End the Neglect

Blogging on behalf of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases

Archive for the ‘Global Development’ category

NTD Reading Breakfast.

May 23rd, 2011

Greetings from End the Neglect!

Learn something new; Catch up with happenings around the world; Supplement your coffee with some of our reading suggestions below!

Germany’s dedication to fighting neglected and rare diseases

Diseases that mainly affect the world’s poorest are often neglected by research in industrialized nations, as they are not particularly relevant to highly developed countries.

Understanding the ins and outs of Economics towards an improved global vitality

One cost of the uproar over Greg Mortenson, and the allegations that he fictionalized his school-building story in the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, is likely to be cynicism about whether aid makes a difference.

Why are more than 1 billion people hungry in the world? Is it true?

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger.

Local Production of Drugs can be beneficial to global health system development.

Events shaping the global pharmaceutical industry provide an unprecedented opportunity for the least developed countries (LDCs) to attract investment in the pharmaceutical sector, including from other developing countries [...]

China’s Three Gorges Dam has ‘urgent’ environmental problems

Environmental deterioration in the Three Gorges Dam region of China is forcing the government to acknowledge “urgent problems” which include landslides, seismic activity, relocations of citizens, and biodiversity loss.

ENJOY!

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Posted in brain food, Global Development, Global Health, NTDs, pharmaceuticals, Public Health, social welfare, socio-economics, Tropical Medicine

The True Size of Africa

May 19th, 2011

Came across this awesome infographic via GOOD. Click on the image to view it larger.

In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as “immappacy,” meaning insufficient geographical knowledge.

A survey of random American schoolkids let them guess the population and land area of their country. Not entirely unexpected, but still rather unsettling, the majority chose “1-2 billion” and “largest in the world,” respectively.

Even with Asian and European college students, geographical estimates were often off by factors of 2-3. This is partly due to the highly distored nature of the predominantly used mapping projections (such as Mercator).

A particularly extreme example is the worldwide misjudgment of the true size of Africa. This single image tries to embody the massive scale, which is larger than the USA, China, India, Japan, and all of Europe … combined!

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Posted in Africa, Global Development, Interactive tools

Tags: infographic media news research

Carter Center Health Programs and Partners Celebrate Record Progress, 35.8 Million Treatments in Fight Against Neglected Tropical Diseases in 2010

March 30th, 2011

By The Carter Center

The Carter Center’s health programs enabled a record 35.8 million treatments in 2010 to protect against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in thousands of communities in some of the most remote and forgotten places in Africa and the Americas.

Since 1986, The Carter Center has been a leader in the control, elimination, and eradication of neglected diseases, working at the grassroots in partnership with ministries of health and low-resource communities to conduct health education and mass drug administration, and to develop health service infrastructure. The Carter Center’s 10 health programs are data-driven and seek to help fill gaps in health care, looking for opportunities to eliminate or eradicate diseases wherever possible, and to control diseases that cannot be completely eliminated. Center disease interventions currently address Guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis, and malaria.

The Carter Center conducts rigorous annual peer reviews and evaluations in conjunction with ministries of health from 14 countries and other partner organizations.

“We don’t just rely on increased treatment numbers to tell us our efforts are working to improve health. The Carter Center uses evidence-based practices to carefully evaluate whether our interventions are significantly reducing the burden of disease,” said Dr. Donald Hopkins, vice president of the Carter Center’s Health Programs.

The 2010 statistics confirm dramatic improvements in public health achieved as a direct result of the Center’s disease efforts in partner countries.

2010 Achievements

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Posted in Global Development, Global Health, NTDs, Tropical Medicine, Vaccine Diplomacy

Pilot Case Study: Do Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) Improve access to pharmaceuticals in Uganda?

March 25th, 2011

Check out this interesting recent pilot study from the Initiative for Public-Private Partnerships for Health, a research initiative out of the Global Forum for Health Research, whose goal is to improve public-private collaborations for health.

The UK Department for International Development (DFID) funded the Initiative on Public-Private Partnerships for Health (IPPPH)1 to conduct a pilot study in Uganda to assess the health and health systems impact of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for improving access to pharmaceuticals in relation to leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, sleeping sickness, and HIV/AIDS. The specific remit was to examine issues of ownership, integration, coordination, implementation and impact, with a particular focus on the unique strengths and problems of these access PPPs as distinct from other comparable programs where drugs are competitively procured. Fieldwork visits were made to five districts in Uganda –Hoima, Kampala, Katakwi, Masaka and Soroti – selected on the basis of active implementation of the PPP programs [...]