For Sale: Lethal Malaria Drugs
Published February 09, 2010 @ 09:49AM PT
Imagine that you head up a nonprofit working in Madagascar, Senegal or Uganda. You've got a great mission statement, an enthusiastic set of donors, and you're making great strides in fighting malaria on the ground. In your last year, you managed to raise a ton of money and have treated 1,000 patients.
Except that, unwittingly, you gave them drugs that don't actually work.
It sounds nightmarish, but that's the situation that plenty of doctors and aid workers easily find themselves in. Poor-quality and counterfeit drugs -- most originating in China or India -- are rife within markets across Africa. In fact, a new study backed by USAID and the World Health Organization found that 26 to 44% of artemisinin-based malaria drugs sold in Madagascar, Senegal and Uganda failed quality testing outright.
And we're not talking about sugar pills masquerading as the real thing, either. In some ways, that actually might be less damaging. No, these pills have some curative properties -- just not consistent or particularly powerful ones -- and are riddled with impurities, too. And with patients getting spotty dosage levels, the spread of such pills may actually be fueling a virulent, drug-resistant strain of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum.
When 'Charity' in Haiti Kills Children
Published February 09, 2010 @ 06:05AM PT
It's gotten even worse. Okay, we knew that the case of the misguided 10 Baptist missionaries was a sideshow with the maddening ability to vacuum up an excessive number of media hits. But now, it turns out, the case has become something of a main event in its own right -- in fact, it's literally killing children.
That's right. Since the missionaries were arrested last month, the misbegotten travails of ringleader Laura Silsby & co. have had a chilling effect on doctors, aid workers and government officials (you know, the people who have a legitimate mission in helping Haiti with the recovery process) trying to save the lives of critically injured Haitian kids.
Now, the New York Times is reporting that 10 children have died or become worse while waiting for authorization from newly skittish authorities to get on flights out of the country for treatment.
Prior to the Americans' arrest, every day, an average of 15 injured Haitian children were getting airlifted out of Haiti onto U.S.-bound flights. Since Silsby & co. bobbed onto the scene, though, only three children have been evacuated for treatment in the U.S. on private flights. Something about the sight of Americans getting tossed into jail for taking kids out of the country without the proper paperwork has effectively discouraged others from putting kids aboard planes.
Behind Haiti's Orphan Crisis, Government Neglect
Published February 08, 2010 @ 11:24AM PT
Thanks to the much-ballyhooed case of missionaries who went kid-snatching in Haiti, the plight of Haiti's orphans has gotten a lot more press in recent days. Not very discriminate coverage, though -- more of the shallow, headline-grabby variety. Which is why it's so refreshing to see the Stars and Stripes taking a deeper dive for readers in their latest story.
Prior to the earthquake, Save the Children estimated there were 380,000 Haitian children living in orphanages. And since the earthquake, the number of children who've lost their parents has more than doubled.
Long before the Jan. 12 earthquake, children in Haiti were often commodified by their poverty -- trafficked for labor, sold on the black market to adoptive parents, or driven into servitude. And, as the S&S writes, long before the latest gaggle of Baptists trooped into Haiti to stir up some headlines, there was an extensive history of missionaries behaving badly, as well.
In Haiti, Aiding the Aid Workers
Published February 08, 2010 @ 09:36AM PT
For a small nonprofit seeking to assist disaster recovery efforts in Haiti, where do you start? With 200,000 tents needed, rampant sanitation issues and 460,000 people living in makeshift camps, the prospect of setting a spade down anywhere can seem overwhelming.
That's why the nonprofit HELP seeks to target its efforts on one group that's frequently mentioned in the news, but whose needs are less-talked about: aid workers. As director Randy Roberson tells Change.org, "In disasters, the immediate victims aren't the only ones. By helping relief teams sustain their efforts for greater periods of time, we can support efforts to provide more aid to everyone."
After working on the ground in Haiti for two weeks, Roberson says he's seen workers easily fall prey to their environment. Members of the Mexican relief team who had to be aerovaced back home, for example -- victims, he says, of the trauma that they'd experienced after spending days digging bodies out of the rubble. He also describes relief teams whose efforts are jeopardized by lack of food and resources, as well as extreme dehydration. "Conditions are terribly harsh -- it's very hot and humid, and some teams aren't used to that. There's the challenge of contaminated water, which makes dehydration worse. And because people are working in large amounts of wreckage, without antibiotics, even a relatively small wound can become life-threatening pretty quickly."
Why Less Funding for HIV/AIDS Isn't as Bad as It Seems
Published February 06, 2010 @ 12:42PM PT
When the White House announced its 2011 budget this past week, the response among the HIV/AIDS community to the 9% increase in global health funding was, you could say, somewhat short of elation. While global health programs managed to escape Obama's federal spending freeze, critics were quick to point out that at just 2.6%, the increase for HIV/AIDS funding was less even than what occurred under the Bush administration. Especially given fears that the global recession will cause donor funding for HIV/AIDS to plummet, a U.S. commitment is more vital than ever. What's more, new World Health Organization standards for anti-retroviral treatments mean HIV/AIDS programs are going to be expected to do much, much more -- with potentially a lot less.
Still, though, all this fear of 'crisis' may be somewhat overblown. In fact, now could be a real opportunity for countries to commit to streamlining their programs for better results.
After you get through the usual academic wonkery, one article recently published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, "Financing the Response to HIV in Low-Income and Middle-Income Countries," sheds some worthwhile light on the subject. The authors' conclusion is startlingly simple, but prescient: "The most striking finding is the mismatch between the types of HIV epidemics and the allocation of resources." Translated: Money is being spent in ways that aren't in the best interest of at-risk and HIV-positive populations.
Specifically, the authors note, less than 1% of expenditures in countries with generalized HIV epidemics actually goes toward "addressing most-at-risk populations." To really stem the virus's spread, countries need to focus their efforts on the most-at-risk (and often most-stigmatized) populations -- from drug users to men who have sex with men -- while also stepping up prevention efforts, with a focus on more effective treatment.
A Growing Global Health Corps
Published February 05, 2010 @ 02:10PM PT
Jonny Dorsey is on a quest. As the 20-something co-founder and executive director of the Global Health Corps, he's working with a team of just four full-time staffers to produce an ambitious goal: an ever-growing network of young leaders in the fight for global health. Global Health Corps is a relatively new organization -- founded just two years ago -- but already it has 22 fellows in the field, each paired with different health organizations across Rwanda, Tanzania and Malawi. The idea to incubate a global network of leaders that will eventually number in the thousands and weigh in with a serious policy voice, as well as boots on the ground.
The group may be young, but it's clearly tapped into a strong current: its inaugural round of fellowships attracted over 1,000 applications. As Global Health Corps gears up to recruit its second class of 34 fellows, Dorsey spoke with Change.org via phone this afternoon:
In some ways, Global Health Corps seems modeled on Teach for America -- was that the inspiration?
Originally, we did first pitch this idea as a kind a Teach for America for global health. They've created a path for talented young leaders to get into education, and built a community around them to support continued careers in that space. So certainly, what they've done is a great inspiration. We also looked at City Year quite a bit -- they do work that combines tangible service with community building and leadership development that I think is absolutely amazing.
So apart from the obvious difference in mission, what makes Global Health Corps' approach distinctive?
Something we're trying to do that we think is innovative is make this is a really global fellowship. We send out our fellows in teams of two -- an international fellow and an in-country fellow -- who are genuinely equal partners. In Rwanda, for example, it'd be a young American with a young Rwandan, and in Malawi, it'd be a young Malawi with a young American. We also have six fellows who work in the United States, too -- four in Newark, NJ and two in Boston. In those situations, the U.S. fellow is the in-country representative.
So we're working to build a global community that can make the fellowship much more meaningful and deep. I love it. Because if you want to talk about building a new generation of leaders in health, it has to be global. We need leaders working in global heath in the U.S., and on the country level around the world. It's the only way to help strengthen this movement in the direction it needs and to take on these challenges.
Haitian PM: Enough Hoopla Already About the Missionaries
Published February 05, 2010 @ 08:54AM PT
It's got all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned media feeding frenzy. The paparazzi swarming the car, the sunglassed celebrities inside. The waves and waves of media hits (over 6,900 articles this morning), the nonstop cataloguing of blow-by-blow developments. (Which, if you've been sleeping under a rock, look something like this: 1). Group of Baptists gets arrested in Haiti for trafficking 33 kids over the border, 2). Group claims they were trying to help orphans, 3). Most said 'orphans' actually turn out to have parents, 4). Group has been jailed and charged with kidnapping, and the judge in this case has three months to decide whether to prosecute. Oh yes, and the New York Times has found out that the group's ringleader owes back pay to previous employees....etc.)
It's not so much scenting blood in the water -- enough blood has been shed in Haiti for the past three weeks, and plenty of it (c.f. Anderson Cooper) has been caught on camera. And covering logistics, sanitation and tent shelters is less appealing. So this time the cameras are on the scent of something else -- something much more titillating. Something much more...blonde. (Or, to be perfectly accurate about everyone involved, brunette.) No wonder the Haitian Prime Minister is throwing up his hands. He's just announced that the death toll has risen to 212,000. He's got a wave of one million people on his hands who are homeless, and an impending threat of water-borne diseases to deal with.
And yet the case of the pony-tailed, be-hatted Baptists is what has the media agog.
