international health policies in the news today 74

Dear Colleagues,

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Our unit takes his summer now, some are taking a break, others are in < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Vienna at the AIDS conference. Remember that if you are around they welcome you at the ITM booth (E-432). Still we’ll do our best to ensure a minimum service throughout the Northern hemisphere summer.

It’s not the summer holiday all around the globe though, the African Union will hold a summit next week in Kampala and some preconference meetings already started there. The topic for this summit: Maternal and child survival, sounds familiar topic for a summit this year.

Enjoy your reading.

David Hercot, Kristof Decoster, Basile Keugong, Josefien Van Olmen & Wim Van Damme

Summer Edition

1. Monitor – AU meet to find solutions to maternal and child deaths

http://www.monitor.co.ug/

This year’s African Union summit, to be held in Kampala next week will take maternal and child health as its theme. A concept note on this topic prepared for the preconference on gender is also available (50 Kb .doc)

2. Reuters – New global AIDS focus: careful budgets?

Maggie Fox; http://www.reuters.com/

UNAIDS published a new report ahead of the Vienna AIDS conference where they suggest that we move to a 2.0 treatment strategy which would be more effective. In times of crisis the motto is “do more with less”. They also highlight a drop in infection prevalence among young people in worst hit country. Is something happening that could show the way to prevent future generations from being infected?

3.Lancet – ART in low-resource settings: how to do more with less

Olivier Koole, Robert Colebunders; http://www.thelancet.com/

Authors discuss a paper published online this week in the Lancet about biological predictors of death among HIV patients receiving ARVs. They discuss the limits of the article on assessing HIV mortality and align the arguments why we should treat more and better HIV infected patients.

4.BMC – Scaling up health policies and services in low- and middle-income settings

Kara Hanson, Susan Cleary, Helen Schneider, Sripen Tantivess and Lucy Gilson; http://www.biomedcentral.com/

This editorial from a special issue of the BMC on Health System Research tries to untangle the hype around scaling up and sets avenues of research and attention from policy makers when speaking about scaling up. The rest of the series on scaling up in LMIC is also worth reading and is open access.

5.Owen – An important step towards aid transparency

Owen Barder; http://www.owen.org/

Not only does Owen Barder have good ideas he is also often at the right place. He recently attended a conference in Paris on aid transparency. Here he summarizes engagements taken by some donors, representing half of the aid worldwide, on improving transparency on data about aid flows.

6.Guardian – Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Andy Beckett; http://www.guardian.co.uk/

If you are looking for some summer reading, you can read this article depicting the Gates Foundation in the Guardian.

7.Oxford and UNDP launch a better way to measure poverty

Press release; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/INESCR/

Ahead of the 2010 Human development report, UNDP with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) of Oxford University launched “a new poverty measure that gives a “multidimensional” picture of people living in poverty”. They claim that this method will help allocate development resources more effectively.