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By Aman
Cross-posted with permission from Technology, Health & Development
Tomorrow is World AIDS Day and instead of “barraging you with [another set of] statistics, gruesome photos, or heart-wrenching stories” (quote credit to Mr. Casnocaha), I want to alert you to something we prefer here - solutions, problem solving, technology, and creative thinking. Piya Sorcar, a doctoral student in Stanford’s Learning, Sciences & Technology Design program has used her considerable skills to figure out how to reach the minds of children in devleoping countries when it comes to HIV/AIDS education.
Bloggers have been looking at the numbers related to our health. WSJ’s The Numbers Guy sheds light on the calculations behind global HIV-infection figures, which the U.N.’s AIDS agency has revised sharply downwards, and Mead Over at Global Health Policy hopes that the revision will re-focus attention on the need for cost-effectiveness estimates in the global response to AIDS. Shirley S. Wang at the WSJ Health Blog busts the myth that suicide rates rise during the winter holidays, while Merrill Goozner at GoozNews explains a mysterious Congressional Budget Office claim that health care co-pays by individuals have fallen as a share of health care spending.
Elsewhere:
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At the opening general session of the American Public Health Association’s 135th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, speakers urged the public health professionals in attendance to address the glaring inequities in the U.S. and throughout the world.
Carlos Cano, interim director of the DC Department of Health, told the audience that in the District of Columbia, a few blocks from the Capitol building, exist “some of the most glaring health disparities in the Western Hemisphere.” CDC Director Julie Gerberding stressed that as a nation, we’ve failed to address disparities not only in healthcare, but in access to opportunity. Keynote speaker Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust and senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, focused on the inequities between the rich world and poor world, which are visible in dramatically different life expectancies and maternal mortality rates.
Speakers offered a range of solutions, most of them linked to this meeting’s theme of politics and policy.
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Crosspost from Effect Measure, by Revere
At 3:50 am EDST I received the welcome news, via Declan Butler, that the Tripoli 6 were free and on the tarmac in Sofia, Bulgaria. All are Bulgarian citizens and were released by the Libyan prison authorities as part of an extradition arrangement. Their life sentences were immediately pardoned by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov. Our six medical colleague had been accused of deliberately infecting over 400 children in a hospital in Benghazi, Libya and sentenced to death. They have been imprisoned for 8 years, through two trials and numerous appeals. Genetic analysis of the infecting strains indicated the virus had been circulating there prior to the medics’ arrival in 1998, but was not allowed to be presented as evidence (more background in these posts).
Yesterday the Libyan Supreme Council commuted the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-Bulgarian doctor to life in prison. The Tripoli 6 became a cause célèbre in the scientific and diplomatic communities when Libyan courts, after holding them in prison for eight years, refused to hear solid scientific evidence exonerating them from a charge they deliberately infected over 400 children in the Al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi. in 1998 (for more background, see here). Poor hospital hygiene is the presumed source of the tragic infections which so far have claimed the lives of over 50 of these children. Life in prison would seem an unhappy kind of victory in this case, but as with all things connected with it, it is not yet the last word. Read the rest of this entry »
by Liz Borkowski
It’s International Women’s Day, and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is holding its 51st session with the theme of “the elimination of all forms of discrimination and violence against the girl child.” Elisha Dunn-Georgiou at RH Reality Check reports that this theme, which you’d expect to get broad support, is under attack from some groups because it’s linked to sexual and reproductive health.
For those who don’t believe that it’s a moral imperative for women to have control over their reproductive lives, there’s another compelling argument in favor of improving sexual and reproductive health (SRH) worldwide: We can’t reduce poverty, violence, and disease without improving SRH.
Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth reports on the newest research on PBDEs (levels of this flame retardant in household dust correlate to levels in breast milk) and gives an update on Washington state’s proposed PBDE ban.
Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has an update on Eli Lilly’s attempts to block the online distribution of documents that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa.
Mead Over at Global Health Policy commends the 22 Members of Congress who wrote to the US Trade Representative in support of Thailand’s exercise of a compulsory license for the AIDS drug Efavirenz, and provides background and analysis on this issue.
The biggest news in science and public health was the tragic, though not unexpected, guilty verdict in the Libyan trial of six medics accused of deliberately infecting patients with HIV. Several members of the scientific community, mobilized by Nature reporter Declan Butler and several bloggers, drew attention to the scientific evidence demonstrating the medics´ innocence in the weeks before the trial, but science lost this one. Declan Butler, reporter has posts chronicling developments in this case; Revere at Effect Measure and Orac at Respectful Insolence have news and commentary on the verdict.
In other news:
By David Michaels
It came as no surprise to some observers that VaxGen (a biotech company in Brisbane, California) failed to meet the specifications of its contract to provide the US government with 75 million doses of a new anthrax vaccine. VaxGen has been playing fast and loose for quite some time – most notably with a famous instance of data dredging in the analysis of the clinical trials for AIDSVAX, its failed AIDS vaccine. I’ll come back to that below.
On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced was ending its sole-supplier contract with VaxGen, which would have been worth up to $877.5 had the company been able to produce vaccines that worked. HHS officials would not discuss the reasons of the cancellation, but, according to Renae Merle’s piece in today’s Washington Post, “HHS evidently canceled the contract after VaxGen missed its deadline Monday to begin human testing because of concerns at the Food and Drug Administration about the product’s reliability.”
Ruth Levine of Global Health Policy offers the AIDS-Malaria link as a reason disease-by-disease thinking isn’t the way to go.
Richard Littlemore at DeSmogBlog reports on which US publishers don’t think their audiences can handle George Monbiot’s book “Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning.”
Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily describes research into improving mood with fast thinking and positive statements.
Jordan Barab at Confined Space has the goods on the nominee for EPA’s Inspector General position.
Page Rockwell at Broadsheet considers the prospects for getting HPV vaccine Gardasil to women around the world.
Andrew Leonard at How the World Works cites data from a new FAO report on world agriculture and suggests that we’ll soon have an answer in the technological optimism vs. Malthusian limts debate.
Integrity of Science — one of the newest members of the ScienceBlogs empire — highlights some of the key points from the “Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science” session of the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.
by Revere and cross-posted at Effect Measure
We are asking the scienceblogging community once again to rally on behalf of our colleagues on trial for their lives in Libya. They have been accused of infecting over 400 children with HIV (see previous posts, here, here, here, here, here and here). When last we made an appeal (here) the response was extraordinary and spread quickly to the blogosphere on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum. The campaign to save the six health workers began with a strongly worded editorial in Nature and spread via the science blogosphere to the wider science and human rights organizations and from there to the New York Times, Washington Post, the Economist and beyond (see Declan Butler’s account and here for the links to over 400 blog and other posts). Nature has kept up the pressure and all this resulted in an appeal by 114 Nobel Laureates, just as the trial ended without hearing the scientific evidence. The verdict and sentencing if guilty (as expected) will be on December 19. [More below the fold]
Today is World AIDS Day, and there’s no shortage of coverage in the blogosphere. Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake combines links to news stories with her own reflections, and Izzy at Unbossed remembers 1982, before they called it AIDS. Michael Bernstein and Nandini Oomman of Global Health Policy report from the World AIDS Day Event in Nairobi, and Christine Gorman of TIME’s Global Health Update links to photos and stories of people living with AIDS.
On other topics:
