Archives: Morning Breakouts

The overhaul's popularity reached an all-time low this month, a change that was driven by eroding confidence among Democrats, according to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

"Despite a massive increase in humanitarian operations and international funding since famine was formally declared 100 days ago, the relief effort in Somalia is expected to miss almost all its key targets for 2011, a draft United Nations report reveals," the Guardian reports, adding, "[m]alnutrition rates have more than doubled, less than 60 percent of the 3.7 million people targeted have received monthly food assistance, and only 58 percent of a targeted 1.2 million people received critical non-food aid items."

In this New York Times opinion piece, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tina Rosenberg reports on the use of food vouchers by some aid organizations in Somalia, highlighting the efforts of World Concern, "a Seattle-based Christian humanitarian group, and its Somali partner, the African Rescue Committee, [which] provide 1,800 families every two weeks with rice, beans, cooking oil, salt and sugar for their tea."

"The shortage of health workers in Uganda is a 'crisis,' says the Minister of Health, and activists say expectant mothers are bearing the brunt of the country's staffing deficiency," IRIN reports. "Just 56 percent of Uganda's available health positions are filled," the news service writes, adding, "A parliamentary committee's recent attempt to redirect 75 billion Ugandan shillings -- about US$27.5 million -- out of a national budget of more than 10 trillion shillings ($3.6 billion) towards hiring enough health workers was rebuffed in September."

"Tanzania is to become the first country in the world to move exclusively to using syringes that self-destruct after a British entrepreneur played the health minister undercover footage of children being injected with used needles," the Guardian reports. "Marc Koska, the designer of an auto-disable syringe and founder of a charity called Safe-Point," who went to the Tanzanian government with the video, "hopes to persuade four other countries in east Africa to follow suit -- Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda -- before he takes on the rest of the world," the newspaper writes.

In a SciDev.Net letter to the editor, Rashid Zargar from the Centre of Research for Development at the University of Kashmir, responds to an editorial published by the news service last week in which editor David Dickson suggested that "focusing on the science and technology required to eliminate a disease, rather than just control it, can pay off." Zargar writes, "Dickson offers an in-depth perspective on disease eradication, and he is correct in saying that eradication strategies, though important, will be challenging." However, he adds, "Ecologists may have reservations about the idea of eradicating a disease, which stem from the belief that mechanisms already exist in nature to maintain ecological balance and the co-existence of living organisms."

Nature News reports on last week's announcement of preliminary results from a large clinical trial testing the efficacy of GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) RTS,S malaria vaccine, writing that while media coverage of the announcement touted it as a "big breakthrough in the long campaign to create a malaria vaccine," "several leading vaccine researchers, who are critical of the unusual decision to publish partial trial data, argue that the results raise questions about whether the RTS,S/AS01 candidate vaccine can actually win approval." According to Nature, low rates of protection suggested by the results and "the frequency of serious adverse events, such as convulsions and meningitis," have added to speculation about the vaccine.

The National Journal reports that President Barack Obama is outpacing the GOP candidates in fundraising from the health industry. Meanwhile, in other campaign news, the abortion issue pops up again in the GOP presidential primary race and also in a congressional campaign.