Tag: Ethiopia

Global Health News Last Week

by ihsection, posted in APHA IH Section, News

SECTION NEWS
Attention IH section members! We are still in need of moderators for the scientific sessions at this year’s annual meeting. According to our program committee, the following sessions are still available:

Monday, October 31
10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.: International Health Programs & Policy 1

2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.: Act Global, Think Local: Domestic applications of international health lessons; Child Survival & Child Health 1

Tuesday, November 1
8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.: Builidng Partnerships and Coalitions for better International Programs; Emerging, Re-emerging & Neglected Tropical Diseases

10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.: International Health Communication/ Behavior Change Communication

12:30 p.m. 2:00 p.m.: HIV/AIDS 2

Wednesday, November 2
8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.: HIV/AIDS 3; Innovations in International Health 2

Please contact Omar Khan (ih.apha@gmail.com) for more information, or to volunteer!

USAID celebrated its 50-year anniversary this week.

The benefits of breastfeeding are being showcased around the world
for Breast Feeding Week.

POLITICS AND POLICY

  • US organizations will find it easier to deliver aid to parts of Somalia controlled by a pro-Al Qaeda group – the threat of prosecution if it ends up in the wrong hands has been reduced  after an announcement by the State Department.
  • Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez was sworn in as the new Assistant Administrator for the Global Health Bureau at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
  • Although Congress resolved the debt ceiling debate, the way the budget package is being shaped — particularly by combining International Affairs with defense in a single “security” category, global poverty spending is getting severely handicapped.
  • Blood tests for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis may be putting patients’ lives at risk through providing misleading results, and should not be used, according to a WHO policy statement.

PROGRAMS

  • The inaugural charter of the Alliance for Oral Health Across Borders was signed at Temple University yesterday.
  • Tom Paulson of Humanosphere breaks down the 2010 Gates Foundation annual report, with some interesting commentary.
  • Jaclyn Schiff of UN Dispatch says we can look for more global health leadership coming from the city of Houston (my hometown!), as Dr. Peter Hotez, whom Schiff calls “an international health force of nature,” and an arm of the Sabin Vaccine Institute move there.
  • The Measles Initiative today announced it has helped vaccinate one billion children in more than 60 developing countries since 2001, making significant gains in the global effort to stop measles.
  • India’s health minister announced Tuesday a new initiative underway to boost the country’s rate of immunizing newborns by collecting mobile phone numbers of all pregnant mothers to monitor their babies’ vaccinations.

RESEARCH

  • A multi-resistant strain of Salmonella Kentucky could be spreading globally, suggests a study by Institut Pasteur. Case numbers have risen in Europe and the US, and infections have also been acquired in various parts of Africa and the Middle East. The strain has also been found in food animals in Africa.
  • Pharmaceutical manufacturer iBio, Inc announced the successful animal testing of a malaria vaccine candidate in trials sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
  • A new study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene shows a relationship between a kind of river flow and cholera outbreaks.
  • A new study in the Lancet shows that text messaging can be an effective tool in malaria treatment and prevention.
  • PLoS Medicine published a new study on HIV/AIDS in the Middle East and North Africa. Among its key findings was the startling fact that sex between men (MSM) accounts for nearly one quarter of all new HIV infections across the region.
  • According to a new study, children of depressed mothers in developing countries are 40 percent more likely to be underweight or stunted than those with mothers in good mental health.
  • A cheap and portable blood test could provide a breakthrough for diagnosing infections in remote areas of the world, a scientific study says.
  • Using WHO data, researchers found that children who experience abuse and develop mental health disorders are at increased risk for chronic physical problems later in life.
  • A new study in the journal Nature Medicine finds that a credit card shaped device used for testing HIV, known as “Lab-on-a-Chip,” has had a successful trial run in Rwanda.

DISEASES AND DISASTERS

  • Mass treatment of river blindness and lymphatic filariasis with ivermectin has been hampered by severe reactions if the patient also has Loa loa. A new map developed by WHO’s African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control will help communities identify low risk areas for Loa loa and distribute ivermectin for lymphatic filariasis control safely.
  • The CDC reports that the annual number of HIV infections in the USA is holding steady at about 50,000, and that African American MSM are at particular risk.
  • AIDS remains a metaphor for inequality, argues Michel Sidibe in the LA Times. In the world’s wealthier nations, where access to medicine is widespread, AIDS is becoming a chronic disease rather than a death sentence. But in the eveloping world, 1.8 million people die of AIDS each year.
  • Global cholera incidence has increased since 2000, with Haiti’s large outbreak tipping the largest burden away from Africa for the first time since 1995, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Sunday.
  • Tens of thousands of Somalis have died and more than half-a-million children are on the brink of starvation. Western aid isn’t flowing to where the worst of the famine is — partly due to the “war on terror.”
  • The head of World Food Program in Ethiopia says the country’s emergency food stocks are almost gone, the latest trouble caused by the drought in the Horn of Africa.

TOTALLY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING – Apparently Hollywood has discovered its next Greg Mortenson: Sam Childers, the “Machine Gun Preacher,” is the subject of much hubbub and an upcoming movie starring Gerard Butler.  This man claims to have been a gangbanger and drug dealer who found Jesus and then took up arms to rescue child soldiers from the LRA.  Global health blogger Brett Keller offers some commentary into Childers’ outlandish (and, frankly, dubious) story, while anonymous aid blogger “J” at Tales from the Hood has a few choice words.

Global Health News Last Week

by ihsection, posted in Information and Social Media, News

The 13th Triennial World Congress on Public Health, to be hosted by the Ethiopian Public Health Association and held from April 21-29, 2012 in Addis Ababa, will bring together leaders in health from across the globe. The conference, “Towards Global Health Equity: Opportunities and Threats,” is currently accepting abstracts; the deadline is Friday, October 21, at 12 a.m. PT (3 a.m. ET). More information can be found here.

International Women’s Day was March 8.

On March 11, a 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan’s Chiba prefecture, followed by a colossal tsunami that washed entire villages away.


The world, of course, stands ready to help, but it is unlikely that most of the assistance will be needed, as Japan is one of the most disaster-ready countries in the world. Unfortunately, the explosions in several of the country’s nuclear plants means that the threat of radiation poisoning looms heavily.

POLICY

  • A panel of independent experts has released a report harshly criticizing the World Health Organization’s handling of the 2009 epidemic of H1N1 swine flu.
  • UN officials expressed concern that rising food and energy prices could compromise or even reverse progress toward the MDGs in developing nations.
  • UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has instructed senior managers to cut 3%, or US$5.4 billion, from budgets.
  • The Kenyan government has moved to strip HIV/AIDS of its special status and begin treating it as a chronic medical condition. It has begun implementing a disease integration model that will do away with emergency response measures and dismantle parallel administrative structures set up to manage the disease.

RESEARCH

  • HealthMap, a project that aggregates health and surveillance data from sounces such as the WHO, Google News, and Eurosurveillance, was launched recently to “[bring] together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.”
  • According to a study done by Tuberculosis Research Centre in India, alarming numbers of women with TB become homeless after they are diagnosed. Approximately 100,000 women are abandoned by their husbands due to TB every year in India.
  • A group of researchers from EPFL’s Global Health Institute and Inserm (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, the French government agency for biomedical research) has discovered that a class of chemotherapy drugs also kills the parasite that causes malaria.

PROGRAMS

  • Oxfam recently released a report criticizing the World Bank for its praise of Ghana’s healthcare system. Amanda Glassman of CGDev disagrees, arguing that Oxfam ignored surveys indicating the system’s success in improving health indicators and beneficiaries’ satisfaction with the quality of service.
  • On March 9, Saving Lives At Birth, a global partnership between USAID, the Government of Norway, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Bank, was launched. The partnership “will seek innovative solutions to reduce maternal and newborn mortality in developing countries.”

DISEASES

  • Rwanda is on track to completely eliminate malaria, the first country in its region.

Reflections on Community Based Participatory Research

by ihsection, posted in Guest Blog, Research

Guest Blogger: Xeno Acharya

As an MPH student at University of Washington, Seattle, I have often wondered if Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a philosopher’s stone in the academics’ head. Having worked in Ethiopia and Sudan (as the researcher) and having been born and raised in Nepal (as the researched), I have come face to face with both sides of this idealistic myth.

In short, CBPR is a research method that has three core elements: participation, research, and action. It emphasizes “authentic partnership” between the researcher and the community, in which perspectives, knowledge, resources, and skills of both are combined.

It is important to remember that most of the time it is the researcher that initiates the research, no matter how participatory. For purposes of convenience, let’s call the researcher M and the researched N. M brings in research funding, manpower, technology, and white man’s knowledge. N (hopefully) brings in local experience, networks, subjects, manpower, and consensus to have been intervened/researched. When I was in Sudan and Ethiopia, I was a Caucasian-looking male who was struggling with the language and cultural nuances, but who was also clearly better paid than most staff working in the same company although I neither had the educational background or the experience the local staff members did. My positionality affected the way my colleagues spoke to me about their work and about themselves, and no amount of CBPR could overcome that.

In Nepal, too, the same power dynamics played out. Although I am a native there and speak the language, I look “white,” and the clothes I wear and the way I walk scream the fact that I have clearly not been around in Nepal for a while. I work for a small non-profit based in Portland, Oregon, that runs a school for untouchable refugee children in Kathmandu. When I visit the school every couple of years, I get the attention (I like) from kids and parents alike, not just because I am the founder but also because of the same power dynamics that comes back to bite at me again and again. So I have settled for the fact that the imbalance is always going to be there no matter what. To me, CBPR is a theory that can never fully come to fruition. Like communism, the idea itself is good and is meant to do well, but a hundred percent CBPR is only a goal to strive for, never a reality.

That said, I think CBPR is still an idea to strive for. There are things I (as a researcher) can change to reduce the imbalance of power between myself and the researched/intervened, and they are still important to do. Reflecting on my own positionality and being aware of this power dynamics is something that I can constantly incorporate in my work; so can you!

Xeno Acharya, originally from Kathmandu, Nepal, is an MPH candidate at the University of Washington. In Nepal, he has worked with local NGOs on awareness campaigns on disability among children, taught in mobile schools for displaced populations, and currently runs a school for children of victims of the civil war (1996-2008) through Namaste Kathmandu; he has also worked on short-term projects in Ethiopia and Sudan. He is currently a research assistant in the Health Systems Strengthening division of a Seattle-based non-profit called International Teaching & Education Center for Health (I-TECH) and is interested in infectious disease prevention, refugee populations, and health systems strengthening.

Failed Leadership of the Health Sector in Addressing the 2008 World Food Crisis

by cteller1, posted in APHA IH Section, Food/Nutrition, Guest Blog

By Charles Teller

Where have international nutrition and health sector leaders been during this serious 2008 crisis of spiraling food crises that are worsening food and nutrition insecurity among the most vulnerable in the world?

At a lively, standing room only session (#3302) on the 2008 Global Food Crisis Monday at the APHA meetings, the 4 panelists and moderator agreed that it was much more than a crisis. It reflected a longer term structural and systems issue related to food poverty, international trade, climate change, energy and environment. Case studies on India and Ethiopia helped to contextualize the intra-country discrepancies in undernourishment, stunting and wasting.

On my Ethiopian case, I contrasted the apocalyptic press statements in September 2008 of the UN ( FAO, WFP,Humanitarian Affairs) with my Oct. 20th interview with the well-informed Minister of Health of Ethiopia who felt that overall high inflation and energy costs, as well as drought, were more serious shocks  to health and nutrition of his people.  In presenting the long and short-term trends in food access and malnutrition in Ethiopia, I found that this discrepancy in information reflects the lack of representative and reliable data on the evolution of the situation, causes and immediate effects. Continue reading “Failed Leadership of the Health Sector in Addressing the 2008 World Food Crisis” →