Oxfam International News
Plan International News
SOLIDAR News
Releases and Publications
Eurodad News
ENPI News
Asia News
Latin America News
ACP News

Articles

Attention: open in a new window. PDFPrintE-mail

3.08.09, BBC
'First' swine-flu death in Africa

22.07.09, IRIN
Male circumcision does not reduce partner's HIV risk

19.05.09, The Financial times
UN to bridge funding gap on health

09.05.09, The Financial Times
Fund to tackle disease trio wins qualified praise
By Andrew Jack
The Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria, which has raised nearly $20bn since its creation in 2002, must focus more on preventing the spread of the diseases and get better value for the aid dollars it spends, a new study has found

02.05.09, The Lancet (Volume 373, Issue 9674, Pages 1500 - 1502)
A global fund for the health MDGs?
The world is off track to achieve the health-related targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Maternal mortality has stagnated for two decades, child mortality is not declining fast enough, HIV/AIDS still infects people faster than the pace of antiretroviral treatment roll-out, and inequalities are widening within and across countries.

30.04.2009, NewYork Times
Report Says World Bank’s AIDS Efforts Are Failing
by Cecilia W. Dugger
A vast majority of the World Bank’s projects to combat AIDS failed to perform satisfactorily over the past decade, with the ones in Africa, the region at the epicenter of the pandemic, registering the worst record, according to a new internal evaluation.

22.04.2009, IPS
Development: World Bank Steps up Funding For 'Safety Net'
by Marina Litvinsky
WASHINGTON (IPS) - The World Bank plans to triple its lending for social safety nets in poor countries to 12 billion dollars over the next two years in order to better protect the most vulnerable people from the worst effects of the global economic crisis, the bank announced Tuesday.

17.04.2009, International Herald Tribune
Plan Tries to Lower Malaria Drug Cost
A new campaign to save lives and prevent drug resistance by driving the price of the best malaria medicine down to as little as 20 cents was announced Friday by international health agencies and European governments.

17.04.2009, BBC News
Millions from malaria drug scheme
By Jane Dreaper
The UK government is donating £40m to a new global effort which aims to bring down the price of malaria drugs.

16.04.2009, Action for Global Health
UNITAID presents patent pool in European Parliament
Pooling patents for the many different anti retro-viral therapies could allow developing countries to continue to access these drugs at affordable prices and also allow the development of combination treatments and pediatric formulations. UNITAID are currently developing such a patent pool and their project was presented in the European Parliament on Wednesday April 15 2009.

16.04.2009, Action for Global Health
Can development aid deliver real results on the ground for MDR-TB
The meeting at lunchtime on Wednesday 15 April 2009 was hosted by Dr Dorette Corbey MEP with the assistance of Eli Lilly’s international aid unit. The focus of the meeting was to bring together actors from across the TB control community to assess how development aid can contribute to the management and effective control of TB and MDR TB.

15.04.2009, Action For Global Health
G8 Health Experts meet civil society in Venice
The health experts from the G8 countries and the European Commission met in Venice from March 26 and 27 2009. As part of their meetings they convened a consultative meetings with representatives from civil society organisations coming both from G8 countries and the global south.

23.02.2009, New York Times
Pneumonia: Grant Will Allow Testing in Poor Countries To Determine Causes Of A Common Killer
By Donald G. Mcneil Jr.
Money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will pay for laboratories in five poor countries to screen children with pneumonia to see what caused it.

03.02.2009, International Herald Tribune
Global Fund is billions short
By Donald G. Mcneil Jr.
Because of the economic downturn, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is running short of money, global business and health leaders said last week.

30.01.2009, Los Angeles Times
Global Health gains at risk from economic crisis
by Mary Engel
Worried that the worldwide economic crisis may roll back gains made in battling diseases in the world's poorest countries, global health advocates are calling on the richest countries not to renege on their funding pledges to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

26.01.2009, The New York times
Spread of Malaria Feared as Drug Loses Potency
by Thomas Fuller

Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report
Daily global health news summaries provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  • 3 Feb - 'Humanosphere' Blog Examines Roles Of Former President Carter, Researcher Foege In Fighting NTDs
    This post in KPLU 88.5's "Humanosphere" blog examines how former President Jimmy Carter gave the fight against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) "a good first shove nearly 30 years ago," writing, "Neglected diseases like river blindness, Guinea worm, parasitic (lymphatic) elephantiasis and schistosomiasis have been in Carter's cross hairs since the mid-1980s." The blog adds, "Few would argue that it has been primarily the work of the Carter Center, carrying on the work of the CDC and others, that has brought the horrible parasitic disease Guinea worm so close to eradication today -- from millions of cases in the 1980s down to a little more than a 1,000 last year." The blog also discusses how William Foege, a former CDC official who is responsible for the smallpox vaccination strategy that helped wipe out the disease, was instrumental in bringing Carter and the Gates family into global health (Paulson, 2/1).
  • 3 Feb - Republican Win In 2012 Election Could Spell End Of International Family Planning Programs
    "If a Republican becomes president, ... say goodbye to international programs providing birth control to women in desperately poor countries such as Liberia," senior contributing writer Michelle Goldberg writes in this Daily Beast opinion piece. Goldberg notes that birth control has become a "significant issue in the U.S. presidential campaign," writing, "All of the Republican candidates have slammed the administration's refusal to give religious institutions a broad exemption from the mandate that insurance cover family planning."
  • 3 Feb - Global Malaria Deaths Twice As High As Previously Estimated, IHME Study Suggests
    "Malaria is killing more people worldwide than previously thought, but the number of deaths has fallen rapidly as efforts to combat the disease have ramped up, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington" published in the Lancet on Thursday, an IHME press release reports. "More than 1.2 million people died from malaria worldwide in 2010, nearly twice the number found in the most recent comprehensive study of the disease," the press release states (2/2). The study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "used new data and new computer modeling to build a historical database for malaria between 1980 and 2010," BBC News notes (Bowdler, 2/2).
  • 3 Feb - WHO Finds Very High Levels Of Drug-Resistant TB In Russia, Moldova
    "[T]he highest levels ever of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) have been found in Russia and Moldova," the WHO reports in research published in the February edition of the WHO Bulletin, but "the agency didn't have data from most of Africa and India, where tuberculosis rates are much higher," the Associated Press/USA Today's "Your Life" reports. According to the AP, the "experts reported that about 29 percent of new TB patients in parts of Russia were drug-resistant" and that "65 percent of previously treated patients in Moldova had resistance problems." The news service notes, "Normally, less than five percent of TB cases are drug-resistant" (2/2).
  • 3 Feb - DRC Facing Decline In Donor Funding, HIV Treatment Shortage
    "The lives of thousands of HIV-positive people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are at risk as the country faces declining donor funding and a severe shortage of HIV treatment, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)," PlusNews reports. "'The problem is quite old in the DRC; the country has always been minimized by donors who have not seen it as a priority, mainly because HIV prevalence is relatively low at between three and four percent,' Thierry Dethier, advocacy manager for MSF Belgium in the DRC, told IRIN/PlusNews," and he added, "But look at the indicators: more than one million people are living with HIV, 350,000 of whom qualify for [antiretrovirals (ARVs)] but only 44,000 -- or 15 percent -- are on ARVs," the news service writes.