The Dire State of Reproductive Rights Worldwide

by Jean Armas, posted in APHA IH Section, Family Planning, Policy and Advocacy, Women's Health

Each day, an estimated 830 women die of preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Disproportionately affected are adolescent girls and women living in rural and impoverished areas. Providing women with universal access to family planning is one important and cost-effective way to help reduce maternal deaths. Doing so would decrease maternal deaths by a third. In developing countries, investing in family planning would lead to 2.4 million fewer unsafe abortions (one of the top causes of maternal deaths worldwide according to the WHO) and 5600 fewer maternal deaths related to unintended pregnancies. In addition, it would decrease infant mortality by anywhere from 10 to 20%.

Availability of family planning services has clear benefits in protecting the health of women and children, but it also offers so much more than that. When women can plan the timing and spacing of their pregnancies, women are more likely to attend and finish school; achieve higher levels of education; gain access to better job opportunities; contribute positively to her community; and improves the chances that she will invest in her children’s health, education, and well-being. In short, when women do better, societies do better.

This is all at grave risk now. As part of Trump’s first executive order, he reinstated the global gag rule which when implemented, states that the US can withhold family planning foreign assistance to any foreign non-governmental organization that so little as provides information on abortions, and that’s even if the organization receives funding from other sources. It’s important to note that the US already prohibits any foreign assistance from funding abortions under the Helms Amendment, which has been in place since 1973.

The re-enactment of the global gag rule comes as no surprise, as historically it has been re-enacted by every Republican president since Reagan then overturned by every Democratic president. Ironically although it has been argued that the gag role was put into place to decrease the number of abortions, a Stanford study found that abortions actually increased in years that the gag rule was in effect. It has also been shown that cutting off family planning funding to these organizations severely limits and in some cases, completely ceases, their ability to provide contraceptives and reproductive health services, thus increasing unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions and further worsening maternal health outcomes.

The newest reinstatement of this rule however, extends far beyond the scope of the original rule and withholds all US global health assistance, not just family planning foreign assistance, to organizations that perform or provide any counseling, referrals, information, or advocacy on abortions. This revision of the global gag rule will not only hurt the millions of women in some of the poorest areas of the world who heavily rely on US-funded organizations which provide family planning services like contraception, but now impacts vulnerable men, women, and children alike. That’s because many of these organizations provide so much more than reproductive health services. Many of these organizations are hospitals and clinics, which in addition to reproductive health services, provide the full spectrum of medical care including life-saving childhood vaccinations, treatment for survivors of gender-based violence, HIV prevention and care, prenatal and postnatal care, and play a vital role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like Zika and Ebola.

This is an unprecedented setback for the global health community and a huge threat to the advances that we have made in the fight against emerging infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS, and maternal and child mortality to name a few. We cannot let the progress we’ve worked so hard for be eradicated. Let us always remember that progress is something we must work for everyday, a call to action that is becoming more imperative in the precarious times ahead of us.

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US support for family planning foreign assistance currently stands at $575 million to 40 countries. With the institution of this new rule, $9 billion of global health assistance to 60 countries is currently at stake.

Here are a few ways to get involved:

Read APHA’s statement opposing reinstatement of the global gag rule.

 

Review abstract submissions for the Section’s 2017 Annual Meeting program!

by ihsection, posted in APHA IH Section, Section Announcements

The following is a message from Jirair Ratevosian, the IH Section’s Program Committee Chair.

APHA’s 2017 Annual Meeting and Expo brings together more than 13,000 attendees and features 1,000 scientific presentations highlighting the latest in research and policy.

Are you interested in helping the Program Committee review abstracts in 2017?

As a reviewer, you will be assigned 3-10 abstracts to review. All abstracts are reviewed by three reviewers, and your score is tallied with the other two reviewers to help determine which programs should be accepted. Time commitment is typically 1-3 hours.

Deadline to sign up: January 31
Membership: Must be a current APHA member
Reviewing Begins: March 7

Please sign up to register here.

As a time-limited commitment, reviewing abstracts is a great opportunity for students and early career professionals to learn more about the abstract writing process, as well as the inner workings of the Annual Meeting. It is also a superb way to be active in the IH Section and help the Program Committee present a science-strong program in 2017.

Global News Round Up

by aphanru, posted in APHA IH Section, News

Politics & Policies

Leading up to the Inauguration of President-elect Trump, experts have made the case for why global health should be a top priority for the new administration. Global health has a long history of bipartisan support and is, frankly, good business.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump aims to replace Obamacare with a plan that would envisage “insurance for everybody,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Sunday night.

Tuberculosis’ recent surpassing of HIV/AIDS as the leading infectious killer globally has not been met with anything close to equal funding for relief.

George W. Bush’s signature PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) program, which helped 11.5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa get access to antiretroviral drugs, could be in jeopardy under Trump’s administration.

The BRICS bloc of nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is a leading intergovernmental forum for cooperation of five large, fast-growing economies with significant influence on international issues, including global health.

Programs, Grants & Awards

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI), funded with an initial investment of $460 million from Germany, Japan, Norway, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates foundation, aims to develop vaccines against known infectious disease threats that could be deployed to contain outbreaks before they become global health emergencies.

January is cervical health awareness month.  For most people, HPV clears on its own. But for others who don’t clear the virus, HPV can lead to certain diseases, like cervical cancer, as well as vaginal, vulvar and anal cancer and genital warts.

Health experts from across the world will meet again in Cumbria to work on new ways to improve health and social care for communities everywhere.

Research

Airborne transmission of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is likely behind the majority of new cases in South Africa, according to an article just published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Severe obesity among American Indian tribal youth in the Southwest.

Forecasting Zika incidence in the 2016 Latin America outbreak combining traditional disease surveillance with search, social media, and news report data.

Up to 70 percent of hysterectomies in the United States, a quarter of knee replacements in Spain and more than half the antibiotics prescribed in China are inappropriate, overused healthcare, researchers said on Monday.

Metabolic syndrome and depressive  symptoms among rural Northeast general population in China.

Prevalence of Chagas disease in a US population of Latin American immigrants with conduction abnormalities on electrocardiogram.

Funding and publication of gun violence research are disproportionately low compared to other leading causes of death in the United States, according to new research.

Diseases & Disasters

A group of 22 pharmaceutical companies have announced a new initiative aimed at tackling noncommunicable diseases and better assessing their individual, and collective, work to enable better access to care in developing countries.

Looking back on 2016, there may not seem to be much to celebrate. In terms of global health alone, the year appeared to be one of unrelenting tragedy.  But, as we begin 2017, there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful.

Following the recent Zika outbreak in Miami-Dade County, a multidisciplinary team of physicians has published a case study describing in detail the nation’s first locally-transmitted case of Zika.

A mouse study, published in Nature, showed altering the immune system slowed the spread of skin cancers to the lungs.

The Philippines has long remained shielded from the global HIV epidemic, but things have changed in the last decade: the country has one of the fastest-growing HIV transmission rates in the world.

Technology

At the first Digital Life Summit, iCarbonX founder Jun Wang announced that seven companies have joined iCarbonX’s Digital Life Alliance and will collaborate to give people a deeper understanding of the medical, behavioral and environmental factors that can accelerate disease or optimize health.

Environmental Health

Chile, Latin America’s leader in solar energy, is starting the new year with an innovative step: the development of the country’s first citizens solar power plant.

Our ability to solve the challenge of climate change, which is also a challenge of energy, food security, immigration, health and fair economic growth, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people, is very strong.

Equity & Disparities

According to David Nabarro, one of the nominees for director-general of the World Health Organization, the issue that most concerns him is how to ensure that there is equity in health throughout the world.  He also believes the disparities in health in our world today are big and to quite a significant extent increasing.

Bolsa Família reaches 11 million families, more than 46 million people, a major portion of the country’s low-income population. The model emerged in Brazil more than a decade ago and has been refined since then.

Maternal, Neonatal & Children’s Health

The U.S. government is leading a wide-ranging and groundbreaking effort to support girls with a comprehensive approach, focusing diplomatic efforts and foreign assistance programs on improving the systems that can make or break outcomes for adolescent girls: education, health, safety, and economic security.

If Nikki Haley is confirmed as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, the strong opponent of abortion rights could be caught up in controversy over whether to define contraception and safe abortions as a human right for women, especially in developing countries.

A year after abandoning the “one-child” policy, the Chinese government is hoping to make it up to millions of women by removing their IUDs, free of charge.  But the offer, made without even a hint of an apology, has provoked incredulous outrage.

Growing up in poverty exposes children to greater levels of stress, which can lead to psychological problems later in life, a new study suggests.

The United Nations today announced that it plans to strengthen its approach to preventing and responding to sexual exploitation and abuse by creating a high-level task force that will develop a “clear, game-changing strategy” to achieve “visible and measurable further improvement.”

Babies should be given peanut early – some at four months old – in order to reduce the risk of allergy, according to new US guidance.

 

A big thank you to all who helped with the IH Global Health Mentoring Program!

by ihsection, posted in APHA IH Section, Section Announcements

The Mentoring Committee would like to thank the following IH Section members for their assistance during the development of the Round 2 Pilot of the Global Health Mentoring Program:

Erick Amick
Abimola Williams
Chelsea Alex
Brittany Roth
Dr. Nur Onvural
Giancarlo Atassi
Maliha Ahmed

This Pilot would not have happened without your hard work and dedication. Thank you for volunteering your time to make this program a success.

Theresa Majeski
Chair, Mentoring Committee

Webinar on Breastfeeding in Limited Resource Settings Presented by Samaritan’s Purse and CCIH

by ihsection, posted in APHA IH Section, Events and Webinars

All are invited to attend a special Samaritan’s Purse International Health Forum on Jan 11th at 12 PM (EST) presented in partnership with Christian Connections for International Health.

Julie Tanaka, MPH, MBA, will present Breastfeeding in Limited-Resource Settings: What Every Clinician Needs to Know. Julie is the Senior International Nutrition Advisor for Samaritan’s Purse and previously served as the Maternal and Child Health Program Manager in Haiti. Julie graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Development Studies and Loma Linda University with a Masters in Public Health and Masters in Business Administration.

To sign up for the forum, click here. One hour of Category 1 CME will be available to all participants.