World Health Organization
First ladies from across Africa will meet with a range of top experts in a first-ever U.S. summit to develop and improve locally-run programs that benefit mothers and children throughout the African continent. The Leadership for Health Summit, to take place April 20 and 21 in Los Angeles is a joint effort of U.S. Doctors for Africa and African Synergy, a group formed by 22 first ladies from Africa.
Political leaders and policy experts, as well as representatives from aid organizations, charitable foundations and key businesses, will join the first ladies for the summit. The goal is to forge new partnerships to expand and enhance locally-run programs started by African first ladies. By linking the first ladies with the expertise and resources, organizers hope to improve the health of millions of mothers and children across Africa, saving hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
“Empowering Africa’s first ladies is an innovative approach to bettering the lives of millions of Africans. These are some of Africa’s most important leaders and aiding their efforts is critical,” said Ted Alemayhu, founder of U.S. Doctors for Africa.
During the invitation-only summit, the first ladies of Africa will introduce their domestic and region-wide efforts across Africa, engage in dialogues with other leaders from the field of global health, and set actionable goals for the coming year.
As an organizing partner for the summit, ONE is working to promote the first ladies’ work and leadership and to help develop sustainable partnerships towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The other organizing partners are allAfrica.com, Africare, Global Health Council, the David & Lucille Packard Foundation, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program, Until There’s A Cure Foundation, Vital Voices Global Partnership, White Ribbon Alliance, Women Deliver and the World Health Organization as well as corporate sponsors, Chevron, General Electric, ExxonMobil and the RAND Corporation.
This group of partners looks forward to building greater partnerships around the first ladies’ objectives, as laid out in African Synergy’s founding Statute: “strengthening the spirit of co-operation, partnership and collaboration among stakeholders at national, regional and international levels through a new approach and more active solidarity”; and of “pooling our efforts for more concerted and concrete action in order to alleviate suffering and effectively combat HIV/AIDS (and other scourges)”.
African Synergy’s collaborations include the opening of maternal health clinics, HIV treatment centers, orphan care programs and vocational training schools in Guinea, Niger, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mali and Cameroon; as well as numerous other initiatives and advocacy efforts throughout all 22 member countries.
Immediately following the summit, the first ladies of Africa will be honored for their leadership at a gala benefit the evening of April 21, hosted by a committee of Hollywood activists and featuring musical performances by Natalie Cole and South African legendary musician Vusi Mahlasela.
ONE is honored to work in partnership with African SynergyUS Doctors for Africa, a humanitarian organization committed to increasing access to medical care for diseases and conditions affecting the people of Africa. Most of us can echo USDFA’s vision statement — We envision a future for Africa, free from the burden of preventable and treatable diseases and conditions, in which its people can prosper.
To learn more about the Leadership for Health Summit, go to: http://leadershipforhealth.org/. To purchase a ticket for the Gala, go to: http://www.usdfa.org/gala2009/.
-Margaret McDonnell, NGO Partnerships and Faith Relations Team
Government ministers and global health advocates from across the world are making their way to Almaty, Kazakhstan this week to focus on primary health care. The summit marks the 30th anniversary of the Alma-Ata Conference, which took place in the Kazakhstani city before the collapse of the USSR.
In the years since 1978, Alma-Ata has become somewhat of a hallmark and source of nostalgia in global health circles. The conference was the first of its kind to put the concept of health equity on the international agenda. Aiming to launch a campaign for health for all, attendees laid out their vision of primary health care. Identifying health as a fundamental human right, they argued that health care should not only be universal and affordable, but should be delivered in collaboration with local citizens in a way that is appropriate to the context.
These tenets were laid out in the Alma-Ata Declaration, which gave countries and international organizations a target date of 2000 for implementation.
Thirty years later the ideals of Alma Ata are far from being realized. Here at ONE, we know the stats on the global health deficit all too well: over 9 million children die before their fifth birthday every year from preventable, treatable causes; half a million mothers die every year during childbirth. While many at the time branded Alma-Ata and utopian, in retrospect its failure was more a result of unforeseen social and economic challenges that shaped the global health landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan, speaks to this in a recent article featured in the Lancet:
Nor could the visionary thinkers in 1978 have foreseen world events: an oil crisis, a global recession, and the introduction, by development banks, of structural adjustment programs that shifted national budgets away from the social services, including health…The emergence of HIV/AIDS, the associated resurgence of tuberculosis, and an increase in malaria cases moved the focus of international public health away from broad-based programs and towards the urgent management of high-mortality emergencies.
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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and philanthropist Bill Gates announced plans to raise $500 million for a campaign used to kick Big Tobacco – you guessed it – in the butt.
This is particularly significant for developing nations, as they are becoming popular targets for cigarette companies’ market demographic.
From the New York Times (Op-ed):
[Bloomberg and Gates’] target is a worthy one: tobacco companies and government-owned tobacco enterprises trying to addict hundreds of millions of new customers in the developing world as sales stagnate or shrivel in the industrialized nations…. The goal [of the campaign] is to reverse the rapid rise of smoking in such countries as China, India and Russia and to head off the epidemic in Africa before it can become entrenched.
Many countries have become addicted to the revenues generated by tobacco taxes or government-owned tobacco companies. They will have to be persuaded that the long-term health damage caused by tobacco far exceeds any short-term gain from tobacco revenues.
Bloomberg and Gates have already committed $375 to begin burning-out the competition – and plan on getting to the neediest countries before Big Tobacco does.
-Betsy Avila
In commemoration of World Health Day, Dr. Margaret Chan, the director of the World Health Organization, warned that climate change stands to exacerbate health crises in the world’s poorest communities.
Reuters reported:
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said that new patterns of global rainfall, droughts and storms could accelerate the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever in some regions, creating serious problems for poor nations.
“The climate change-sensitive diseases and conditions are already creating huge burdens in many countries… The impact of climate change can act as an amplifier,” she told a news conference in Geneva, where the United Nations agency is based.
Confronting the health challenges from global warming will require concerted efforts to forecast changing weather patterns, fight mosquitoes and other disease-spreading bugs, distribute vaccinations and boost medical coverage, Chan said.
In sub-Saharan Africa, projections indicate that changing climate patterns will have serious implications on agricultural productivity, water availability and human health.
-The areas suitable for agriculture, the length of growing seasons and the yield potential of food staples are all projected to decline- some African countries could see agricultural yields decrease by 50% by 2050 and crop net revenues could fall by as much as 90% by 2100.
-Rising temperatures can alter runoff patterns and increase water evaporation rates, which can severely reduce the availability of water. By 2020, an additional 75-250 million people in Africa are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change.
-Previously malaria-free highland areas in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi could experience modest incursions of malaria by the 2050s, with conditions for transmission becoming highly suitable by the 2080s. In total, an additional 260-320 million people worldwide could be living in malaria infested areas by 2080.
While these trends and events can not be attributed solely to climate change, they are the types of challenges that will become more frequent and intense with increasing climate variation.
Read about World Health Day 2008: Protecting Health from Climate Change
Read more about how climate change will impact sub-Saharan Africa.
-Nora Coghlan
The World Health Organization (WHO) published their largest survey ever on multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) on Tuesday. In summary, MDR-TB is more prevalent, and more in need of control, than ever.
“TB drug resistance needs a frontal assault. If countries and the international community fail to address it aggressively now we will lose this battle,” said Dr Mario Raviglione, Director of the WHO Stop TB Department. “In addition to specifically confronting drug-resistant TB and saving lives, programmes worldwide must immediately improve their performance in diagnosing all TB cases rapidly and treating them until cured, which is the best way to prevent the development of drug resistance.”
Read the full study here, some key findings below:
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- The WHO estimates that there are nearly 500,000 new cases of MDR-TB each year, about 5% of the approximately 9 million new cases of regular TB per year
- The highest rates of MDR-TB were found in countries in the former Soviet Union and China. China and India carry about half the global burden of MDR-TB and the former Soviet states another 7%. Rwanda had a noticeably high percentage of MDR-TB cases among TB patients (3.9%), but data on MDR-TB presence in Africa was rather limited in the study.
- Extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), a virtually untreatable form of TB, has been recorded in 45 countries.
- Surveys in Latvia and the Ukraine found nearly twice the level of MDR-TB among TB patients living with HIV compared to those without. In South Africa, 44% of TB patients are estimated to be co-infected with HIV.
- MDR-TB and XDR-TB are progressively more expensive and difficult to treat.
The WHO estimates that $4.8 billion is needed for overall TB control in low and middle income countries in 2008, with $1 billion for MDR-TB and XDR-TB. There is a total finance gap for 2008 of $ 2.5 billion, including a $ 500 million gap for MDR-TB and XDR-TB.
There’s an important editorial in the LA Times today about drug-resistant tuberculosis.
A couple of excerpts:
“A new survey by the World Health Organization shows that drug-resistant tuberculosis is even more widespread than had been feared — on average, it’s present in 5% of new TB cases. That’s 500,000 drug-resistant cases a year. If most Americans aren’t concerned by this, it’s because they don’t yet understand that drug-resistant tuberculosis is no longer a disease that threatens mainly HIV and AIDS patients and the Third World poor. It threatens us all. Worldwide, only 8% of TB cases occur in HIV/AIDS patients…
Even after the panic last year caused by Andrew Speaker, the jet-setting honeymooner found to have MDR TB, funding to stop the disease has lagged. The WHO, which gets its money from United Nations member states, estimates it needs $4.8 billion for global TB control. But despite increases in funding from the U.S., Britain and private donors, it still faces a $2.5-billion shortfall.
You can read the full piece here.
A new report on malaria from the World Health Organization outlines some positive news. Among the key findings is that the distribution of bed nets and medications have cut malaria deaths in half in Rwanda and Ethiopia.
From a Washington Post article this afternoon:
“This is the first time we have seen these results with the new tools,” said Arata Kochi, head of malaria programs for WHO.
“This is a genuinely historic achievement,” said Richard G.A. Feachem, former director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. “This is not theoretical. We do not have to wait for a vaccine or new drugs. If we implement today’s technologies aggressively on a national scale, we will have a big impact.”
Two key items in the current “tool kit” are bed nets impregnated with insecticide that lasts three to five years and treatment with at least two drugs. One of them is artemisinin, a compound originally derived from a Chinese herbal medicine.
Read the Washington Post article here. Tomorrow we’ll be able to link to the full report.
-Virginia Simmons
