September 5, 2014
Oregon researchers developing a vaccine that has shown promise in preventing HIV infection in primates said on Wednesday they have been awarded a $25 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. From Reuters:
The grant follows research published by the scientists seeking to show their vaccine candidate halting the transmission of, or eliminating altogether, a form of the virus in about half of more than 100 monkeys tested.
“In effect, we helped better arm the hunters in the body to chase down and kill an elusive viral enemy,” lead researcher Louis Picker wrote in the magazine Nature, which published lab results last year. “And we’re quite confident that this vaccine approach can work exactly the same way against HIV in humans.”
While the annual number of new HIV infections has declined in recent years, more than 35 million people globally were living with HIV and an estimated 2.1 million people were newly infected with the virus that causes AIDS last year, according to the World Health Organization…
The grant will be used over the next five years to establish whether the vaccine can be used safely on humans in a clinical trial and to help Picker develop a version of the vaccine suitable for larger-scale testing, which is required to bring it to market and will take at least a decade.
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Spotlight on PSI
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Global Health and Development Beat
One person commits suicide every 40 seconds — more than all the yearly victims of wars and natural disaster — with the highest toll among the elderly, the United Nations said Thursday.
The dengue vaccine developed by the French pharmaceutical Sanofi has shown an efficacy of 60.8 percent in tests with children and teenagers in Latin America, and is effective against all four serotypes of the disease, the company said today.
A new child health model? Relatively unusual in much of the world, donating breast milk is common in Brazil, where the network of banks works in much the same way as blood banks — testing, sorting and storing milk used mostly to feed premature infants in neo-natal units.
The completed a nationwide polio immunization campaign in all districts of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. The national immunization days campaign was carried out during three days between 17 and 19 August.
An estimated 135 million children under the age of five in the Asia-Pacific region have not been registered by any government agency. That leaves them unable to claim national identities needed for access to rights and critical services. A major push is about to commence to get such children, and those of all ages, a legal identity.
Fear of contracting the deadly Ebola virus is hampering efforts to recruit international health workers and slowing the delivery of protective garments and other vital materials to stricken areas in West Africa, World Health Organization officials.
USAID is providing $75 million to fund 1,000 more beds in Ebola treatment centers in Liberia and tens of thousands of protective suits for health care workers.
A severe drought has ravaged crops in Central America and as many as 2.81 million people are struggling to feed themselves, the WFP said on Friday, though the region’s coffee crop has been largely unscathed.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
Achieving the non-controversial medical goals of sexual health requires dealing with the controversial aspects of sexual life, argues Pauline Oosterhoff in the Guardian development blog. She writes:
Clearly, sexual health is about much more than HIV, sexually transmitted infections, maternal mortality and other health problems that can count on broad public support. For that matter, these uncontested issues can only be solved by addressing some of the thorny and controversial aspects of sexual health. Take sex education for teenagers. Unmarried teenagers are often excluded from receiving information and sexual health services because, according to unrealistic and prudish social norms, they are not supposed to be sexually active.
This leads young men to turn to the only other easily available source of information about sex: pornography. Unfortunately, pornography is also a key source of misinformation on sex, often depicting sexual activity as entirely oriented towards fulfilling male sexual desire, with little attention given to pleasurable or safe sexual experiences for women.
Unsurprisingly, relying on pornography as a major source of sexual education for men does not produce very positive sexual health outcomes. And denying unmarried teenage women access to reliable sex education in schools contributes to high maternal mortality rates and high infant malnutrition rates. Moreover, even married men and women, whose sexual activities are socially condoned, often lack the basic conditions for sexual health.
The lack of political interest in improving comprehensive sexual health is a major reason why poor countries are failing to significantly reduce maternal mortality, one of the millennium development goals.
Globally, an estimated 222 million women lack access to modern methods of family planning. In some of the least developed countries, up to a quarter of women report an unmet need for family planning. Some of these unmet family planning needs can be addressed by increasing access to contraceptives. But the provision of any contraceptive technology has to address women’s health concerns, including the concerns they might have about how it will affect their sexual relationships. If couples do not want to use condoms because they decrease sensation, or resist using an intrauterine device because their countries have no trained healthcare staff to help insert it properly, we need to take these concerns seriously, rather than dismissing them as ignorant or irresponsible.
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Capital Events
Happy Friday!
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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