Global Pulse Blog

Many news articles have been written recently on the increase in the prevalence in chronic diseases across the globe.  Rapid economic development is seen as one possible cause of the swift spread of chronic diseases in the developing world.

Let’s take the increase in the prevalence of Diabetes Type II for example. China has nearly 250 million and India has about 50 million people with Diabetes and prediabetes.  It is estimated that by 2030, 366 million or 6% or the world’s population will have Diabetes. This condition has two different modes of contraction, one for the wealthy, mainly being obesity resulting from over-nutrition, and another for the poor via changes in the amount of exercise and diet that once consisted mainly of vegetables but now has switched to foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat.    The change of diet is a direct result of the increase in the numbers of people moving from villages to cities in search of work.  A study found that the influence of urbanization and change of living habits have a greater influence than genetic predisposition for  determining whether a person develops Diabetes Type II, these migrants were twice more likely to have hypertension and to have higher blood sugar than villagers.

Read the rest of this entry →

Global Health Watch 3
Examining the World’s Health from an Alternative Perspective
Call for Case Studies and Testimonies
Contribute to the Alternative World Health Report

The Global Health Watch provides a platform for activists  to share experiences and inform each other with practical examples and theoretical analyses  to strengthen local, national, regional and global campaigns towards  Health for All!

This is a great way to get involved with the People’s Health Movement from a research/academic standpoint.

How you can voice your views:

The Global Health Watch is putting out a call for the submission of country or region specific case studies and testimonies. These case studies and testimonies will form part of the electronic platform of the alternative world health and selected case studies shall also be incorporated into the final document of Global Health Watch 3 – scheduled for publication in 2011.

Some suggestions: Read the rest of this entry →

Though a few days late, let us ponder again the far reaching implications of our actions on the health of the earth body and human body… After all, Earth day is every day! Our current era of post-industrial-post-modern living (in many “developed” nations) is defined by a certain standard of living that is accompanied by serious costs and consequences that wander far beyond geographic and political borders. For a list of health conditions please see John’s excellent Earth Day post).

Two great studies sponsored by NASA explore the relationship between atmospheric conditions and human health. NASA has teamed up with researchers from Emory to measure particulate matter concentrations (PM 2.5) in smoke and haze via satellite in order to better document the link between environmental hazards and disease. The second study combines the technological resources of NASA with health researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to analyze the effect of the environment on cardiovascular disease in African Americans living in the “Stroke Belt.” Results from this six year NIH-funded investigation, called Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS), have been integrated into the CDC WONDER database.

A few days ago, Senator John Kerry urged the public and congress to move forward with legislation to tackle climate change. Today’s proposed unveiling of the new senate bill was delayed largely in part due to a shift in priorities from energy reform to immigration reform. Though this announcement sent Senator Graham packing, let us hope that the reality of the situation remains impetus enough for swift action.

Oren Lyons, a member of the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy and indigenous rights activist, imparts the Haudenosaunee thought that decision-making should be guided by the welfare of the seventh generation to come. The below quotation from Lyons eloquently captures wisdom of indigenous inhabitants of North America:

We say that the faces of coming generations are looking up from the earth. So when you put your feet down, you put them down very carefully – because there are generations coming one after the other. If you think in these terms, then you’ll walk a lot more carefully, be more respectful of this earth (Lyons 1995).

Corporate machines, government and individuals should take this advice, and think long term. If respect for our home doesn’t change policy or opinion, the gathering scientific evidence linking environmental conditions and health should: it is in everyone’s best interest to preserve our home for our health.

Join Commit in September @ commitinseptember.com

This is my first blog post on the Global Pulse Blog.  My name is Sam Vaghar and I manage the Millennium Campus Network (www.mcnpartners.org), a national non-profit network of university student organizations working to reduce extreme poverty and achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals.  The network spans 17 campuses across four cities and counts Dr. Paul Farmer, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, and musician John Legend among its Board of Advisors.

I’ll save an explanation of my passion for student activism for another time.

Right now I want to invite you to add your name at www.commitinseptember.com, a new national petition to President Obama and Congress urging action on the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  We have put in specific asks on global education, global health, and long-term development in Haiti.  Our goal is to generate 25,000 signatures by the end of July and present them to White House and Congressional staff ahead of the UN MDGs Summit this September.

Why this matters: This generation is passionate about global health and development.  When you walk onto most college campuses, you will find a student organization (or five!) committed to raising awareness, fundraising, or engaging in service work overseas in solidarity with the world’s poorest communities.  But our leaders in Washington aren’t always aware of our generation’s passion.  Commit in September is one powerful way for all of us to show them what we stand for. We are calling on students to partner with us this year, signing the national petition, writing a letter to the editor, becoming a Campaign Ambassador (visit the site for info.), and joining with us, the United Nations Foundation, 1,000 peers and leading advocates at our conference this September at Columbia University on the eve of the UN MDGs Summit.

Together, our generation can build a grassroots movement for global development.  But we’ve got to get personal, reach out across our networks, and use all means available to create both social and political change.  I know many members of AMSA are leading the charge for global health equity, and I hope you will partner with us in this effort.  Please leave a comment so I can connect with you in the days and weeks ahead!

PS- It is a real pleasure to be joining this blog community.  I have been impressed by AMSA’s commitment, particularly in the advocacy arena, and the opportunity to connect with all of you means so much to me.  Hana, thanks for the invite!

Some exciting news to share: Global Pulse Blog is now syndicated on MedPedia’s News & Analysis section!  About MedPedia:

The Medpedia Project is a long-term, worldwide project to evolve a new model for sharing and advancing knowledge about health, medicine and the body among medical professionals and the general public. This model is founded on providing a free online technology platform that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and transparent. [Read more.]

As a fellow organization that believes in open-access publishing, peer review, and online innovation, we applaud MedPedia’s work, and are proud to be part of it.  If you have a Medpedia profile, we invite you to check out ours, follow our blog and join our discussions!

Gaia by Alex Grey

Only 40 years ago, the image of our planet as a fragile blue ball in space inspired the first Earth Day.  Though people today are more aware than ever of the need to take care of the environment, challenges remain. Here at Global Pulse, we wanted to bring together stories of innovation and help increase awareness of the health aspects of environmentalism. On that note, Framing Science put together an excellent post on the inter-agency NIH report on the human health impacts of climate change, which range across a variety of health disciplines including:

• Asthma, respiratory allergies, and airway diseases
• Cancer
• Cardiovascular disease and stroke
• Foodborne diseases and nutrition
• Heat-related morbidity and mortality
• Human developmental effects
• Mental health and stress-related disorders
• Neurological diseases and disorders
• Waterborne diseases
• Weather-related morbidity and mortality
• Vectorborne and zoonotic diseases (like malaria, which can be transmitted from animals to humans)

One key aspect to addressing these challenges will be to re-invent farming to feed the future population, projected to hit 9 billion people by 2050, while at the same time preserving ecosystems. In the past decade, humanity past the point where over 50% of our population lives in urban areas, making cities vital to ensuring the future health of the planet and her people. The second great epidemiological revolution succeeded in part by controlling the health of our water,. Innovative architect Manit Rastogi plans to do the same for Delhi by transforming the polluted network of Nullahs (sewage laden stream) into a pedestrian and cycling network by using bio-remediation embankments. In San Francisco, newly launched Urban Forest Map is helping citizens take care of their city trees via the web.

As future medical professionals, many of us often cringe at the amount of waste generated by laboratories in the service of medicine and research. Oscillator gives a personal touch to this and shows a few simple ways to reduce waste in the lab while the EPA and DOE are busy designing the green lab of tomorrow.

The following is a guest post by Farheen Qurashi, AMSA’s Jack Rutledge Legislative Director 2009-2010.

U.S. student activists

Just a few days ago, we celebrated World Health Day – the progress we’ve made in providing aid to patients around the world, the diseases prevented and the treatments admitted. But, we still have a long way to go, and as we celebrated, we also remembered that there is much to accomplish and continue in global health aid.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Barbara Lee (CA-9^th) introduced HR 4933, the Global HEALTH Act of 2010. This is a key piece of legislation that makes bounds towards creating a comprehensive and integrated global health aid strategy, focusing on strengthening health systems of developing countries to provide comprehensive primary to tertiary care as well as expanding the vital health care workforce – including doctors, nurses, midwives and community health workers—in needy areas. There is a dire international shortage of all kinds of health workers, and this is a bottleneck to providing sustainable and adequate care to patient populations – strengthening the health workforce is a key part of strengthening an overall health system.

Importantly, the Global HEALTH Act:

• Creates the Global Health Workforce Initiative, which emphasizes training, retention, and support for needed health workers
• Mandates the creation of a multi-year, in-depth strategy for health systems strengthening, and authorizes necessary support for this strategy
• Ensures country-ownership and accountability to health strategies
• Authorizes support for health strategies to ensure the swift achievement of US global health goals
• Prioritizes the needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations like women and girls, sex workers, etc.

On the cusp of the US’s own health system reform movement, we must also remember our patients in need around the world. The Global HEALTH Act makes a much-needed and bold step forward for global health aid, and AMSA is proudly one of its original supporters, along with Physicians for Human Rights, Health Alliance International, Health GAP (Global AIDS Project), and other organizations.

The Global HEALTH Act, HR 4933, is currently awaiting discussion in the Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committees of the House of Representatives. For the ideas within the bill to receive recognition, support, and success, we must ask our Congressmen to show their support by co-sponsoring the legislation.

To send your Congressman a message, click here.

To find out more about the Global HEALTH Act, click here.

To read the full text of the bill, click here.

This is the second in a series of posts for the American Public Health Association’s National Public Health Week.

Today, Wednesday April 7th marks World Health Day 2010. This year, the UN Secretary-General’s Message for World Health Day centers on the theme of urbanization and health with the campaign “1000 cities – 1000 lives.” The theme of Urban Health was chosen in the setting of a world in which the majority of the population is living in urban versus rural areas for the first time in history. At the same time, poverty is also shifting from sparsely-populated rural areas to urban areas especially in developing countries.

Disparities in people’s income, opportunities, living conditions and access to services along with numerous threats to public health including inadequate sanitation and refuse collection; industrial and traffic pollution; infectious diseases that thrive on squalor and crowded conditions; high rates of tobacco use; physical inactivity; unhealthy diets; crime, violence and the use of harmful substances are complex issues depending not only on public health measures but also social policy and governmental structures.

Source: Wikipedia

This is the first in a series of posts for the American Public Health Association’s National Public Health Week.

Most of us associate biodiversity with images of tropical rain forests and coral reefs. While these ecological hot-spots are an important source of medications and global ecosystem services, biodiversity also plays a key role in neighborhoods across the US through regulating the spread of diseases such as Lyme disease. But how is that possible, you might ask, and what can you do about it?

Lyme disease  affects hundreds of thousands of people across the US, with a greater concentration in the northeast. Recent decades have seen an explosion of urban sprawl across the northeast leading to decreased species diversity along with people living in close proximity to fragmented habitats.  But how are these related?

The connection is explained succinctly in Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity:

“The Blacklegged Tick (Ixodes scapularis) is the vector of Lyme disease, as well as of several other pathogens in the eastern U.S., and the primary reservoir for Lyme disease in this region is a common rodent, the White-Footed Mouse (Peromyscus leucopus)…Mice live in many different habitats, from pristine old-growth forest to degraded woodlots, garden sheds, and even kitchens. Several studies have demonstrated that populations of White-Footed Mice become very concentrated in small forest fragments, probably due to the absence of other vertebrate species that prey upon, or compete with them (forest fragmentation…affects predators over prey disproportionately). As a consequence, tick populations in small forest fragments have many White-Footed Mice, but few other mammalian hosts on which to feed, resulting in a high proportion of the ticks being infected and able to infect people. In contrast, in more extensively forested areas, the combination of fewer White-Footed Mice and more abundant, alternative, reservoir-incompetent hosts (an incompetent reservoir for Lyme does not pass on the Lyme bacteria to ticks that bite them, or does so poorly) results in a lower proportion of the tick population being infected.”

This phenomenon is known as the Dilution Effect: As species richness declines there is a subsequent decrease in the “dilution” of host-species making Lyme disease easier to spread. As the authors note, the dilution effect is not unique to Lyme, the same mechanism also operates in Hantavirus and West Nile Virus and possibly many others. As sprawl-based development patterns spread to more areas of the planet, we can only expect to see an increase in the number of dilution effect diseases unleashed upon populations worldwide.

So how can you increase biodiversity in your community and thereby help protect the health of your family and neighbors?

Get involved with your local conservation commission and bring these dangers to their attention. Find ways to support local parks and nature preserves. Also, if you have a yard or garden, try to plant local species that help support wildlife.  Most importantly: Education! If you are in college or school, talk to your professors about integrating awareness of biodiversity into curriculum.  Thanks to the UN and various donors, Sustaining Life is available at a very affordable price and can serve as a great textbook without placing a great financial burden on students. In addition, local schools can serve as great sources of biodiversity through gardens and planting of local species on grounds. Often these locals are less expensive to maintain, requiring less water and fertilizer.

These are just some ideas…we’d love to hear from GP readers with their experiences and success stories.