Check out this great news on rotavirus, courtesy of Candace Rosen at PATH (from PATH’s RotaFlash newsletter), which you all helped to support with your advocacy for GAVI last spring!
Diarrhea is the third biggest killer of children under five years of age in Zambia (40 per day; 15,000 each year), and rotavirus, the most common cause of severe and fatal diarrhea in young children, is responsible for nearly one-third of those deaths. As in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest rates of rotavirus mortality worldwide, rotavirus contributes heavily to the tremendous drain on the health and economic resources in Zambia:
Approximately 41 percent of young children hospitalized for severe diarrhea are infected with rotavirus.
An estimated 4,506children under age five die from rotavirus diarrhea annually.
Vaccines are the best way to protect children in Zambia and the rest of the world from severe rotavirus diarrhea and the deadly dehydrating diarrhea that it causes.
ONE member and Peace Corps volunteer Brandon Green will be sharing his experiences in Burkina Faso with ONE Blog readers in the series, “Back to Africa” over the next few months. We look forward to hearing about all his adventures!
Me and my students at our HIV/AIDS talk
At one of my English Clubs — a place for students to practice their English — last Tuesday, 140 7th and 8th graders crammed into a classroom that shouldn’t be able to hold more than a third of them. They were there to learn a few English words and watch the American put a condom on a wooden penis. I was there to teach them about HIV/AIDS. The class started by discussing what HIV/AIDS is and how it affects the human body. Then, I showed them some statistics about people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. I told them that sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of infections, and that 1.2 percent of the population of Burkina Faso is currently living with HIV/AIDS.
Life happens here at the Tema Clinic in Accra, Ghana. Babies trade a death sentence for life. Mothers transform their sickly skeleton figures to healthy, able bodies. Tema offers hope in a place that was once hopeless and ravaged by AIDS.
Funded by the Global Fund through financial support from Product (RED), Tema Hospital cares for 2,200 people living with HIV. We recently visited their facility again –- their work never ceases to amaze me. The Global Fund make it possible for the hospital to provide ARV treatment and PMTCT (prevention of mother-to-child-transmission). Thanks to these interventions, only 4 percent of babies at Tema with HIV-positive mothers are born with the virus.
Last week, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) celebrated the transition of Project HEART to local partners, after eight years of putting hundreds of thousands of patients on life-saving ARV treatment.
Kevin Kouassi, Community HIV Counselor from Dimbokro, Cote d’Ivoire, and Project HEART beneficiary, counsels a young pregnant woman about prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV services. (Photo: Olivier Asselin)
Project HEART was launched in 2004 in partnership with the CDC and PEPFAR to scale up access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services in Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. As of September 2011, Project HEART has enrolled more than 1 million people in HIV care programs (including 80,000 children), provided antiretroviral treatment for more than 560,000 patients, and tested and counseled more than 2.5 million pregnant women.
In celebration of the Global Fund’s 10th anniversary, ONE Global Health Policy Manager Erin Hohlfelder reflects on the organization’s accomplishments over the years.
When I was ten, I was busy doing important things like mastering long division, practicing softball and rocking the plastic glasses/bowl cut combo. While I’m proud of those accomplishments, I have to say I’m even more proud today to honor all the incredible things that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has achieved in its first ten years of existence. To understand the Global Fund’s impact, it’s important to remember just how bad things were before it existed: Fewer than 50,000 Africans had access to AIDS treatment. Malaria was killing nearly 1 million people annually. Treating TB was considered too expensive for most of the developing world.
As the world’s business, political and media elite made their annual trek to the Swiss town of Davos -– blanketed in more snow than I have seen there for a decade -– conventional wisdom had it they should have all the lightheartedness of a gray, winter, Alpine sky. The Eurozone crisis, the difficulty of getting tough political decisions in the United States, and worries in some of the champions among emerging markets – the chance of a property crash in China, for example, or of runaway inflation in India –- were all said to contribute to a note of pessimism among Davos devotees.
Right now, some of the world's biggest oil companies are fighting to keep some of their deals with foreign governments secret. Let's tell big oil we won't be bullied.
Cuts to poverty-fighting programs won't balance the budget, but they will set back progress on Canada's development priorities and risk jeopardizing existing investments.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
