The World Health Organization is debating how to reform itself after botching the response to the Ebola outbreak, a sluggish performance that experts say cost thousands of lives.From the AP:
On Sunday, WHO’s executive board planned to discuss proposals that could radically transform the U.N. health agency in response to sharp criticism over its handling of the West Africa epidemic.
“The Ebola outbreak points to the need for urgent change,” WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said. She acknowledged that WHO was too slow to grasp the significance of the Ebola outbreak, which is estimated to have killed more than 8,600 people, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Critics say the kinds of reform being debated are long overdue.
“The groundswell of dissatisfaction and lack of trust in WHO over Ebola has reached such a crescendo that unless there is fundamental reform, I think we might lose confidence in WHO for a generation,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights at Georgetown University.
“Ebola revealed all of WHO’s inherent weaknesses and the international community saw painfully what it was like to see WHO not being able to lead. That resulted in thousands of deaths that were completely avoidable,” he said. “If that doesn’t light a fire for reform, I don’t know what will.”
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Global Health and Development Beat
Two new tools to fight AIDS should be available by 2030 in the form of a vaccine and new intense drug treatments, ending most cases of a disease that has killed millions in the past 30 years, Bill Gates said.
An in-depth report from the New York Times shows how anti-malaria bed nets are sometimes used for fishing, in parts of Africa.
A stunning new discovery in India could in future lead to the development of a new vaccine against malaria, reports NDTV.
A Devex slideshow goes through the potential people who will be the next USAID administrator.
A steep fall in Ebola cases in Liberia will make it hard to prove whether experimental vaccines work in a major clinical trial about to start in the country, the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health said.
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Spotlight on PSI
In the PSI Impact blog, President and CEO Karl Hofmann makes the economic case for all women having contraceptive choice. An excerpt:
Helping women who already have expressed a desire for modern contraception is all that’s needed to turn this negative trend into a positive one. Meeting the unmet need for family planning on the part of 220+ million women would prevent an estimated 26 million abortions each year (according to the Guttmacher Institute), and catch the world up on the most lagging of the Millennium Development Goals, MDG 5 on improving maternal health.
It would also improve the survival of children born into families wishing to practice birth spacing or limitation. And at a time when conserving the world’s natural resource base is more important than ever, we should recognize that answering a call already in place would have the same environmental effect as stopping all illegal deforestation in the world.
Responding to women as health consumers with choices will not only lift them, their families and their economies, it will also help countries that struggle to take advantage of the power of demography for good, rather than seeing it as a curse of underdevelopment. We call this the Demographic Dividend – when fertility decline creates a bulge of working age people who can add measurably to national income generation when empowered with the right social investments in education and job creation strategies.
All of us have a role in meeting women’s contraceptive needs. Governments first and foremost are responsible for setting the policy framework and prioritising health systems investments in order to meet the health needs of their populations broadly. Non-governmental organizations can employ social marketing or other strategies to support governmental efforts to reach in particular poor and vulnerable consumers. International organisations, starting with the UN and specialized agencies such as the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), can help mobilise other donors and channel needed resources to gaps such as health and family planning commodities.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
A story on NPR from this weekend explores how big data can transform medicine. An excerpt:
AMY STANDEN, BYLINE: In 2011, a young girl from Reno, Nevada, was flown by helicopter to the pediatric intensive care unit at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Jenny Frankovich was an attending physician there.
JENNY FRANKOVICH: She was gravely ill. Her kidneys were shutting down.
STANDEN: Tests showed the girls had lupus, a disease in which the immune system goes rogue. Frankovich had seen kids like this before. And she recalled that some of them also developed blood clots, which can be deadly. Blood clots can be prevented with an anticoagulant, but that too carries risks.
FRANKOVICH: You could stroke. A patient could bleed into another organ.
STANDEN: Giving the drug was risky. Not giving the drug was also risky. So Frankovich asked the other doctors around the girl’s bed, what should we do here? The answer – we don’t really know.
FRANKOVICH: There wasn’t enough published literature to guide this decision. And really, the best route was to not do anything.
STANDEN: And that’s when she had her big idea.
FRANKOVICH: I knew I had the patients’ charts, all electronic, in a database that was searchable.
STANDEN: Not long ago, she says, this data would have filled an entire office room with boxes of paper files. Now she could search it with a keystroke.
FRANKOVICH: I brought the data back to that big team of doctors that was around her bed. And I said, hey, this is the number of lupus patients we’ve had. This is the number that had a clot. What do you think? Universally everybody said, wow, based on those numbers, you know, it seems like we should try to prevent a clot in her.
STANDEN: So they did. It worked.
FRANKOVICH: She didn’t develop a clot. And over time, her lupus did get better. And she’s, as far as I know, doing well.
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Capital Events
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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