Kaci Hickox, a nurse who recently returned from working with MSF in Sierra Leone, will get to return to her Maine home for the remainder of her forced quarantine. From the New York Times:
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, in a brief interview, said that he expected the nurse, Kaci Hickox, to be transferred Monday morning after doctors and federal officials signed off on the plan.
The details of how she would be transferred and the protocols she will follow in Maine have yet to be worked out.
“She will remain subject to New Jersey’s mandatory quarantine order while in New Jersey,” the state’s health department said in a statement. “Health officials in Maine have been notified of her arrangements and will make a determination under their own laws on her treatment when she arrives.”
The nurse’s treatment has drawn withering criticism from both public health officials and the nurse herself.
After landing at Newark Liberty International Airport, a forehead scanner showed Ms. Hickox had a temperature of 101, which prompted the concern as fever is a symptom of the Ebola virus. Ms. Hickox later said that the reading came because she was flushed and upset. A later reading by an oral thermometer recorded a normal temperature of 98.6.
Since Friday, she has been kept at University Hospital in Newark, in an isolation tent with a portable toilet, but no shower or television.
“I’m hopeful that this morning if all goes well we’ll be able to release her and send her back to Maine,” Mr. Christie said.
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Global Health and Development Beat
At least 70 teenage girls and boys have been kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria’s Borno and Adamawa states since Oct. 18, say local government officials.
With hundreds of advanced infection-control hospital rooms left over from the fight against SARS, and with some medical professionals suggesting that the Ebola virus was inherently fragile and unlikely to spread in places with modern medical facilities, many doctors in Asia paid little attention to the disease until very recently.
A look into a groundbreaking clinic in South Africa and how it is helping men deal with HIV.
A campaign to vaccinate 21 million children against measles and rubella in Tanzania is part of one of the largest public health interventions in the east African country. As well as immunising against rubella and measles, health workers are distributing vitamin A supplements and deworming tablets, and treating children and adults for neglected tropical diseases, such as elephantiasis.
Global development lenders, including the World Bank, African Development Bank and European Union, pledged more than $8 billion on Monday to boost economic growth and reduce poverty in eight countries in the Horn of Africa.
Colorado State University’s Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing and Academic Resource Center has been awarded $2 million by the U.S. Department of Defense to aid in the development and manufacturing of a vaccine to protect against infection by filoviruses, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses.
The CDC and Pentagon are both training “go-teams” that can be on the ground within days of an Ebola diagnosis in the U.S. Team members learn about containing infection and dealing with the stress, but it’s unclear how these crews will work with each other.
Governments must avoid doing anything to deter desperately needed health workers from coming to West Africa to fight Ebola, the head of the U.N. mission battling the virus said on Monday, adding that quarantine decisions must not be based on hysteria.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
The reproductive health discussion should also include sexual satisfaction and pleasure, says Chloe Safier, Regional Gender Lead for Oxfam in Southern Africa, in the From Poverty to Power blog. She writes:
Narrow assumptions about the enjoyment of sex have harmful effects on cisgender heterosexual men, too, who can be limited by a generalized norm in which a man’s sexual satisfaction is assumed to revolve around ejaculation. Although it’s not equally comparable to the experience of women and LGBTQI people, some men are bound by restrictive constructs of masculinity that prohibit knowing and expressing their sexual wants and needs.
A revised approach to sex within the international development community would make the link between sexual pleasure and power dynamics, choice, health, and rights. It would account for the realities of people’s holistic (and sometimes pleasurable) sexual lives, and further, move beyond the gender binary of women and men. We must acknowledge that our sexual selves, experiences and choices do not exist in a vacuum and are linked to issues of class, race, norms, caste, sexual and gender identity and expression, and other forms of privilege and exclusion.
Perhaps inspired by the aforementioned dinner conversation, the issue of sexual satisfaction (even the right to an orgasm) came up over the next days of the country strategy process. Not surprisingly, it provoked a critical debate and even challenges as to whether we should talk about such an issue at all in our Oxfam meeting.
great sexThere was no clear resolution, but at least there was conversation about what sexual and reproductive health and rights really mean – and what we can talk about in spaces where we bring together many people from diverse cultural backgrounds around the shared cause of improving people’s lives. Feminists and women’s rights activists and their organizations have been talking about and working on this issue for ages, and it’s time to take the conversation up in other spaces too.
Ignoring that people have – and enjoy – sex diminishes the full reality of people’s experiences and relationships. If the development and donor communities, could shift their conversations around sexual and reproductive health and rights, empowerment, and gender to include the people’s whole sexual lives, we’d all be better off.
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Capital Events
Tuesday
9:00 AM – Brazil’s Presidential Elections: Interpreting the Results – Atlantic Council
9:30 AM – Innovations to End Violence Against Women: The Unique Approach to the UN Trust Fund – SID
12:30 PM – Liberia: Challenges to Managing the Ebola Outbreak – GMU
Wednesday
12:00 PM – Challenges for Journalism in Latin America – Freedom House
6:30 PM – What 6 Billion People Think: The Gallup World Poll – Young Professionals in FP
Thursday
12:00 PM – Education Innovations in Pakistan: A Look at DFID Programs – SID
Friday
11:00 AM – Cultural Adaptation and Translation in Autism Research: Global Perspectives – Elliot School
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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Disclaimer: Opinions presented in this email do not necessarily reflect the views of PSI.
