India could run out of a critical medicine in its free HIV/AIDS drugs program in three weeks due to bureaucratic bungling, a senior government official said, leaving more than 150,000 sufferers without life-saving drugs for about a month. Reuters has the exclusive report:
Missed dosages for long durations can increase patients’ drug resistance and result in faster spread of the virus, while changes in medication regimens expose patients to side effects.
The supply crunch will be an embarrassment for the four-month-old government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has promised to deliver more affordable and better health services.
As drugs in the open market are expensive, the government provides more than one-third of India’s 2.1 million HIV/AIDS patients with free antiretroviral drugs that are procured from pharmaceutical companies via a tender process.
Delays in approving such tenders has left the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) scrambling to secure supplies of tenofovir/lamivudine tablets that are prescribed to thousands of patients during initial stages of treatment.
“We are also fed up. What to do? There are so many bureaucratic hurdles. The file goes to so many tables, and so many comments,” NACO Deputy Director General A.S. Rathore told Reuters.
Several sources, company executives and documents seen by Reuters revealed that a tender for the medicine was approved last week, but supplies normally take at least 60 days to reach patients, which in this case would take it to late November.
NACO had raised the demand in January, Rathore said.
Patients and activists complained of shortages of several HIV drugs in September, forcing one group to send a legal notice to India’s health secretary, Lov Verma. Verma directed NACO to take stock of the program and told Reuters on Sept. 4 that the situation was not as grave as activists described.
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Global Health and Development Beat
Mexico has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world, and women can find themselves criminalized even after miscarriage.
Older people are expected to make up one-fifth of the world’s population by 2050. So governments must prepare to expand social pensions and ensure that this growing demographic plays a full role in society, according to the 2014 Global AgeWatch Index.
Fighting the Ebola epidemic means confronting the issue of inequality, as people in poor countries have less access to knowledge and infrastructure for treating the sick and containing the deadly virus, the head of the World Bank said.
Pestilence, cyclical droughts and floods, and the West Africa Ebola crisis have pushed hunger to record levels in Gambia, where 200,000 people need urgent food assistance, the United Nations says.
In Zimbabwe, the issue of contraceptive use remains controversial and divisive in this country of 13.72 million people. Parents and educators are agreed on one thing: that levels of sexual activity among high-school students are on the rise. What they do not agree on, however, is how to deal with the corresponding increase in teenage pregnancies.
In Senegal, literacy experts are using the new technologies to motivate and teach women to read. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization rolled out the program in Dakar in 2012, but is now expanding it to six other African countries.
CBC reports on how MSF has tried to scale up its response to the Ebola outbreak in Liberia.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
There has been some important progress on global reproductive rights, but there are still concerns, writes Joseph Chamie,former director of the United Nations Population Division, in IPS. An excerpt:
With improved medical techniques, changing social norms and grassroots movements, induced abortion also became increasingly legalised globally. Although some remain strongly opposed to induced abortion, nearly all industrialised countries have passed laws ensuring a woman’s right to abortion.
Also at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 179 governments indicated their commitment to prevent unsafe abortion and in circumstances where abortion is not against the law, such abortion should be made safe.
Reproductive rights to terminate a pregnancy, however, have also led to excess female fetus abortions. Particularly widespread in China and India, their sex ratios at birth of 117 and 111 boys per 100 girls are blatantly higher than the typical sex ratio at birth of around 106.
Consequently, the numbers of young “surplus males” unable to find brides are more than 35 million in China and 25 million in India.
The introduction in 1970 of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) – fertilisation in a laboratory by mixing sperm with eggs surgically removed from an ovary followed by uterine implantation – radically altered the basic evolutionary process of human reproduction.
IVF provides childless couples the right and means to have biological children. It is estimated that more than five million IVF babies have followed since the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978.
However, IVF has also raised ethical concerns. In addition to creating a pregnancy through “artificial” means, IVF has become a massive commercial industry prone to serious abuses and exploitation of vulnerable couples in the desire to make profits from childbearing.
IVF also permits gestational surrogacy, which extends reproductive rights to same-sex couples. In contrast to traditional surrogacy, where the surrogate is the actual mother, gestational surrogacy allows the surrogate to be unrelated to the baby with the egg coming from the intended mother or donor.
While those who are childless have a right to have biological children, gestational surrogacy raises challenging ethical questions, such as the exploitation of poor women, as well as complex legal issues, especially when transactions cross international borders.
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Capital Events
Thursday
12:00 PM – India’s Achilles Heel: Failure to Deliver Public Services – CGD
Friday
12:00 PM – Harnessing the Power of Markets to Tackle Global Poverty: A Conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz – AEI
3:00 PM – From Copenhagen to Paris: Emerging Economies and the Challenges of Climate Change Diplomacy – Georgetown University
Wednesday – 8 October
10:00 AM – Turning the Tide for Girls and Young Women: How to Achieve an AIDS-Free Future – Kaiser Family Foundation and Population Council
Friday – 17 October
8:30 AM – Ensuring Equity for NCDs in Women’s Health Throughout the Life Course – FHI 360
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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