Worldwide measles deaths had dropped 48 percent in six years as immunisation efforts reached more children in sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations said on Friday.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said the fall in deaths to 454,000 in 2004 from 871,000 in 1999 was "an outstanding public health success story".
Story here. The biggest decline took place in Africa.
The World Health Organization reports that polio has been eradicated in Benin; Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Ghana; Guinea; Ivory Coast; Mali and Togo. However, polio remains endemic in six countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Niger, Afghanistan and Egypt. Story here.
It is being tried in Nigeria.
Nine million young people in Nigeria are to be sent text messages on Wednesday to raise awareness about HIV/Aids. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) is launching its Nigerian campaign because it has the third highest number of people with the disease. Unicef is aiming to take advantage of the surge in mobile phone use in Nigeria over the last six years.
Story here.
A synthetic cannabinoid -- similar to the compounds found in marijuana, but substantially stronger -- causes the growth of new neurons and reduces anxiety and depression, investigators at the University of Saskatchewan here reported.
And researchers at the University of Calgary said they've found evidence that the brain contains so-called CB2 cannabinoid receptors, previously seen in immune tissue but thought not to exist in brain tissue. The discovery, they added, could lead to new drugs to treat nausea associated with cancer or AIDS.
Story here.
The HIV virus appears to be less fit than it was in the late 1980s.
The HIV virus that causes AIDS, the fatal disease of the immune system, is becoming less aggressive, researchers have said in a landmark new study, amid surging speculation about the implications for the global fight against a pandemic that has killed an estimated 30 million people worldwide.
Researchers at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, compared HIV-1 samples from 1986-89 and 2002-03 and found that 75 per cent of the newer samples appeared less fit than those of 15 years ago both in terms of spread within individuals and transmission to others.
Story here.
My younger brother thought the claims made in "Super Size Me" were outrageous. He conjectured that eating an all McDonlads diet would lead to weight loss. The scant evidence appears to be in his favor:
At a cost of $9 to $11 for three meals, the single mother of two [Merab Morgan] can afford it. She travels throughout the Raleigh area working construction jobs, and she has never failed to find a McDonald's somewhere. The whole process of ordering and eating a meal takes maybe 5 minutes, and she mostly eats in her car. Sometimes she hits the drive-through only once, ordering enough food to last the whole day.
What has been the result?
Since April 22, when Morgan launched her diet with a Sausage Burrito and a medium Diet Coke, she's lost 33 pounds, putting her at about 195 pounds. At 5 feet, 9 inches tall, she's dropped from a size 22 or 24 to a size 15. The size 2X and 3X T-shirts she used to wear look like dresses on her. And despite her friends' fears about skyrocketing cholesterol, she feels great.
Story here. For more evidence, see Leslie Sayer's webpage.
In a potentially major breakthrough in the campaign against AIDS, French and South African researchers have apparently found that male circumcision reduces by about 70% the risk that men will contract HIV through intercourse with infected women.
Other than abstinence and safer sex, almost nothing has been proved to reduce the sexual spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. World- wide, the major route of HIV transmission for many years has been heterosexual sex.
Vaccine developers have said they would consider an AIDS vaccine with just 30% efficacy useful. But so far, no effective vaccine against the disease has been developed, leaving AIDS workers desperate for another tool to help them stem the tide of new infections, estimated at almost five million last year.
Here is the story. (subscription required)
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Thursday that the Quebec government cannot prevent people from paying for private insurance for health-care procedures covered under medicare.
This is good news for many Canadians. However, it is bad news for the subset of Americans who mistakingly believe that the Canadian health care system is the ideal. If it was so great, why has the private market for health care developed? Story here.
David Brooks understands the complexity of the AIDS problem in Africa.
The problem is that while treatment is a technical problem, prevention is not. Prevention is about changing behavior. It is getting into the hearts of people in their vulnerable moments - when they are drinking, when they are in the throes of passion - and influencing them to change the behavior that they have not so far changed under the threat of death.
Prevention is not treatment. Successful prevention requires something else to change the incentives that people face. Once again, Mr. Brooks offers insights into the problem.
It's about disproportionate suffering. It's about people who commit minor transgressions, or even no transgressions, and suffer consequences too horrible to contemplate. In America we read in the Book of Job; in sub-Saharan Africa they have 10 Jobs per acre.
It's about these and a dozen other things - trust, fear, weakness, traditions, temptation - none of which can be fully addressed by externals. They can be addressed only by the language of ought, by fixing behavior into some relevant set of transcendent ideals and faiths.
That's a language governments and N.G.O.'s rarely speak. It's a language that has to be spoken by people who connect words like "faithful" and "abstinent" to some larger creed. It has to be spoken, in Africa, by people who understand local beliefs about ancestors and the supernatural. It's a language that has to be spoken by an elder, a neighbor, a person who knows your name.
Without the change in language and understanding, I doubt that the AIDS epidemic in Africa will end.
Recent research suggests that the two may not be positively related.
Good times seem like they should bring good health. More people have jobs and health insurance when an economy is growing. Fewer people skip visits to the doctor to save money or suffer the severe stress that comes with a layoff. So with job growth now stronger than it has been since 2000, the country can look forward to some vigorous years, it might seem.
But that is not quite how the world works, some new research has found. In fact, a strong economy should probably come with a warning label. A one-percentage-point fall in the unemployment rate - which is what has happened since the summer of 2003 - leads to 12,000 deaths a year in the United States that might not otherwise have happened, according to Christopher J. Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
When the economy improves, the number of car and workplace accidents rise, as people are on the job and on the road more often. Deaths from heart attacks, flu and pneumonia increase, too. Cancer deaths do not change and suicides fall, but not by nearly enough to overcome the other increases in mortality.
Smoking rises, as does obesity, during a boom. Physical activity falls. The part of the population that drinks remains the same, but some moderate drinkers become heavy drinkers.
I think this a good example of thinking about the differential impact of economic growth over the short-run and long-run. The short-run costs are the deaths (maybe, I am not sure I agree with the results). The short-run benefits include additional resources available to find cures and treatments for heart attacks, pneumonia, and other health problems. In the long-run, we have less deaths with longer healthier lives. But what is the long-run health costs of economic growth?
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