Global Pulse Blog

This is a guest post by Leah Bevis and Alison Hayward, MD for Uganda Village Project, an IFMSA transnational project. There are many ways to get involved with UVP, including through summer internships. – Sujal Parikh

Naigaga Florence lives in Bulumwaki Village, a small, extremely rural community in eastern Uganda. A thin, toothless, but smiling old woman, we first sighted her at a village outreach – in her arms was the most malnourished child that any of us had ever seen. The child’s eyes were dull, his hair a few blondish wisps on a dry skull. His tiny limbs were mere bones draped in shriveled skin, and his head lolled on his neck as if about to fall off completely. His name was Alfred, and he suffered from severe malnutrition, since his mother had died and was unable to breastfeed him. Without breastmilk’s protection, babies in the rural villages of Uganda face a grim prognosis. They are fed a thin gruel of flour and water which provides hardly any calories, or the protein they need to grow.   Read the rest of this entry →

All cancers are due to abnormalities in DNA. A complete catalog of mutations in the DNA of the genes responsible for melanoma and lung cancer has recently been completed. Knowledge of these genes will allow earlier detection of the tumor as well as give scientists the ability to develop very specific drugs with the capability of targeting the individual mutated genes. This list will also allow scientists to decipher specific environmental factors for triggering these mutations.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium is made up of scientists from 10 countries, with each country designated to focus on cataloging all the possible mutations responsible for cancers of a specific area of the body. For example, UK is looking at breast cancer, Japan at liver and India at mouth, China is studying stomach cancer, and the US is looking at cancers of the brain, ovary and pancreas.

In its meeting yesterday, the board of UNITAID voted to approve the Patent Pool for HIV/AIDS drugs, opening the door for greater development and production of desperately needed antiretrovirals. Lowering intellectual property barriers on ARVs and allowing for the production and sales of generic versions of the drugs in resource-poor countries will help make the drugs affordable to the people who need them the most, and has the potential to save millions of lives. According to its sponsors, the Patent Pool could also save over $1,000,000,000 a year.

Want to know what the Patent Pool is all about? Read the very recent Global Pulse interview with Ellen ‘t Hoen, Senior Advisor for the Patent Pool at UNITAID.
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There has been significant concern over efforts by drug companies to keep middle-income countries out of the patent pool. If such limits are imposed, millions of impoverished HIV patients in India, China, and Brazil will remain unable to afford the drugs.

Read on for more on UNITAID, AIDS, intellectual property, and the Patent Pool.

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Britain’s Medical Research Council (MRC) announced that the Pro 2000, a vaginal microbicide gel, was ineffective in preventing the spread of HIV infection in a trial conducted in four African counties. PRO 2000 works by inhibiting the entry of HIV into cells .The trial was sponsored by the Microbicides Development Program (MDP), a not-for-profit partnership of 16 African and European research institutions took place between September 2005 and September 2009, involved 9,385 women .

Sheena McCormack, who led the trial, was disappointed in the results because a smaller trial held earlier, indicated that that the results for the current larger trial would be different from what they were. The smaller trial included more than 3,099 women and was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH. The sites include 6 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and one site in the United States. The results of the smaller trial were presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal, Canada in February. These results indicted that the Pro 2000 gel would reduce transmission rated by 30 %. Earliers this year, ENDO Pharmaceuticals purchased the PRO 2000 from Indevus Pharmaceuticals.

Currently, women make up half of all people worldwide living with HIV and in sub-Saharan Africa, women represent nearly 60 percent of adults living with HIV.

In most cases, women become infected with HIV through sexual intercourse with an infected male partner. Manufacturers were hoping that this microbicide would be a potential solution for hose whose partners refuse to use condoms and could have empowered women with a prevention method they could initiate. Even though this microbicide failed to prevent the spread of HIV, scientists have not given up hope, as here are currently dozens of microbicides being tested. A previous post on the Global Pulse Blog discusses the debates that have taken place about the role of microbicides on HIV prevention.

Living in Emergency Trailer from LivinginEmergency on Vimeo.

The critically acclaimed film documentary “Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders” is playing nationwide tomorrow evening in select theaters. News anchor Elizabeth Vargas will moderate a LIVE panel discussion with MSF frontline aid workers and award-winning journalists.

Between World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10), PHR is gathering 10,000 signatures asking the U.S. Senate to ratify the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in 2010.

Conceived as a “Bill of Rights for Women,” CEDAW sets a common international definition for gender-based discrimination, and establishes an agenda for ending it. States ratifying CEDAW are required to institutionalize gender equality through domestic legislation, repeal and replace all discriminatory provisions in their laws, and establish public institutions of recourse for women who require protection against discrimination.

Discrimination is bad. Women should have equal rights. Surely this is something we can agree on? Not so fast. Read further for the controversial stuff. Read the rest of this entry →

The editors of Global Pulse would like to thank The Lancet Student and Speaking of Medicine for featuring our latest issue. We’re proud to work with these great groups, and we’re always looking to collaborate and share with other journals and student organizations. If you’re interested in collaborating with Global Pulse, please email me at sparikh [at] globalpulsejournal.com.

Medical students from the University of Michigan gathered yesterday for World AIDS Day to rally Representative John Dingell’s support regarding several key issues surrounding global health and health care reform. Students sang modified versions of Christmas carols, whose words were replaced with language describing the necessity of: 1) accessible and affordable essential medicines for HIV/AIDS patients worldwide and 2) continued backing of PEPFAR, which currently only has $366 million of the $48 billion as promised by former President George W. Bush in 2008.

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The new issue of GP is up and running just in time for World AIDS Day!

New in this issue:

Get tested to know your HIV status.