An estimated 200 million children worldwide fail to meet their development potential due to poverty, poor health and unstimulating environments. Missing developmental milestones has lasting effects on adult human capital. Africa has a large burden of risk factors for poor child development. This paper identifies the scope for improvement at the country level in three domains – nutrition, environment, and mother–child interactions. It uses nationally representative data from large-scale surveys, data repositories and country reports from 2000 to 2014. Overall, there was heterogeneity in performance across domains, suggesting that each country faces distinct challenges in addressing risk factors for poor child development. Data were lacking for many indicators, especially in the mother–child interaction domain. The authors argue that there is a need to improve routine collection of high-quality, country-level indicators relevant to child development to assess risk and track progress.
Equity in Health
This assessment identified risk factors, mental health, psychosocial needs and mechanisms of coping by children under the care of female sex workers (FSWs) and adolescent girls surviving in sex work settings of Kampala, Gulu, Mbarara, Wakiso and Busia in Uganda. The study found stigma and discrimination, poor accommodation facilities, sexual abuse by clients of sex workers and substance abuse among children, adolescent girls and mothers, gender-based violence and low levels of literacy, with a high prevalence of mental health disorders, including depression, suicide, post traumatic stress symptoms and generalised anxiety disorder. Adolescent girls surviving in sex work settings, presented higher rates of common mental health disorders. particularly those aged 11-14 years. The study found that the risk factors are not addressed given that children under the care of FSWs and adolescent girls are often neglected by systems.
In this paper the authors used 2010 estimates to assess how many children aged younger than 5 years were exposed to stunting or extreme poverty. The authors used country-level prevalence of stunting in children younger than 5 years based on the 2006 Growth Standards proposed by WHO and poverty ratios from the World Bank to estimate children who were either stunted or lived in extreme poverty for 141 low-income and middle-income countries in 2004 and 2010. To avoid counting the same children twice, the authors excluded children jointly exposed to stunting and extreme poverty from children living in extreme poverty. To examine the robustness of estimates, the authors also used moderate poverty measures. The estimated number of children exposed to the two risk factors in low-income and middle-income countries decreased from 279 million in 2004 to 249 million in 2010; and the prevalence of children at risk fell from 51% to 43% globally. Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest prevalence in both years, however.
Peri-urban natural resource development projects can have both positive and negative consequences for residents and workers. There are various possible health risks, argues this new report summary from iD21.
The South African government expressed concern last month after a news report highlighted the story of a young woman who admitted she was thinking of contracting the HI virus to access a disability grant. The young woman, Thato, said she had ten 'boyfriends' with whom she slept for money. She was supporting two nieces, her own child and a grandmother suffering from diabetes on the money she made, by being what she described as a "prostitute in disguise".
The nongovernmental organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres has criticized Swiss drug maker Roche Holding for not "liv[ing] up to its promise" to reduce the price of its antiretroviral drugs for developing nations, the Wall Street Journal reports. The organisation said that of the five major drug makers that have announced plans to cut their prices of antiretroviral drugs in developing nations, Roche is the "lone holdout" in failing to follow through.
Effective tools to control malaria are available now but are not being accessed by the populations in need. The prime example is insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs). Most malaria-carrying mosquitoes bite at night. Thus ITNs have been proven to reduce malaria infection and death rates by forming both a physical barrier against mosquitoes and, in the words of the World Health Organisation (WHO) ‘generating a chemical halo’ around the bed, repelling and killing mosquitoes. However, for people in rural Africa, bednets are hard to get hold of. In these areas, access is often restricted to those with money to buy them from urban centres, or to those taking part in isolated research projects and localised bednet programmes.
Although Botswana, one of the African countries hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, offers free antiretroviral drugs, has 16 treatment facilities and hundreds of trained doctors and nurses, the nation is "barely making a dent" in fighting the disease. However, a new initiative to provide HIV tests as part of routine medical checkups in public and private clinics may help to improve HIV testing rates in the country.
The proposed Certificate of Need (CoN) for doctors, which they claim intrudes on their right to freedom of movement, will remain. This was the word from Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in a February media briefing. "The government will move on the CoN framework to achieve our goals in terms of the constitution," the minister said. "The CoN will remain. It is intended to transform the healthcare sector in South Africa."
As the number of HIV-positive children and AIDS orphans continues to rise in South Africa's east-coast KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, AIDS organisations have embarked on community-based projects aimed at generating income for the guardians of children affected by the virus. The goal is to create self-sufficiency and ultimately gain independence from funding agencies. But it has been difficult to sustain the programmes, especially those focusing on traditional crafts, such as beadwork and woodcarvings.