International
Health
The W8 shows that change is possible
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Dorothy Ngoma © Oxfam
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Dorothy Ngoma is head of the National Organisation of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi and she’s telling leaders to help the world’s poorest people.
Dorothy is a member of the W8, a group of 8 extraordinary women from all 4 corners of the world who are campaigning for health and education for all.
As Dorothy puts it:
“Health and education have been recurrent themes in my life. I feel these issues personally. I’ve seen many women dying due to the weak health system in my country. Poverty is a massive problem in Malawi. 14 million people live in Malawi and 70% live below 1 dollar per day, they struggle to survive. There are only 200 doctors in the whole country. When I told that to a press conference in France a gasp went round the room.
Because of a lack of skilled midwives and doctors 16 women die daily due to problems related to pregnancy and delivery. 22 people die daily due to TB, while TB is a curable disease. Malawi has 1 doctor for 65,000 and 1 nurse for 3,500 people. An impossible task.
People often don’t go to hospital until they have something really serious, simply because they don’t have the money. Sometimes, people don’t even have money to get on the bus to get to hospital.
In Malawi we fight against any sort of diseases: TB, malaria, HIV/AIDS, cholera, dysentery, we have the problem of dirty water. It’s a sick community. Nurses are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. We have to lobby for more nurses and we have to work hard to stop nurses leaving the industry or leaving Malawi, due to the heavy job.”
Along with the other members of the W8, Dorothy is working to spread this message and let others, especially decision makers, know about the issues. Better education and health for all is possible, but only with more resources. More doctors, more nurses and more midwives.
As Dorothy says, “We need to speak up both at the local level and at international level. We need to tell people what’s wrong and how to change it.”
Thanks to Dorothy and the other members of the W8 we know that change is indeed possible.
GAVI’s Julian Lob-Levyt talks to ONE
Last week GAVI Alliance CEO Julian Lob-Levyt visited Berlin to talk to German politicians, NGO representatives and the media about GAVI’s work, the success it has achieved over the past ten years, and the challenges lying before us in the fight against preventable disease such as pneumonia and diarrhea.
Launched in 2000, the GAVI Alliance is a global health partnership representing stakeholders in immunisation from both private and public sectors.
Whilst he was in town Julian took a few minutes out of his busy schedule for an interview with ONE’s Gisela Glimmann:
Primary health care in Ethiopia
Dr Gebreab Barnabas, Head of the Regional Health Bureau in Tigray province, talked to ONE recently about a primary health care programme that has been running in Ethiopia.
The scheme, which started 5 years ago, involves the training 30,000 female health extension workers nationally, including 1,800 in Tigray. Supported by the Ethiopian government, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, UNICEF and other partners, it also involves the building of more than 3000 heath centres.
Programmes such as this help put health care in the hands of the local community. Not only is primary health care less costly, but its impact can be huge. By eliminating the risk of the disease it helps reduce the costs of diagnosis, treatment and follow up.
Hear what Dr Barnabas had to say:
Bono’s Latest New York Times Column: “Ten for the Next Ten”
ONE co-founder Bono’s most recent column for the New Year Times, on 10 ideas for the next 10 years, was published over the weekend. I wanted to share it because it calls attention to a few ideas that are in our area of work, including the rotavirus vaccine and the upcoming World Cup in Africa.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the full column here.
Happy New Year!
-Kathy McKiernan
Taking the Fight to Rotavirus
The thing is, they exist, these vaccines. They’re not a mere hope, like an AIDS vaccine. And one of the brightest bits of news in 2009 is that rotavirus vaccines have been shown to work not only in nations with low child mortality, but in the poorest countries, where diarrhea (not a killer in our house) caused by rotavirus infections takes the lives of 500,000 children a year. The World Health Organization just this summer issued a strong recommendation that rotavirus vaccinations be part of every nation’s immunization program. From this vantage point, I like the look of the next decade.
The World Cup Kicks Off the African Decade
It’s getting easier to describe to Americans the impact of the World Cup — especially the impact it will have in Africa, where the tournament is to be held this summer. A few years ago, Ivory Coast was splitting apart and in the midst of civil war when its national team qualified for the 2006 jamboree. The response was so ecstatic that the war was largely put on hold as something more important than deathly combat took place, i.e. a soccer match. The team became a symbol of how the different tribes could — and did — get on after the tournament was over.
This time round, for the 2010 World Cup, naysayers thought South Africa could not build the stadiums in time. Those critics should be red-faced now. South Africa’s impressive preparations underline the changes on the continent, where over the last few years, 5 percent economic growth was the average. Signs point to a further decade of growth to come. Canny investors will put more capital there. This in turn has the potential to shore up fragile young democracies across the continent.
It would be fitting if Nelson Mandela, who has done more than anyone for Africa’s rising, would kick off the opening ceremonies. If he shows up, the world will weep with joy.
Nigeria: A Year Without Guinea Worms
There have been a lot of successes in global health – could the elimination of Guinea worm worldwide be next?
After 12 consecutive months without a single worm detected, Nigeria is moving closer to the eradication of Guinea worm. Two more years are needed for the WHO to make it official, but it appears that Nigeria, once the worst-affected country (653,000 cases in 1989), is free of worms.
This progress, led by the Carter Center’s Guinea Worm Eradication Program, is being achieved without the assistance of a vaccine or medicine to treat or prevent Guinea worm. Preventative measures come in the form of health education and low-technology actions to influence behavior change, like filtering the fleas out of drinking water with fine-mesh filter cloths or pipe filters.
Guinea worm, dracunculiasis, is contracted by drinking pond water infested with microscopic fleas that harbor the worm larvae. The larvae grow for a year inside a person’s body, becoming worms up to three feet long, which exit the body through painful blisters in the skin.
Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan are the only countries that still have the worms, down from 20 affected countries in 1986 when the Carter Center began its campaign against the disease.
Spurred on by the eradication of smallpox in 1977, the Carter Center’s International Task Force for Disease Eradication has identified seven diseases as potentially eradicable: dracunculiasis, poliomyelitis, mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis, cysticercosis, and measles. Nigeria’s success in combating Guinea worm offers hope for Guinea worm’s full eradication.
Great news for Global Health
It’s a crazy week with all that’s been going on in New York at the UN and Clinton Global Initiative but before the world’s attention turns to the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, I wanted to flag two pieces of great news on global health that came out this afternoon, which you understandably may have missed.
First, it was announced that an extra $1 billion has been secured in support of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which funds major programmes to protect children from preventable diseases, such as pneumonia, measles, meningitis and diarrheal diseases. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown helped make the announcement yesterday during one of the many events in New York. GAVI will use the additional funding not only to support and distribute more vaccinations to save more children’s lives from these diseases, but also to improve health systems in comprehensive ways in poor countries.
ONE sees this as an especially important announcement in light of the fact of last week’s historic UNICEF report on child mortality, which found the number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year had been cut to the lowest level ever on record—8.8 million. This progress was largely thanks to scaled up support for relatively inexpensive solutions, many of which GAVI supports, such as vaccinations and supplements.
However, the UNICEF report also found that although great gains were made thanks to the targeting of many major diseases, a lack of investment in pneumonia and diarrheal diseases have made them the two main causes of children’s deaths worldwide. Today’s $1 billion announcement means that vaccines that can help prevent deaths from these two diseases—which account for 3 million deaths each year—will be available soon at greatly reduced costs through GAVI.
As ONE’s President David Lane said in a press release ONE put out: “We know how to stop deaths from pneumonia and diarrheal diseases, but these conditions are the biggest killers of children under five. Today’s GAVI announcement is an important step to accelerate progress in areas where we’ve seen big results, but will also target more diseases that so far have not been targeted and that needlessly take the lives of children.”
The second big announcement was a new airline ticket programme that will allow you to voluntarily contribute $2 each time you fly to help fight global disease. The programme was announced today, also in New York, by the U.N. agency UNITAID, which is attached to the World Health Organization. UNITAID helps reduce the costs of treatment for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, making these lifesaving medicines available to those that need them.
As David Lane said in the press release: “Paying $2 to help save lives in the fight against preventable disease sure beats baggage fees.”
The initiative, which in particular will help fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa as well as help improve maternal health, is backed by several major travel industry companies, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Recipients of the donations will include UNICEF and the Clinton Foundation. It looks like you can expect to see the initiative start at airports this January.
We expect lots more news in the days ahead, so stay tuned to the blog. To read more about ONE’s reaction to today’s two announcements, you can see ONE’s full press release here.
-Steve Wilson
TB Sniffing Rat Pack
Just when you thought the film “Ratatouille” would be the highlight for these long-tailed rodents, the organisation APOPO has trained African rats to diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). Using scent detection, these HeroRAT’s can reliably (50 percent higher reliability than traditional microscopy) process 40 sputum samples in seven minutes, a task that takes trained lab technicians an entire day.
This innovative means of ‘ratting out’ pulmonary tuberculosis presents a unique way to enhance TB case detection in resource limited settings.
To learn more, read the original article here, and check out ONE’s tuberculosis brief here.
-Rena Pacheco-Theard
Financing for health update
At the very end of May, the High Level Task Force on Innovative International Financing for Health Systems released a set of recommendations for potential ways to raise new money to fill the gap in financing the health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Launched in September 2008 at the UN Summit and led by Gordon Brown and Robert Zoellick, the President of the World Bank, the Taskforce has set out to make recommendations on the mix of financing mechanisms that could raise new funding in an efficient and effective manner.
While financing for global health has nearly doubled in the past decade, and remarkable progress has been made in reducing child mortality and expanding access to care and treatment for diseases such as HIV/AIDS, progress toward meeting the health MDGs remains off-track, especially in Africa.
Donor funding at its current levels will not be enough to turn this around: new, innovative ways of raising funds that are additional to current levels of development assistance are needed, and current mechanisms can be expanded. Among the array of options put forward by the Taskforce as options to mobilize and make better use of existing funds, the Taskforce is recommending that more countries consider solidarity levies on airline tickets and explore the feasibility of levies on tobacco or currency transactions.
ONE welcomes entrepreneurial thinking by major donors for how to raise new money and make better use of existing resources for health in developing countries. We look forward to future discussions on how these resources will be channeled and hope that the G8 seriously considers innovative financing as a way to increase the quantity and quality of aid.
-Lisa Fleisher
The 2008 G8 Summit: Outcomes for Africa
African development was again the subject of G8 discussions as world leaders gathered in Toyako, Hokkaido in northern Japan from July 7-9 for the 2008 G8 Summit. While the G8 was confronted with multiple global challenges, including climate change and a weakening global economy, the 2008 Hokkaido Summit marked an important “mid point” moment in the fight against poverty. The Hokkaido Summit came at the critical halfway point to both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the G8 Gleneagles promises to Africa. The G8 are dangerously behind on their landmark commitments to the region, having delivered only $3 billion of the promised $25 billion in additional assistance to Africa by 2010, according to the 2008 DATA Report.
After difficult negotiations, the G8 summit yielded small gains for the poorest. The bulk of G8 agreements on development and Africa and food security reiterated previous pledges rather than outlining new measures to get the group back on track. The G8 did announce plans for a new effort to tackle the global food crisis, though more details are needed to ensure its effectiveness and delivery. They highlighted the UN High-level meeting on the MDGs in September as an important opportunity to review progress and identify actions needed to overcome remaining challenges.
At a time when G8 credibility is at risk due to slow progress in delivering on commitments, there was a strong call for greater accountability in the G8 Communique. The G8 agreed to track progress against previous commitments in health, education, water and agriculture, as well as its compliance with anti-corruption measures.
Overall, the US, UK and Germany provided strong leadership in negotiations and have significantly increased their funding for Africa in recent years.
After the jump, the following brief overview of outcomes for Africa from the 2008 G8 Summit.
-Ben Hubbard
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The International ONE Blog is a daily log of the anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by ONE staff, with guest contributions from ONE volunteers, members and allies.
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TAGS: Education, Health, Malawi