Global Pulse Blog

The following infographic from USAID graphically illustrates the ways in which investments in females have wide-reaching and significant impacts.

In what ways do you think that investments in females can have an impact?

For the past 10 years, the Botswana-UPenn Partnership has been “building a healthy future together.”  This initiative between the Government of Botswana, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Botswana was originally formed in 2001 to build capacity in Botswana in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and has evolved to take a broad interdisciplinary approach to train health care personnel throughout Botswana, to develop medical training programs in Botswana, to form partnerships and joint research and clinical programs and to offer experiences in global health to trainees and faculty.

During the week of October 10-14, 2011, the Botswana-UPenn Partnership celebrated its ten year anniversary with events highlighting the past, present and future of the program. Check out the archives to learn more about this program, its history and where it is going!

Jennifer Staple-Clark’s Unite for Sight has put together a web-based curriculum to teach students and practitioners of “global health work” about the historical roots of their endeavors.  Though brief, it should help those new to the field to better understand past global health efforts so that they may learn to improve future ones.

According to a recent study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Indonesian children who were exposed to Jalan Sesama over a 14-week period had significantly improved literacy, mathematics, early cognitive skills, safety knowledge and social awareness than those children with no or lesser exposure to the Indonesian Sesame Street program. The study appears in the International Journal of Behavioral Development’s OnlineFirst collection for December 5, 2010 in anticipation of its upcoming print publication.

Jalan Sesama, Indonesia’s version of Sesame Street, is funded via the United States Agency for International Developmental via the Sesame Workshop. The television program employs live action, puppetry and animation to teach lessons on mathematics, literacy, culture, safety, environment and more in a culturally-sensitive manner utilizing visuals and characters which children can find in their local environment. Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelago and fourth most populous country in the world. Its 17,508 islands are strewn across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, straddling the Australian and Asian continents. This unique geographical situation has often presented a challenge to the creation of a common national voice. The creation of Jalan Sesama,which translates to “Togetherness Street” reflects this mentality as does the country’s national motto,“Bhinneka tunggal ika,” which translates loosely to “unity in diversity,” and more literally to “Although in pieces, yet one.”

Photographs from the Sesame Workshop Website

The authors of the current study, Dina L.G. Borzekowski, EdD, associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health, Behavior and Society and Holly K. Henry, a current doctoral student at the school, carried out a randomized research study examining the effect of a 14-week intervention on 160 children ages 3 to 6 years in the Pandeglang District of Indonesia’s Banten Province. The children were questioned regarding their skills and knowledge at the start and conclusion of the 14-week intervention. The authors found that the children with the greatest exposure to the television program performed better than those with less exposure when evaluating their literacy, early cognitive and mathematics skills even after adjusting for baseline scores, age, gender, parents’ education and exposure to other media.

This study’s lead author, Dr. Borzekowski, previously carried out a similar study which was published in July 2010 investigating the Tanzanian version of Sesame Street, Kilimani Sesame. Similar to the current study in Indonesia, this study concluded that Tanzanian children with the greatest exposure to the Sesame Street inspired television program showed the greatest gains in social, cognitive and health outcomes.

This past week an excellent discussion of important global health challenges and developments, including those related to the Millennium Development Goals, took place at the TEDx Change Meeting, “The Future We Make”. TEDx is a new program enabling local communities and organizations to organize, design and host their own independent events to discuss innovative and important ideas.

Check out the webcast from the recent “The Future We Make” meeting on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website for an engaging and insightful discussion of issues related to the Millennium Development Goals such as child mortality rates, birth rates, literacy, HIV/AIDS and more on a global level.

TEDxChange Webcast

In today’s guest post, recent medical graduate Laura Janneck, MD, MPH reflects on an elective course in social medicine she took in Uganda. Dr. Janneck is an AMSA alum, and now a resident in Emergency Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston. For further information about the course, see details below.

Over the course of my involvement in global health during medical school, I began to narrow my interests toward humanitarian assistance and global health delivery in post-conflict settings. Last year, during my fourth year of medical school, I participated in a new course on social medicine being taught in Gulu, northern Uganda, a region that is recently recovering from a 20 year civil conflict. This course, called Beyond the Biological Basis of Disease: The Social and Economic Causation of Illness was very well organized, with didactics on a range of topics from the health consequences of internal displacement, to the portrayal of Africans in the Western media. We also were able to spend time on the wards seeing patients with a range of diseases and syndromes common in the region. The keystone of this course, however, is the international student body. Half of the medical students study at Gulu University and hailed from around Uganda. The other half were American and European. This enabled fantastic discussions with different perspectives on the issues we were studying, and planted the seeds of long-term friendships between colleagues from around the world. I enjoyed my time there so much that I went back to Gulu for another clinical rotation later that semester.

If you have any questions about the course or are interested in applying, please email the course directors at: social.medicine@yahoo.com. Applications are due July 30, 2010.

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 →

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!

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.