Canada has announced that it will make maternal and child health a priority when it hosts the G8 summit in June 2010. Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, said in a statement that his country would champion a major initiative to improve the health of women and children in the world’s poorest regions. He said that members of the G8 could make a difference in maternal and child health and that Canada would be making this the top priority in June. The Prime Minister suggested that the solutions are within reach for the international community and include better nutrition, clean water, inoculations and training of health workers. With only five years left to achieve the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), successes have been achieved but much more needs to be done, particularly with MDG 5, which targets maternal health and lags furthest behind of all the eight MDG targets.
Equity in Health
The list of names, in English alphabetical order, and titles of the persons proposed by Member States for nomination by the Executive Board for the post of Director-General can be found at the above website. The Board will meet from 6 to 8 November 2006.
In this article, the authors describe five children who died of clinical rabies in a three month period (September to November 2011) in the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital. From previous experience and hospital records, this number of cases is higher than expected. The authors express concerned that difficulty in accessing post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) rabies vaccine may be partly responsible for this rise. They make three recommendations: prompt course of active immunisation for all patients with significant exposure to proven or suspected rabid animals; the use of an intradermal immunisation regime that requires a smaller quantity of the vaccine than the intramuscular regime and gives a better antibody response; and improved dog rabies control measures.
Scientists have called for a more balanced approach in distributing the billions of pounds available for controlling tropical diseases. In a paper published recently, they said that a focus by governments and charities on the big three tropical diseases - HIV, malaria and tuberculosis - had left millions of the poorest people in Africa without treatment for a range of illnesses.
The neglected diseases, which include schistosomiasis, river blindness, ascariasis, elephantiasis and trachoma, affect more than 750 million people and kill at least 500,000 every year.
"We want to sensitise the scientists and African leaders in power to be more aware of the magnitude and impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Secondly, we want to bring in the community to be part and parcel of the fight. We want also to look at the HIV/AIDS network in Africa and to identify the key people, so we can talk with one voice; especially with regard to how we can collectively access HIV-related treatments." - Interview with Dr. D. M. Owili, Chairman of the 13th International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA).
This World Health Organisation report focuses on the health of the 738 million people living in Africa. It provides a comprehensive analysis of key public health issues and progress made on them in the Africa region. The report finds that whilst AIDS continues to devastate the region, the number of HIV-positive people on antiretroviral medicines increased eight fold from December 2003 to December 2005. Also, most countries are making good progress on preventable childhood illness: polio is close to eradication and 37 countries are reaching 60 per cent or more of their children with measles immunisation.
HEALTH care worldwide was traditionally based on a fee-for-service model, with no incentive for doctors to restrict the amount of medicines prescribed or for members to stay healthy, says Ricardo Rosa, chief operating officer of IQ Health.
Three years after its inception, the first project to provide free AIDS drugs to South Africans put the 1,000th patient on antiretroviral treatment (ART). In May 2001 the Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and Western Cape Health Department project started providing people at an advanced stage of AIDS with ART at three HIV/AIDS clinics in Khayelitsha township, outside Cape Town. Today the clinics offer about 2,000 consultations every month in the sprawling township. "We estimate that 5,000 people need treatment in Khayelitsha today," MSF campaign coordinator Marta Darder told PlusNews.
In the face of widespread stigma around HIV/AIDS, few people have the courage to go public about their status, but one such person is Mampho Leoma, 28, a mother of two from Mapetla, in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. Leoma recalled the day she found out she was HIV-positive: "It was the 26th of January last year; I was four months pregnant ... It was very sad - I didn't expect the result. At the time I was not going with anyone else but my husband, and I didn't think he was going out with other girls either."
Entrenched poor health and health inequity are important public health problems. Conventionally, solutions to such problems originate from the health care sector, a conception reinforced by the dominant biomedical imagination of health. By contrast, attention to the social determinants of health has recently been given new force in the fight against health inequity. The health care sector is a vital determinant of health in itself and a key resource in improving health in an equitable manner. Actors in the health care sector must recognise and reverse the sector's propensity to generate health inequity. The sector must also strengthen its role in working with other sectors of government to act collectively on the deep-rooted causes of poor and inequitable health.