Archives: Morning Breakouts

"A total of 28,000 people died of HIV/AIDS in China in 2011, and another 48,000 in the country were found newly infected by the virus, according to an official publication" released on Saturday by China's Ministry of Health, UNAIDS, and the WHO, Xinhua/China Daily reports. "With about 780,000 people living with HIV/AIDS nationwide, including 154,000 AIDS patients, the total infection rate of the country stands at 0.058 percent, the report said," according to the news service. "The report added that more than 136,000 AIDS patients had received anti-virus treatments by September 2011, bringing the treatment coverage rate to 73.5 percent, an increase of 11.5 percentage points compared to 2009," Xinhua writes (1/21).

Roll Call reports that state legislatures passed a landmark number of anti-abortion measures in 2011 - setting the stage for the year ahead.

President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday is expected to include a shift in strategy related to health policy.

Fresh from his South Carolina victory, Newt Gingrich appeared on three Sunday morning talk shows. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were also interviewed.

"In recent months, many politicians and presidential hopefuls have called for budget reductions, and many have specifically targeted military spending for cutbacks," Peter Hotez and James Kazura, past president and president, respectively, of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, write in this Atlantic opinion piece. "[P]rograms such as the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) often find themselves low on the priority list despite their crucial role in saving the lives of our troops on the battlefield and here at home," they write, adding, "Today, American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan still face formidable tropical disease threats. ... For over 100 years, WRAIR has been the U.S. military's premier institution for preventing these types of tropical infections."

This post in the Ministerial Leadership Initiative's (MLI) "Leading Global Health" blog is "the third of a series of perspective pieces on country ownership from the 'Advancing Country Ownership for Greater Results' roundtable organized last week by" MLI, a program of Aspen Global Health and Development. "This third of four pieces covers the comments from several participants," including Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and co-moderator of the session; Mark Dybul, former U.S. global AIDS ambassador, and current co-director at Georgetown's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law; Pape Gaye, president and CEO of IntraHealth; Paul O'Brien, vice president for Policy and Campaigns at Oxfam America; Salif Samake, director of Mali's Health, Planning, and Statistics Unit in the ministries of Health, Social Development, and the Promotion of Women, Children and Family; and Francis Omaswa, MLI senior adviser, executive director of the African Centre for Global Health and Social Transformation, and co-moderator of the session (Donnelly, 1/19).

The GOP presidential hopefuls clashed on a range of issues related to the health law, its individual mandate and efforts to repeal it. Candidates' positions on abortion were also flashpoints.

At a presentation hosted by the Global Health Council on Thursday at the University of Washington, Christopher Murray and Michael Hanlon from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation provided an update on global development assistance for health, the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports (Lubinski, 1/19). The data were based on a recently released report, titled "Financing Global Health 2011: Continued Growth as MDG Deadline Approaches," which "offers a comprehensive view of trends in public and private financing of health assistance with preliminary estimates for health financing in the most recent years" and "shows that development assistance for health (DAH) continues to rise, albeit at a slower rate than before the recession," according to an IMHE press release (December 2011).

"In 2012 there will be a major strategic shift in global health, away from development and towards sustainability," a Lancet editorial states. "Since 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), driven by a macroeconomic diagnosis of global poverty, have focused on investment in a small number of diseases as the most effective approach to decrease poverty, ... [b]ut this approach is now delivering diminishing returns," because of emerging challenges such as non-communicable diseases (NCDs), climate change, and financial security, as well as a heightened focus on integration and accountability, the editorial says.

"An international debate over whether to censor new research on bird flu may soon prove academic, as other laboratories close in on similar findings showing how one of the most deadly viruses could mutate to be transmitted from one person to another," Reuters reports. Last year, two teams of researchers reported study results "that showed how the H5N1 [bird flu] virus can be transmitted through airborne droplets between ferrets, a model for studying influenza in humans," and the findings prompted the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) in December to advise "two leading journals, Nature and Science, to withhold details of the research for fear it could be used by bioterrorists," the news service writes.

Texas and Janssen Pharmaceuticals reach a $158 million settlement on a suit claiming that the company lied about the efficacy of the anti-psychotic medicine.