"Health & Medical News"

This is an interesting story GE redesigning an EKG machine (the last one of which they made in 1999) for a place like India. The have also been advertising a lot on TV - I was able to find the ad on YouTube which is pretty cool. Four things immediately struck me:

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Washington — About 5% of the 9 million new cases of tuberculosis diagnosed each year worldwide are now resistant to multiple drugs, the highest rate ever recorded, according to a World Health Organization report.

The report, released on Feb. 26, also found that extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, a virtually untreatable form of the disease, infects people in 45 countries. Although the United States has had relatively few cases of resistant strains of the disease — 47 cases of XDR-TB were found in a retrospective analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1993 to 2006 — the potential for its spread is great.

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Vaccines are hot. “The global vaccine market is set to double by the year 2016, fueled by unprecedented product innovations and global recognition of the benefits of immunization,” said Michael D. Decker, MD, MPH, vice president for scientific and medical affairs at vaccine manufacturer Sanofi Pasteur, USA.

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Here’s your opportunity to influence the global health research agenda: the WHO is asking for global input on their agenda for the 2008 Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health via meetings with stakeholders, an on-line consultative questionnaire, and will be holding a structured e-forum in Spring 2008 to discuss the agenda. The call for conference papers will be sent out in February 2008, and the Lancet will publish an issue on global health to complement the conference - article submissions for inclusion are due in June 2008. The conference will be held in Bamako, Mali from 17-19 November 2008.

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Jose from Little Devices That Could (LTDC) is going to be helping out with a fantastic looking course being offered by Harvard-MIT. The post below, with permission, is from LTDC. The course has some very bright minds involved. Could you imagine a collaborative course like this on every campus? I would bet there would be some great results. If you have any input or project ideas, send Jose an email (see his website below).? 

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Which single intervention would do the most to improve health of those living on less than $1 a day?

The public library open access journal Medicine asked this question to leading experts across a wide variety of domains. There certainly is no consensus answer:

“PLoS Medicine is participating in a global theme issue on poverty and human development on October 22, 2007 (http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/globalthemeissue.cfm). Over 200 scientific and medical journals are taking part. For our theme issue, we asked a wide variety of commentators worldwide??”including clinicians, medical researchers, health reporters, policy makers, health activists, and development experts??”to name the single intervention that they think would improve the health of those living in poverty. We also asked four individuals living in poor, rural agricultural communities in the Santillana district, province of Huanta, Ayacucho, Peru to give us their response to the question, ???What do you think would do the most to improve your health and the health of your family????

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The Lancet now has two sites/blogs dedicated to global health. For those outside the public health/medical realm, The Lancet is one of the top journals in these fields. Their blog on the main site has not really been updated on a regular basis, so for that reason alone, another site is a welcome change. This site, focused on students, already has some youthful energy. The Lancet Student has been up for the past couple of months and they are going forward full force and really trying to create a campaign of change. They are working hard to develop a community and the site seems to have a lot of potential that I am excited about because they seem to be setting up an ecosystem to draw more attention to global health issues by energizing a passionate student base. The entry of such a major player, voice and authority using web-based interaction (primarily blogging in this case) in the global health field is long overdue. Ever since I started this blog I have felt that even a simple and dedicated site by a major organization could go light years further than an individual could alone (such as the THD blog). Keep an eye on them as the evolve:

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Conducting clinical trials overseas is nothing new, however, increasing access to capital and investment in emerging countries does appear to be relatively recent. Two new pieces (links at end) detail the move into China by pharmaceutical companies. I have covered this notion in a previous post.

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Partly because of my recent visit to Beijing I am fascinated by what is happening in/with China. In addition, because China is now front and center stage and because they play such an important role in the lives of those living not only in the West (see living without “Made in China”, via Treehugger; Amazon book) but for those in various regions (see Africa and China) there are substantial implications to what happens in China on many important levels (global business & finance, global health, global environmental conditions). With the 2008 Olympics just around the corner, you will only hear more and more about these issues and hopefully the media blitz will have some positive impact on governance and policy issues going forward. With that I want to highlight what prominent bloggers have been recently talking about with respect to China and health/global health issues with a couple of articles mixed in:

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The Kaiser Family Foundation is probably the best disseminator of information, this is their bread and butter. Thanks to them, you can watch the proceedings of the Clinton Foundation annual meeting (this week). The image below will take you to instructions for the free webcast and you can check out the Foundation’s web page for further information on scheduling. In addition the Financial Times has a page dedicated to covering the annual summit. For those in the public health community, that fact that FT is covering this is yet one more sign that the business community is starting to get involved in global health/development issues. See the FT website here.

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