Global Health Progress

Worldwide malaria deaths may be almost twice as high as previously estimated, a study reports.

An Indian girl between the ages of one and five years old is 75 percent more likely to die than an Indian boy, giving the country the worst gender differential in child mortality in the world, according to new data released by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the Times of India reports.

Today, 13 pharmaceutical companies, the U.S., U.K. and U.A.E governments, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and other global health organisations announced a new, coordinated push to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by the end of the decade.

Significant progress in reducing under-five mortality is expected to continue beyond the self-imposed deadline of about 189 countries that committed to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by year 2015.

Novartis Foundation on Sustainable Development (NFSD) has donated $60 million worth of multidrug therapy (MDT) for leprosy.

Please join Global Health Progress (@GlobalHealth) in their upcoming conversation (Jan. 30/31) with authors and global health experts Dr. Peter Singer and Dr. Abdallah Daar as they discuss the grandest challenge – global health progress.

Counterfeit or weakened versions of life-saving antimalarial drugs are making the rounds in Africa, potentially putting millions of lives at risk and encouraging drug resistance, say scientists.

Maurice Dubois (CBS News) takes a look at how Haiti’s peanut crop is saving lives and creating new economic opportunities with help from Abbott Laboratories and Partners in Health.

The Chinese drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the greatest advances in fighting malaria, the scourge of the tropics, since the discovery of quinine centuries ago. Artemisinin’s discovery is being talked about as a candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

This morning brought a victory in humanity’s battle against the germs that surround us, infect us, and define our history: polio virus appears to have been eliminated from India, one of only four nations in which the disease that paralyzed Franklin Delano Roosevelt is still endemic.