Archives: Morning Breakouts

Meanwhile, on the House side, a top Democrat has said he will support efforts to undo the panel created to curb Medicare spending growth. The American Medical Association also reiterated its support for repeal.

"Urbanization leaves hundreds of millions of children in cities and towns excluded from vital services, UNICEF warns in 'The State of the World's Children 2012: Children in an Urban World,'" released on Tuesday, the agency reports in a press release (2/28). "Children in slums and poor urban communities lack access to clean water, sanitation and education, as services struggle to keep up with fast urban growth, says" the agency's flagship report, according to AlertNet (Caspani, 2/28). The report "calls attention to the lack of data on conditions in slums, particularly as it relates to children, and it calls for a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding poverty and inequality in cities and increased political will to improve the lives of the most marginalized," UNICEF writes in an accompanying article (2/28).

"Tackling land-use conflicts around game parks must form part of the national strategy to stop the spread of [Trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness], warn doctors fighting the disease in Tanzania," IRIN reports. According to the news service, "Tanzania's booming tourism industry has been driven largely by its wildlife parks, which contribute almost $1.8 billion a year to the economy," but "[a] growing number of communities find their villages 'squeezed' between wildlife areas, putting them at risk from tsetse flies that spread ... sleeping sickness, a debilitating and often fatal disease."

In this Open Society Foundations (OSF) blog post, Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Program at OSF, examines "the ways that power structures, rather than individuals, contribute to disease rebound and spread," citing a recent study by MJ Milloy and colleagues, published in the journal JAIDS, "which shows the link between incarceration and the failure of HIV treatment." Wolfe writes, "Milloy's analysis showed that incarceration kick-started viral replication among patients who had previously had their HIV under control. The findings make the study one of a number of must-reads on how prison practices not only impact the health of inmates but communities at large" (2/27).

This report (.pdf), published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on Monday and titled "Righting the Global Fund," recounts the adversity faced by the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria over the course of 2011 and suggests potential strategies for addressing these challenges going forward (2/27). "Aside from the major challenges of ensuring adequate funding from donors, there are five critical areas where the Global Fund will need to concentrate its repair efforts this year" -- grant oversight, management, governance, program inefficiencies, financial forecasting and donor reliability -- and "five priorities that should guide the U.S. government's approach to the fund" -- fund management, operational integration, diplomacy, consistent messaging to Congress, and the integration of science data and innovation, the authors write in the report (Morrison/Summers, 2/27).

A joint agreement recently signed by the Ugandan Ministry of Health and the U.S. Government's Global Health Initiative (GHI) to carry out collaborative initiatives targeted at "bringing quality health care to Ugandans" is "a significant effort that should, with proper implementation, improve health care services, particularly by reducing pregnancy-related deaths," a Daily Monitor editorial states.

Two new reports from southern Africa's Health Systems Trust show that pregnant women, infants, and people newly diagnosed with HIV infection are receiving more services, but the costs of care are increasing, PlusNews reports. The annual District Health Barometer shows that about half of infants born to HIV-positive mothers are being tested for the virus at six weeks; almost all pregnant women are tested for HIV, helping to lower the rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission to below four percent nationwide; and about 70 percent of people newly diagnosed with HIV receive screening for tuberculosis (TB), according to the news service.

In this guest post in the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog, Brook Baker of the Northeastern University School of Law Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy, "describe[s] and comment[s] on pharmaceutical company Novartis's court challenge to India's strict standards of patenting medicine" and worldwide protests against the company that took place last week prior to its shareholder meeting (Mazzotta, 2/27).

In this post on the Center for Global Development's (CGD) "Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog," Jenny Ottenhoff, policy outreach associate at CGD, previews issues that may be raised when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before four congressional committees this week about President Obama's FY 2013 budget request for the State Department and USAID. She asks, "[W]ill core development issues -- like those around global health, the [Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)], Pakistan, migration, foreign aid reform and climate change -- find a time to shine during the proceedings?" (2/27).

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday "launched a national polio vaccination campaign in Angola, where the crippling disease has returned despite being eradicated in 2001, and praised the government for its leadership on the issue," the U.N. News Centre reports. "Angola provides a large majority of the funding needed to vaccinate the country's children," the news service writes. Ban said the return of polio to Angola within four years after it was eradicated in 2001 illustrated the importance of immunization against polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases, as well as responding to any new polio cases, according to the news service (2/27).

Pharmaceutical company Novartis "has spoken out following criticism about its challenge to India's patent laws, insisting that access to life-saving drugs is not under peril by the move," Pharma Times World News reports. The case, which the Indian Supreme Court is scheduled to hear next month, challenges "Indian patent law, notably Section 3(d), which states that a modification of a known chemical composition is non-patentable," the news service writes.

Politico reports on a new poll that shows the nation is almost evenly split on whether, if elected, a Republican president should repeal the health law. Meanwhile, in related news, The Hill reports that House GOP lawmakers will renew their attacks on the overhaul to correspond with the Supreme Court review of the measure.

The campaign advertisement invokes the name of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. The younger Kennedy calls the ad, which suggests that Brown shares the late senator's position on religious exemptions for health care providers, "misleading and untrue."

The Associated Press reports that the fight against cancer is increasingly not just about finding cures, but also finding ways to afford the costs of improved treatments.