Equitable health services

In the run-up to International Women's Day, 8 March, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that the specific health-care needs of women are often ignored or insufficiently taken into account in war situations. ‘People wounded in fighting are given priority for medical treatment, but women, even pregnant mothers, are often given scant attention despite their special needs,’ said the ICRC's adviser on issues relating to women and war. In the world’s least developed countries, many of which are at war, women are 300 times more likely to die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications than in developed countries, according to UNICEF. In war time, women are particularly at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence and they have no means of transportation to reach a health-care facility so as to give birth safely.

Responsibility to take forward a still in-progress framework to cope with global influenza pandemics is now in the hands of the World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan. The framework is intended to set forth guidelines for the sharing of viruses, vaccines, and other benefits related to pandemic strains of influenza. This includes mechanisms for tracing and reporting outbreaks, as well as for capacity building, technology transfer, and stockpiles of vaccines. It also includes a model binding contract for entities sharing viruses with pandemic potential.

This report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) reveals that a third of 306 anti-malarial medicines collected and tested from six African countries failed to meet international quality standards. Reasons for this failure include insufficient active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), an excess of degradation substances, and poor dissolution. In fact in two samples one of the APIs was totally absent. The countries surveyed were Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. The quality of anti-malarial medicines varied across countries, from Ethiopia – where no samples failed quality testing – to Nigeria, where the highest incidence of failure occurred (64%). This result implies that a patient in Nigeria is more likely to be treated with a substandard anti-malarial than a patient in a country that complies with international quality standards. Failure rates were noticeably low for WHO-prequalified medicines available in these countries (less than 4%) as well as for imported products manufactured by well-established manufacturers. The report concludes that WHO prequalification is a highly effective mechanism for verifying the quality of medicines.

The authors note the emerging epidemic of yellow fever in Angola and spread of similar Aedes aegypti mosquito-borne viruses including dengue, chikungunya, and now Zika, albeit with differences noted. Yellow fever was first identified as a viral infection in 1900, has been reported from more than 57 countries and yellow fever outbreaks have case fatality rates as high as 75% in hospitalised cases. There has been an effective yellow fever vaccine since the late 1930s, but with outbreaks in unvaccinated populations in 1987 in urban Nigeria, despite a mass vaccination campaign. According to WHO, the current yellow fever outbreak is in more than six of Angola's 18 provinces, and there has been movement of unvaccinated travellers from Angola to neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, but also to further states, including Mauritania, and China. Southeast Asian countries are now considered at risk because the Aedes vector is present and the population is unvaccinated. However should yellow fever outbreaks occur elsewhere in Africa, in Latin America, or in Asia, the authors note that the current global supplies of yellow fever vaccine may be inadequate.