The New York Times: As Donors Focus on AIDS, Child Illnesses Languish
Chief of health at UNICEF, Mickey Chopra, is trying to put diarrheal diseases back on the global health agenda, highlighting the fact that 1.5 million young children die each year in developing countries from this plight – more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Chopra’s observation lies at the heart of a wider debate over whether the United States and other rich nations spend too much on AIDS, which requires lifelong medications, compared with diarrhea and the other leading killer of children, pneumonia, both of which can be treated inexpensively.

The Times: EU countries fail to agree on fund to help developing nations go green
Nine Eastern European countries have refused to commit to an international fund to pay developing countries to go green, despite a plea from the Danish Prime Minister and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Germany was leading another group of countries, including France, that argued it was bad tactics for the EU to show how much it was prepared to pay this far in advance of the talks. Said Brown, “Unless we have a plan for funding the action we are taking on climate change we will not get agreement in Copenhagen.”

ABC News: U.S. Food Aid Contributing to Africa’s Hunger?
Ethiopia gets 70 percent of its aid from the U.S., but according to a new report by the aid organization Oxfam International, the help “may actually be exacerbating the cycle of starvation.” U.S. law requires that food aid money be spent on food grown in the U.S., at least half of it must be packed in the U.S. and transported in U.S. ships, which the report claims is far more expensive and time consuming than buying food in the region. According to an Oxfam spokesperson, “You can’t just deal with the problem. You need to treat the underlying causes, otherwise you’ll be locked into this endless cycle of foreign food donors.”

The Economist: Falling fertility
The Economist reports that the fertility rate in developing countries is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—“that people think of as teeming with children.” The fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate. This new finding is significant, according to the Economist, as it means “that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.”

Reuters: African nations appeal for quick Doha trade pact
A South African minister said Thursday that African nations will ask developed states to speed up work to conclude the Doha round trade talks and to make early concessions on reducing cotton subsidies that hurt poor farmers. According to Reuters, Trade ministers from Africa, who are meeting in Cairo this week, have said that continuing delays on a new global trade deal was crippling African development, especially in the wake of the global economic crisis.

UPI.com: Supercomputer hunts HIV vaccine targets
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, as part of the International Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology Consortium, are using the world’s fastest supercomputer to analyze vast quantities of genetic sequences from HIV infected people in the hope of identifying possible vaccine target areas. Said one of the researchers, “At this scale we can begin to figure out the relationships between chronic and acute infections…and it is these interconnections where a specially-designed vaccine might be most effective.”