What We’re Reading 4/22/09

Apr 22nd, 2009 11:00 AM UTC
By Steve Wilson

Boston Globe—Panel to establish plan for global healthcare
A high-level commission will develop a blueprint this year for how to get the most out of record levels of global health aid, enlisting lawmakers, pharmaceutical executives, and a wide array of specialists to recommend ways the US government can better coordinate what organizers say is now a fragmented approach to helping the world’s most vulnerable people. The bipartisan “Commission on Smart Global Health Policy,” whose members include U.S. lawmakers, health care experts, NGO leaders and former military officials, was given a mandate yesterday to identify a more comprehensive strategy for spending the estimated $10 billion dedicated each year to assisting the most disease-plagued nations.

AP—IMF: Nations need to do more or crisis will worsen
In advance of this weekend’s International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, the IMF said losses at financial institutions could approach $4.1 trillion worldwide, and the fund urged countries to take bolder action to bolster banks or risk an even deeper recession. More capital is needed to cushion against further losses, the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report concluded: An estimated $275 billion in capital for U.S. banks and $600 billion more for European banks. The report and an updated economic forecast due today will form the basis for three days of meetings set to begin Friday among finance officials from the world’s richest countries and major developing countries.

Huffington Post—Is Aid Really “Dead?” (opinion)
Carol Peasley, the President of the international non-profit Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), writes on the Huffington Post that Dambisa Moyo’s argument in her book “Dead Aid” is not only hyperbolic and over-simplistic, but is simply not supported by the facts on the ground. She sites, among other things, how aid working in partnership with African governments and international NGOs has drastically reduced child deaths and put millions of children in school, and says of the book, “While (the) title is seductive, its main conclusion is wrong. The evidence just doesn’t support it.”

AFP—Teachers needed across West Africa
West African primary schools need 750,000 more teachers to combat some of the lowest literacy rates in the world, a report by a group of charities and non-governmental organizations said yesterday. “West Africa is missing more than 750,000 trained primary school teachers. Those teachers who are in place have to manage large classes with limited training, few or no materials, and poor pay,” said the report. According to the study, Nigeria has the biggest gap with an additional 459,000 trained teachers needed.

Bloomberg—Sanofi Widens Study of First Vaccine Against Dengue
A French drug maker that is leading an effort to develop a vaccine against Dengue Fever announced it is widening studies of its new vaccine in Asia, moving it closer to developing the first weapon against a potentially deadly scourge affecting two-fifths of the world’s population. The drug maker, Sanofi Pasteur, will test the shot in Vietnam and Singapore after beginning studies on children in Thailand this past February. The long effort for a dengue vaccine was begun by scientists in the U.S. in the 1940s. About 2.5 billion people live in areas prone to the virus, which the World Health Organization says causes about 50 million infections every year. Before 1970, only nine countries had experienced epidemics of dengue hemorrhagic fever, but the number had more than quadrupled by the end of the 1990s, WHO said.

-Steve Wilson

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