Global Health Progress

In part seven of our series about Dr. Geelhoed’s first medical mission of 2009, the doctor turns bid farewell in Nairobi to the group he worked with in Africa and heads eastward to rendezvous with a fresh crew in the Philippines.

Friday, April 24, 2009: African health delegates traveled to Boston, Massachusetts, where they visited an award-winning AstraZeneca research and development facility and later met with the Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach.

April 25th was World Malaria Day. The mosquito-borne disease is still one of the biggest killers in developing countries with a death toll of a million each year. But there’s an international push for a multi-front war on malaria, ranging from cheap and effective bed netting to the development of a vaccine. The Gates Foundation has bet on vaccines, but is also funding less conventional scientific approaches.

Nestle today announced three new company initiatives aimed at creating new partnerships with governments, NGOs and small enterprises. The announcement comes as Nestle launches a two-day forum on Creating Shared Value in New York in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Partnerships and the Mission of Switzerland to the United Nations. The initiatives include an expanded education programme focused on nutrition, health and wellness for school age children around the world, a research and development centre in Africa, and a new Nestle Prize in Creating Shared Value, awarded every other year to foster innovative approaches to solve problems of nutrition, water and rural development.

The World Bank is set to triple healthcare spending in developing countries to $3.1 billion this year amid signs governments are cutting funding in the midst of a global economic crisis.

A new World Bank report said it would increase its healthcare funding from $1 billion last year, with evidence already that some governments are facing difficulties in affording HIV/AIDS drug therapies.

The Foundation will feature distinguished awardees and alumni of the program, who will speak about their groundbreaking discoveries in the area of translational cancer research.

The Annual Conference on Vaccine Research provides highquality, current reports of scientific progress featured in both invited presentations and submitted abstracts.

The 12th World Congress on Public Health will bring together leaders from across the globe to discuss important issues and to bring together the strengths of developing and developed countries.

April 25

World Malaria Day is a day of unified commemoration of the global effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world. This year’s World Malaria Day marks a critical moment in time. The international malaria community has merely two years to meet the 2010 targets of delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria, as called for by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.

In spite of intensive education on HIV/AIDS over the past decade, recent research conducted by UNESCO suggests that the spread is on the ascendancy. Globally there are about 5.4 million young people living with the virus. This was made known at a four-day workshop dubbed, ‘Educational Planning and Management in a World with AIDS’ in Accra recently. 30 participants from West African English-speaking countries – Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Gambia – attended the workshop.