Month: September 2011

Global Health News Last Week

by ihsection, posted in APHA IH Section, News

SECTION NEWS
The Advocacy/Policy Committee would like to invite you to participate in our first Advocacy Day, led in partnership with the Global Health Council. The day, scheduled for Thursday, November 3rd, 2011, immediately following the annual meeting in Washington, D.C., will be an opportunity for us to voice support for a continued focus on international health to our elected officials. With the intense Congressional pressure to cut the budget, our voices can make a real difference. As a participant during this exciting day, you will be provided with training materials on effective advocacy techniques to ensure your message is clearly heard. Even if you do not have advocacy experience, you need not hesitate to sign up because you will be teamed with others. Please consider joining your fellow International Health Section members on Thursday, November 3rd, 2011 on Capitol Hill to advocate for a healthy globe.  Interested parties should register here.  Please note that registration will close on October 14th.  Any questions should be directed to Peter Freeman, Advocacy/Policy Committee Chair, at pffreeman@gmail.com or 773.318.4842.

POLITICS AND POLICY

  • GOP Presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann has been slammed by scientists, doctors and others for claiming that the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine can cause mental retardation. An ethicist has now put up money behind his challenge to her claim.
  • A commitment by G20 nations to strengthen agricultural research in developing countries will help reduce food insecurity as long as it focuses on small farmers and their needs, officials and experts said at a G20-backed conference this week.

PROGRAMS

  • The Gates Foundation has presented the Harvard School of Public Health with a $12 million grant to support its maternal health task force.
  • USAID is teaming up with former President George Bush to reduce cervical cancer deaths by 25% in five years for target developing countries.
  • The magic number may be $6 billion to make a real dent in ending the spread of AIDS.
  • A collaboration between UK and US funding agencies has announced more than £3.5M new funding for research aimed at controlling the transmission of diseases amongst humans, animals and the environment.

RESEARCH AND INNOVATION

  • The number of African countries with national policies on traditional medicine increased almost fivefold between 2001 and 2010, according to a report on a decade of traditional medicine on the continent.
  • The recently published results from two malaria vaccine trials appear to show that scientists are getting closer to developing a vaccine against the mosquito-borne illness.
  • Effective nursing is the backbone of a high quality health care delivery system. GHDonline’s nursing community will discuss how ongoing mentoring and training programs can enhance nursing in an expert panel discussion September 19-23.
  • The number of young women with breast cancer has more than doubled worldwide since 1980, say researchers at Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
  • After 2 years of analyzing the results of the largest AIDS vaccine clinical trial ever held, the so-called Thai prime-boost trial, and the only one so far to show some protection against HIV, researchers say they have discovered insights that could lead to an effective vaccine.
  • IUDs can prevent cervical cancer, finds a study published in the Lancet.
  • Reducing the incidence of malaria could also drastically reduce the number of deaths from bacterial infections among children in Africa, a study has found.

DISEASES AND DISASTERS

  • Authorities worry that tropical mosquitoes found in San Gabriel Valley could spread disease if they gained a foothold in Southern California.
  • A human rights investigator for the United Nations says up to a quarter of the world’s trash from hospitals, clinics, labs, blood banks and mortuaries is hazardous and much more needs to be done to regulate it.
  • A report from UNICEF and the WHO shows the decrease in the rate of deaths for children under the age of five.
  • The WHO warns that thousands may die if multi-drug resistant and forms of tuberculosis continue to spread throughoutEurope.
  • One of the scientific advisers to the new blockbuster movie “Contagion” says the “risks are very real — and are increasing drastically… Our vulnerability to such diseases has been heightened by the growth in international travel and the globalization of food production.”

FOCUS – NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES

  • Cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness and diabetes account for 63 percent of all global deaths, yet up to half could be prevented, according to a new report, Noncommunicable Diseases Country Profiles 2011, released Wednesday by the  World Health Organization.
  • The WHO released a 207 page “global score card” on the prevention of chronic illness, one week ahead of the NCD summit at the UN.
  • Eli Lilly and Company has committed $30 million to the Global Health Initiative. The Lilly NCD Partnership will work to identify comprehensive, sustainable approaches to patient care. Initially it will concentrate on diabetes.

Thanks to Tom Murphy and Mark Leon Goldberg, Tom Paulson, Isobel Hoskins, and Public Health Newswire.

Save the Date: Knowledge Crossing Borders Conference, May 30-June 1, 2012 (West Chester University)

by ihsection, posted in Information and Social Media

West Chester University, along with Universidad Nacional at Heredia, Costa Rica, is organizing an international conference on higher education to be held May 30-June 1, 2012 at West Chester University campus. The official CIESUP/Knowledge Crossing Borders conference website can be accessed here.

Pre-Conference learning institutes: May 29, 2012
Conference: May 30 – June 1, 2012
Cultural Exchanges/Programs: June 2 – June 3, 2012

Updated:Proposals are due by November 1, 2011. The call for proposals is posted below.

In an increasingly global and technological world, geographic and intellectual borders are being blurred, reconstructed, and reinstituted. The resulting paradigm shift is creating opportunities and challenges for nations and for institutions of higher learning. Political, economic, and socio-cultural issues surrounding the production, dissemination, access, ownership, and consumption of knowledge are receiving ever-increasing scrutiny across all academic disciplines.

The International Higher Education Congress sponsors seek to build a sustainable future through transformative global partnerships in higher education. The conference theme—Knowledge Crossing Borders: Building a Global Future through Research and Innovative Practices—is both broad and timely and includes the research, pedagogical, outreach, and administrative functions of institutions of higher education. The conference will examine how knowledge transactions across regional and international borders create both difficult challenges and transformative opportunities for cooperation, change, creativity, and innovation.

Conference participants will actively explore and develop common interests and intersecting scholarly work linking two or more of the participating countries and institutions.

We are seeking conference workshop papers that focus on border-crossing perspectives in broad contexts. Topics may include, but are not exclusive to, the following tracks of inquiry:

  • Technology and Science
  • Sustainability
  • Best Practices in Higher Education
  • Globalization and Transnationalization in Higher Education
  • Funding Models for Higher Education

More detailed descriptions of the tracks are found here.

Proposals may be submitted for the following structures:

  • Individual presentations not to exceed 20 minutes
  • Entire concurrent sessions or workshops that may be structured with up to three presentations for a total of 60 minutes of presentation and 20 minutes of audience response
  • Poster sessions which will include at least 60 minutes of presenter’s scheduled presence, for dialogue with conferees concerning the project portrayed

Global Health News Last Week

by ihsection, posted in News

September 5 was Labor Day.

POLITICS AND POLICY

  • The State Department has announced the official US Delegation to the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs, which will take place September 19-20.
  • Access to affordable lifesaving medicines will be threatened where they are needed most—in parts of the developing world—if the U.S.insists on implementing restrictive intellectual property policies in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, says Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).
  • Sarah Boseley shares the great news that Kenya has officially made female genital mutilation illegal.
  • A federal appeals court in Virginia has dismissed two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
  • United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon singled out sustainable development as the top issue facing the planet with the world’s seven billionth person expected to be born next month. Key to this was climate change, and he said time was running out with the population set to explode this century.
  • Thousands of proposed cuts in the US Congress could lead to significant cuts to USAID.
  • The Philippines reproductive health bill is still making its way through the senate.  Meanwhile, 7 villages in Bataan, the Philippines have banned “artificial contraception” amid national debate over the bill.
  • A report co-authored by an Australian academic highlights the need for healthy ecosystems as the basis for sustainable water resources and stable food security for people around the world.

PROGRAMS

  • Sometime this fall, the world’s population will reach 7 billion people. Experts now forecast that by 2050, the population could be 10 billion. Some say those numbers should force policy makers to focus more intently on making family planning much more widely available in the developing world.
  • The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has put together a one day conference bringing together innovators and health workers to share ideas about ways to more easily deliver interventions.
  • It has been commonly held that insecticide treated bed nets reduce the rate of malaria for people who use them. Now there is hard evidence to back up that assumption.

RESEARCH AND INNOVATIONS

  • A new study shows that less than three doses of the vaccine against cervical cancer can effectively protect women in the developing world where 80% of global deaths due to cervical cancer take place.
  • Only three African countries are on track to achieve MGD 5, according to an African Institute for Development Policy study.
  • Most efforts in the Western world seeking to find solutions for developing world problems tend to think of inventing new technologies or, at least, using the tools we typically use to fix things — modern drugs for diseases, improved seeds for crops, a better mousetrap. Sometimes, all you need is a newly geared donkey. 
  • Scientists may have developed a new TB vaccine after tests showed the elimination of TB from infected tissue in mice.
  • A socially active lifestyle can dramatically speed up weight loss through the burning of fat in mice, a study shows. Researchers at Ohio State University in the US identified a link between the amount of social interaction in a mouse’s environment and its weight.
  • An easy-to-use diagnostic chip for HIV could “give results in minutes” and be a game changer in the field of cheap diagnostics for remote regions, claim the researchers who developed it.

DISEASES AND DISASTERS

  • Having to contend with U.S.army drones and the crossfire between the Taliban and the Pakistani army, the residents of Pakistan’s tribal areas find access to treatment for HIV/AIDS harder than in most other parts of the world.
  • Three-quarters of a million people are facing death by starvation in Somalia according the United Nations, who declared Monday that famine had spread to a sixth southern region of the beleaguered Horn of Africa state.  Meanwhile, an investigation has revealed that masses of food meant for famine victims in Somalia are being stolen. There have also been reports of rioting and killings during food distribution at camps for famine victims.
  • A magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck 100km southwest of the city of Medan, Sumatra and 110km beneath the earth’s crust.
  • A New York Times editorial castigates the international community’s response to the cholera outbreak in Haiti.
  • The CEO of insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk says the WHO should buy low cost diabetes drugs in bulk for the developing world.
  • Messages of good health and positive self-esteem for girls aren’t hard to come by in kid lit, so what’s the deal with all the attention for a not-yet-published rhyming picture book about an obese, unhappy 14-year-old named Maggie?

INFOGRAPHICS AND OTHER MEDIA

Stories from the Field: Clínica Tzanabaj (San Pablo, Guatemala)

by ihsection, posted in Community-Based Primary Health Care, Stories from the Field

by Deborah Flores, RN, Ed.D, MBA E-mail

Lake Atitlan is a large lake approximately 340 meters deep, situated in the Guatemalan highlands. It is flanked by several volcanoes and surrounded by towns and villages inhabited by descendents of Mayan people. They are proud and strong people. The lake itself is one of the most beautiful in the world.

This lake supports coffee and farm crops. Most of the indigenous population survives on very little money as they make a living from the land. The lake is a major life force in their lives. There is cyclical contamination from fertilizer run off, etc. which leads to bouts of cyanobacteria in the lake.

Although the weather is temperate, the rainy season brings mudslides and flooding, which has been known to destroy homes, commercial property and lives.

There are several small hospitals around the lake; one is public, and the others are private. There are also many clinics which provide basic medical and dental care. These are supported by churches and/or by locals, and some of these are private as well. Providers are predominately volunteers who either come in to the area from Guatemala City or are on short assignments from US, Europe or other parts of Central or South America. Much of the equipment is donated either through medical companies or churches. This in itself can be a challenge.

In December 2010, my husband, a general surgeon practicing in the US, decided to retire from medicine. He is from Guatemala, and for many years has desired to return there. He has always been drawn to the lake area, as so many people are. He decided we could contribute if we opened a health center to care for the people, because basic healthcare needs are difficult to meet. For example, basic dental care is in great need, infants suffer from dehydration and the women suffer from early respiratory disease due to cooking over an open fire that often is not vented properly.

After much deliberation and planning, the clinic is now being built in San Pablo, a town with inadequate water and sewage systems.

Most children get a basic education but seldom leave the lake area. It is a closed community and very difficult to earn people’s trust.

We hired approximately 50 local workers and, with the help of a family member who is an engineer and architect, the workers were taught how to create and build using the earth underneath them. All of the materials are made on site, and rock is hauled from the riverbed to use for the rest of the structures. These men have acquired skills that they will now be able to use for the rest of their lives, hopefully to gain future employment after the project is complete. At this writing, this site has been under construction for over two years. The project itself has had an economic impact on the community, as it is the largest construction project that has ever been implemented in San Pablo.

Before breaking ground, a shaman blessed the land, as this was very important to the local workers. We then joined a local parade to advertise the coming clinic. Our workers started a soccer team for “Clínica Tzanabaj” and wear special shirts to denote who they are. We will continue to find ways to advertise the facility, but in reality, you cannot miss it driving through the area between San Pablo and San Marcos.

Until the clinic is finished, my husband travels from town to town to assist with surgeries as needed. When the clinic is complete, I will join him there to provide primary care. We hope in this way we have been able to impact our world far more than if we had stayed in the US and continued to provide care.

Deborah Flores will be joining the faculty of Research School of Nursing, which is affiliated with Rockhurst Univerisity.  Her husband is a general surgeon who retired early and is providing free care in Central America, and she joins him every few months to assist.