West Africa’s fight to contain Ebola has hampered the campaign against malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that is claiming many thousands more lives than the dreaded virus. From the AP:
In Gueckedou, near the village where Ebola first started killing people in Guinea’s tropical southern forests a year ago, doctors say they have had to stop pricking fingers to do blood tests for malaria.
Guinea’s drop in reported malaria cases this year by as much as 40 percent is not good news, said Dr. Bernard Nahlen, deputy director of the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative. He said the decrease is likely because people are too scared to go to health facilities and are not getting treated for malaria.
“It would be a major failure on the part of everybody involved to have a lot of people die from malaria in the midst of the Ebola epidemic,” he said in a telephone interview. “I would be surprised if there were not an increase in unnecessary malaria deaths in the midst of all this, and a lot of those will be young children.”
Figures are always estimates in Guinea, where half the 12 million people have no access to health centers and die uncounted. Some 15,000 Guineans died from malaria last year, 14,000 of them children under five, according to Nets for Life Africa, a New York-based charity dedicated to providing insecticide-treated mosquito nets to put over beds. In comparison, about 1,600 people in Guinea have died from Ebola, according to statistics from the World Health Organization.
Malaria is the leading cause of death in children under five in Guinea and, after AIDS, the leading cause of adult deaths, according to Nets for Life.
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Global Health and Development Beat
Rescuers in Malaysia are struggling to reach thousands of people affected by the country’s worst flooding in three decades to deliver food and medical aid.
Researchers reported at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, CA on a satellite-based cholera outbreak prediction model in which specific environmental factors are correlated with epidemic cholera outbreaks.
In an effort to reduce the spread of dengue fever, a team of developers in Costa Rica have created a free app to allow the public to easily report the standing water that acts as mosquito hatcheries, and allow the government to quickly spray these areas with pesticides.
Haiti now has two new clinics, open-air, modest in size and cost, designed to tackle diseases that can be as insidious and deadly as Ebola, but are also more common: cholera and tuberculosis, reports the New York Times.
A consumer organization and an anonymous HIV/AIDS patient are suing Aetna in federal court, claiming the insurer discriminates against people with HIV/AIDS by requiring them to buy medications through the mail starting Jan. 1.
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine researchers have received a $5.67 million grant to continue research with and clinical trials of patients with HIV/AIDS.
A mobile application created by some of the world’s leading technology companies, such as Facebook, Nokia and Samsung, is giving Africans free access to websites with medical advice, educational tools, job vacancies and local news.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
A lot of people decried that things were going wrong in 2014, says Paul Krugaman. But a lot of things went right. He points to the way the US dealt with Ebola as an example in his New York Times column:
2014 was a year in which the federal government, in particular, showed that it can do some important things very well if it wants to.
Start with Ebola, a subject that has vanished from the headlines so fast it’s hard to remember how pervasive the panic was just a few weeks ago. Judging from news media coverage, especially but not only on cable TV, America was on the verge of turning into a real-life version of “The Walking Dead.” And many politicians dismissed the efforts of public health officials to deal with the disease using conventional methods. Instead, they insisted, we needed to ban all travel to and from West Africa, imprison anyone who arrived from the wrong place, andclose the border with Mexico. No, I have no idea why anyone thought that last item made sense.
As it turned out, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some early missteps, knew what they were doing, which shouldn’t be surprising: The Centers have a lot of experience in, well, controlling disease, epidemics in particular. And while the Ebola virus continues to kill many people in parts of Africa, there was no outbreak here.
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Capital Events
Happy New Year!
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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