Archives: Morning Breakouts

Again on the defensive about the Massachusetts health law he signed while governor, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney reiterated that he didn't think the federal government should have used the state's measure as a model and acknowledged that he didn't finish the job in terms of reducing health care costs.

In this Guardian opinion piece, the newspaper's health editor, Sarah Boseley, responds to the positive results of a large-scale clinical trial of an experimental malaria vaccine reported on Tuesday and recaps other strides made against the disease in recent years, writing that "there is a way to go yet, with more results from the trial to come, and many uncertainties, including how much this vaccine will cost and who will be persuaded to pay."

Though emergency humanitarian assistance has helped keep people alive in the Horn of Africa, "this effort is not sustainable," David Morley, president and CEO of UNICEF Canada, writes in a Globe and Mail opinion piece. "Trucking in water and flying in food and medicine save lives, but we must rethink the way aid agencies operate in the region. We need to blend the immediate life-saving effort with creative longer-term community development ... and involve everyone affected by the crisis. Farmers, herders, refugees and displaced people, local communities and government officials have valuable insights that a massive humanitarian response all too often overlooks," he continues.

"Eradicating malaria is not a vague, unrealistic aspiration but a tough, ambitious goal that can be reached within the next few decades," Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said on Tuesday at the international Malaria Forum in Seattle, Reuters reports. "Gates said a renewed focus and substantial increases in funding for malaria ... was steadily 'shrinking the malaria map' and would continue to do so," and he "pointed to Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia as 'likely early candidates' for being able to eliminate the disease from within their borders in the near future," according to the news service (Kelland, 10/19).

IRIN examines maternal and child health in "conflict-afflicted eastern Myanmar, [where] until recently obstetric care was often crude, unsterile and dangerous for both mother and child, health experts say." To address high rates of maternal and infant mortality in the region, "in 2005 several CBOs, the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University, and the Global Health Access Program launched the Mobile Obstetric Medics (MOM) project -- dramatically boosting access to care," IRIN writes.

Four years after the Lancet "published a special series on global mental health, highlighting the gap in provision between rich countries and the rest of the world," the journal has published a new series, including an "editorial accompanying the series, welcom[ing] the initiatives in global mental health in the past four years, but [saying] 'there is still a long way to go and many challenges to face,'" IRIN reports (10/18).

NPR's food blog "The Salt" reports on the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves' efforts to "bring in celebrities, chefs and politicians to help create awareness for the need for cleaner fuels and better cookstoves," the smoke and gases from which contribute to nearly two million deaths a year -- more than malaria -- according to a study released by the WHO last week. "The technology is easy, but getting the stoves and cleaner fuels to impoverished millions is not," the blog writes.

GlobalPost's "Global Pulse" blog examines how Kenya is working to decrease the number of preventable deaths under a "recently launched ... campaign called 'Let's Live,' which sets a target of reducing preventable deaths in Kenya by 50 percent by December 2012." Achieving that goal "would be an historic feat. But the country could seriously decrease numbers of preventable deaths if it used currently available health tools, such as the rotavirus vaccine," the blog writes (Donnelly, 10/18).

"An experimental vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline halved the risk of African children getting malaria in a major clinical trial, making it likely to become the world's first shot against the deadly disease," according to a study "presented at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Malaria Forum conference in Seattle and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine" on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Analysis of data from the first 6,000 children to participate in "a final-stage Phase III clinical trial conducted at 11 trial sites in seven countries across sub-Saharan Africa ... found that after 12 months of follow-up, three doses of RTS,S reduced the risk of children experiencing clinical malaria and severe malaria by 56 percent and 47 percent, respectively," the news service writes (Kelland, 10/18). The vaccine was developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in partnership with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, and the study was partially funded by the Gates Foundation, Inter Press Service notes (Whitman, 10/18).

Paul Farmer, a founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, in an interview with the Associated Press/Washington Post "said cholera has sickened more than 450,000 people in a nation of 10 million, or nearly five percent of the population, and killed more than 6,000," giving the Caribbean nation "the highest rate of cholera in the world a mere year after the disease first arrived" (10/18).

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "on Tuesday announced a $2.5 million grant to Mercy Corps to fund relief and longer-term recovery efforts in drought-stricken Wajir County on Kenya's border with Somalia," representing "more than 40 percent of the $5.4 million in private funds that Mercy Corps has raised to date for Horn of Africa relief efforts," the Seattle Times reports. The Gates Foundation on Tuesday also "announced a $1.6 million grant to International Medical Corps to provide emergency food assistance and to help improve health, hygiene and sanitation in northern Somalia and eastern Ethiopia," the newspaper writes (Bernton, 10/18).