World Health

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting launched a new, amazingly interactive site LiveHopeLove that brings together poetry, essays, documentaries, short video interviews, music, and photography to explore the AIDS crisis in the Caribbean. In the video below, poet and writer Kwame Dawes who returns to the country of his youth to speak with Jamaicans about the impact HIV has had on them and their country.

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The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting launched a new, amazingly interactive site LiveHopeLove that brings together poetry, essays, documentaries, short video interviews, music, and photography to explore the AIDS crisis in the Caribbean. In the video below, poet and writer Kwame Dawes who returns to the country of his youth to speak with Jamaicans about the impact HIV has had on them and their country.

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Cross posted at On Day One

Over the weekend, Matt Yglesias and Brad Plumer posited that an auctioned carbon cap and trade system would yield significant benefits to public health. Among other things, “increases in CO2 can worsen the adverse respiratory effects of ozone and other air pollutants” and people would be incentivized to drive less, and walk more, and thus live healthier and longer. (This latter point has been researched by the New America Foundation’s Phillip Longman.)

One Health-Climate nexus less relevant here in the United States but of critical importance in much of the developing world is that warming temperatures have resulted in the appearance of disease vectors where they were previously absent. Mosquitos carrying Malaria and Dengue fever are suddenly showing up in places where the risk of these diseases used to not be so acute. Check out the World Health Organization’s climate change page, for a rather exhaustive explication of the links between human health and climate change in the developing world. READ MORE

From the Associated Press:

The United Nations health agency said Wednesday that it was monitoring vaccine supplies for yellow fever as it confirmed the first cases of the disease in a Latin American urban area in six decades. The World Health Organization said that there had been nine confirmed cases in the suburbs of Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion, and that three people had died.

Dr. William Perea, the W.H.O.’s yellow fever chief, said the disease, carried by mosquitoes, could spread quickly in built-up areas with poor sanitation.

To the extent that a disease can be completely eradicated from the globe, I was under the impression that yellow fever was basically gone. In fact, according to the World Health Organization not only is it still around, but yellow fever’s mosquito carrier is “once again infesting regions from which it was previously eradicated,” particularly in South America and the Caribbean. Scary. READ MORE

A few months back, Dr. Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne.org (a UN Foundation-Vodafone partnership) wrote in to explain how PDAs are saving lives in Africa. At the time, Selanikio was concluding a pilot program that distributed Palm Ziros equipped with open source software called EpiSurveyor to public health workers in Kenya and Zambia. As Selanikio reported, the PDAs had a transformative effect on the ability of local public health officials to efficiently distribute immunizations and monitor potentially catastrophic outbreaks.

That experience obviously made clear to Selanikio the potential of PDAs to not only revolutionize the public health sector in the developing world, but to transform entire emerging economies. Selanikio explains in an op-ed picked up by All Africa.com.

Along with the internet, with which it is rapidly merging, this is the most astonishing technology story of our time, and one that has the power to revolutionise access to information across the developing world.

Unfortunately, rich country biases limit understanding of this amazing phenomenon: for those in North America or Western Europe the cell phone is primarily or uniquely a phone designed to make voice calls.

In the rich world, even those who use the mobile for other tasks such as e-mail almost always do so as an adjunct to their “computer” (ie, the desktop or laptop in their home or office): the mobile phone is used for those tasks only when the “computer” isn’t accessible.

Selanikio explains how that ‘bias’ becomes manifest, “as of this morning a Google search for ‘educational software for Windows’ got 41,300 results, while a search for ‘educational software for cell phones’ got exactly 9 hits.”

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In its annual update on worldwide trends in the AIDS epidemic, UNAIDS announced today that the number of people living with HIV is lower than previously thought. New sampling techniques used for this year’s report show that about 33 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, compared with last year’s estimate of around 40 million. Also, the new techniques yield an estimate that 2.5 million people will be infected with AIDS this year–which is a 40% drop in last year’s estimate.

The number of people living with AIDS each year is still increasing–but at a much slower rate than previously thought. This is excellent news, but far from a declaration of victory. From the Los Angeles Times:

Dr. Roger Detels, a UCLA epidemiologist, cautioned that the reduced numbers should not be used as an excuse to dismiss concerns about the pandemic.

“Even though the estimates are lower than we had previously thought, they’re still pretty significant,” Detels said. “You’re still talking about prevalences in sub-Saharan Africa where you’ve got over 20% of adults infected with HIV…I think the danger here is to say: ‘Oh my Lord, you know they overestimated. It’s not a very serious epidemic.’ I would say 33 million is a pretty serious epidemic.”

Indeed, the report shows that 5,700 people die each day from AIDS-related conditions. That’s like losing the population of Miami every two and a half months. READ MORE