decade, the country's current relationship with pharmaceutical companies, and how South African President Jacob Zuma's HIV/AIDS policy is received in the region and by international donors. "South Africa has gone from global laggard to playing a leading role in the global HIV response," Navario said, adding that the country's "policies are in lockstep with World Health Organization guidelines, and an aggressive new strategic plan aims to tackle HIV-related stigma, meet 80 percent of treatment need and cut new infections in half by 2016" (3/7).

"The health status of women is linked to their fundamental freedoms and empowerment," Susan Blumenthal, public health editor at the Huffington Post and former U.S. assistant surgeon general, and Jean Guo, a health policy intern at the Center for the Study of Presidency and Congress, write in the website's "Healthy Living" blog in a post marking International Women's Day, which was celebrated on Thursday. "With 3.4 billion women worldwide, women's health is a global issue today. Yet, societal and environmental factors including poverty, discrimination, and violence are undermining the advancement of women's health," they write.

In a letter (.pdf) published Wednesday in the Lancet, officials from the CDC refute "point by point" three letters previously published in the journal that were critical of the agency's Center for Global Health, ScienceInsider reports. Lancet Editor Richard Horton on February 11 "published criticisms of the institution's Center for Global Health that he received from an anonymous letter writer" and then "ran complaints made by two more unnamed critics of the CDC center on March 3," the news service states, adding, "As Horton noted, the letters 'raise questions about leadership, management of resources, proper use of the CDC's authority and power, and the scientific rigor of CDC research.'"