all global health stories

Medical basics still needed in Developing World

404132862 — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:17:24 -0500

Despite all the progress and promise of modern medicine, most of the world is still struggling to get the fundamentals of medical care: simple diagnostic tests, affordable medicines, and efficient supply distribution, several Harvard specialists said today.

Era ending at School of Public Health

404132862 — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:26:07 -0500

Barry R. Bloom, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), yesterday announced that he will be stepping down from his position as the School’s leader at the end of the current academic year.

Bloom, the Joan L. and Julius H. Jacobson Professor of Public Health, became dean of HSPH on January 1, 1999. During a period marked by globalization and profound changes in science and technology, Bloom has led initiatives to keep HSPH at the frontier of scientific discovery and interdisciplinary innovation and to extend its leadership in improving the health of populations around the world.

Improving women's health key Indian strategy

jake — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:16:46 -0400

Detailed research of Indian health disparities has revealed that significant differences in access to health care exist even within families, with the health and nutrition of women and girls taking a backseat to that of men and boys.

That was the picture painted Monday (Oct. 22) by Gita Sen of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, and an adjunct lecturer on population and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

Sen was one of the speakers at a two-day symposium hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Boston University’s Global Health Initiative, and Tufts University.

Improving child survival around the globe is key goal of United Nations

jake — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:35:56 -0400

Reducing child mortality rates for children under 5 — which in 2004 was 6.5 (per 1,000 children annually) in Latin America and the Caribbean, about 20 in South Asia, and 39 in sub-Saharan Africa — is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals were established at the beginning of this decade to address the problems of global poverty, health, and sustainability. Targets were set related to these issues, to be achieved by 2015. However, there are concerns at the midway point that the targets will not be achieved.

Forty percent of world lacks clean water, solutions sought

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:49:16 -0400

The pictures — of children with sunken eyes and shriveled skin; oxen being herded across a river where women clean their clothes and fill their pitchers; an African villager sipping water from a shallow puddle — made the point like no words could at the May 11 Center for International Development symposium “The Impact of the Global Water Crisis on Health and Human Development” at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Still, the statistics were almost equally startling: More than a billion people worldwide lack safe water sources, and 2.6 billion — 40 percent of the world’s population — have no basic sanitation. Nearly 2 million people a year, 90 percent of them children under 5, die from dehydration and associated malnutrition and microbial diseases.

Global momentum for smoke-free society

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:02:54 -0400

In a perspective article in the April 12 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Association of European Cancer Leagues describe the growing momentum for indoor smoking bans in countries across the globe. They identify Ireland’s pioneering 2004 comprehensive indoor smoking ban as a likely tipping point for fundamental change in social norms and public health worldwide.

Since 2004, in only a few years, more than a dozen other countries have also adopted national indoor smoke-free policies that are being implemented or will be implemented in the near future.

Battling AIDS in Brazil: A message of hope

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:25:42 -0400

An upbeat conference on AIDS?

Hard to imagine, unless you'd attended "The Brazilian Response to AIDS" on March 22, sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

True, Brazil has had its share of AIDS deaths, but they are far less than expected in the early days of the epidemic. In the early 1990s, the World Bank predicted that by the year 2000, there would be 1.2 million people in Brazil infected with HIV. But by 2005, there were only 600,000 infected, and the death rate from AIDS has been stabilized at 6.3 per 1,000. Moreover, people living with AIDS receive far more effective, compassionate, and consistent care in Brazil than in almost any other country in the developing world.

Brugge, colleagues urge Senate to increase NIH funding

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:37:36 -0400

Testifying Monday afternoon (March 19) before a U.S. Senate committee hearing on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, Harvard Medical School Cell Biology Department Chair Joan S. Brugge warned that "four years of flat [NIH] funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research," threatening "the rapid progress in developing effective and less toxic treatments for the myriad different cancers."

Indonesia's strategies to fight bird flu run afoul of reality

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:50:11 -0400

If Indonesia is able to execute a comprehensive bird flu plan written by the government, it will take great strides toward controlling the outbreak in the sprawling island nation, a visiting professor who has studied the region said Friday (March 9).

Unfortunately, there's little chance of that happening.

"There's a level of rhetoric and a level of reality and an increasing gap between rhetoric and reality," said James Fox, visiting professor of Australian studies in Harvard's Anthropology Department.

Fox, visiting Harvard from Australian National University, delivered a grim assessment of the spread of bird flu throughout Indonesia, "The Course of Avian Flu in Indonesia: Implications and Possibilities," as part of the Asia Center's ongoing Modern Asia Series.

Current U.S. renewable energy goal too low, says head of national lab

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:34:55 -0400

The head of the U.S. government's renewable energy lab said Monday (Feb. 5) that the federal government is doing "embarrassingly few things" to foster renewable energy, leaving leadership to the states at a time of opportunity to change the nation's energy future.

Dan Arvizu, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Colorado-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said a brief opening exists to dramatically increase the energy generated from renewable sources in the coming decades, but said more resources and a national policy promoting renewable energy will be needed to make it come true.

Deep-sea sediments could safely store man-made carbon dioxide

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:13:59 -0400

An innovative solution for the man-made carbon dioxide fouling our skies could rest far beneath the surface of the ocean, say scientists at Harvard University. They've found that deep-sea sediments could provide a virtually unlimited and permanent reservoir for this gas that has been a primary driver of global climate change in recent decades, and estimate that seafloor sediments within U.S. territory are vast enough to store the nation's carbon dioxide emissions for thousands of years to come.

Investigating health disparities

50443248 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:46:49 -0400

Addressing health disparities is among the top priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said the agency's director Elias Zerhouni at the second of three Harvard symposia on April 14.
The symposia were convened by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) to involve high-ranking health officials from several countries.

"Health disparities research is something that truly we're just at the beginning of understanding and promoting and stimulating," said Zerhouni. "It will require an integrative approach."

In addition to Zerhouni, the talk featured speakers representing Canada, India, and the Americas. Former HSPH Dean and Harvard Provost Harvey Fineberg, who now heads the Institute of Medicine, served as discussant for a subsequent panel discussion.

People live longer at higher altitudes

50443248 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:14:19 -0400

The high life is a healthy life, at least in Greece.
Residents of a village at an altitude of 3,100 feet suffered fewer heart attacks and lived longer than people in two nearby lowland areas, researchers from Harvard and the University of Athens found. Their study followed 1,198 men and women for l5 years.

Although the mountain dwellers on average had higher blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and blood fats, they died from heart disease at less than half the rate of the lowlanders. Death rates were 61 percent lower for the men, 54 percent lower for the women.

Greater physical activity and adaptation to reduced oxygen levels at moderate and high altitudes are responsible for their longer lives, the scientists conclude.

Benefits of clean fuel in Africa would be enormous

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:18:41 -0400

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), finds that promoting cleaner, more efficient technologies for producing charcoal in Africa can save millions of lives and have significant climate change and development benefits. The findings appear in the April 1 issue of the journal Science.

HSPH examines government role in health disparities

50443248 — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:09:50 -0400

Health officials from Mexico, Sweden, England, and the United States compared notes on health reforms March 4 at a symposium designed to illuminate the role of government in addressing health disparities.
The event was the first in a series of three symposia this spring that will examine the issue of health disparities and government.

Harvard School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom said the symposia are designed to not only generate information, but to help devise a plan of action to address the problem of differences in health care quality and access among different groups.