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World leaders set to tackle global healthcare challenges at World Innovation Summit for Health
The most pressing global healthcare challenges are to be tackled as the world’s leading medical, academic and government professionals gather at the inaugural World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) in Doha, Qatar on 10-11 December 2013.
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- Health Care
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How finding research gaps can help fight malnutrition
The case of nutrition in the development agenda is often complicated. It is often overshadowed when bundled with food security, and yet donors sometimes appear clueless on how to solve one without addressing the other, leaving many to question on whether donor money is really making a dent in the global fight against malnutrition. So what can the aid community do? Nutrition experts on Thursday converged in New York — where development takes center stage this week — to present some 20 priority areas for nutrition research in the first Global Research Agenda on Nutrition Services. These include:* Describing the interactions between the food system and nutrition. * Integrating individual and household-level factors underlying economic vulnerability and food insecurity. * Role of nutrition in developmental origins of health and disease. * The relationship between markers of nutrition and functional outcomes. * Knowledge related to inputs of nutrition intervention.
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- Health Care
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GAVI Alliance to address the next vaccine challenge: Supply chains
No one likes it when a delivery fails to show, but when it happens with vaccines it costs lives. Currently, millions of children go unimmunized each year because of delivery problems, including anything from vaccine supply chain breaks and ineffective cold chain equipment to poor vaccine stock management in developing countries. Shockingly, these kinds of issues account for a substantial number of the children who miss out on their shots. That has got to change. These supply chain inefficiencies may be contributing to the deaths of 1.5 million children each year from vaccine-preventable diseases, the vast majority in developing countries.
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- Health Care
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Firm bets on telemedicine to reach needy patients
Access to healthcare has been a challenge to many Kenyans, particularly those in remote areas which do not attract specialized doctors. To help solve this problem, Dr Emily Obwaka, a medic, has made advocating for the use of telemedicine in both public and private hospitals her mission.
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- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- public health
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Consortium to advance human hookworm vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa
The HOOKVAC consortium, led by the Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam, Thursday announced receiving a grant of 6 million Euros to develop and test a vaccine for human hookworm, a disease that infects 600-700 million of the world’s poorest people.
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- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Game-changing Partnerships: Health care companies in rural India finding ways to complement each other
About 840 million people in India - or 72 percent of the total population of 1.2 billion - are rural. For these 840 million people, health care is basically inaccessible. A few innovative companies are out to change that.
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- Health Care
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Africa’s Healthcare Cocktail: Of Coverage, Cost And Innovation
“You guys are investing in hospitals.” That was the question (or masked hope) of an American-trained Ethiopian doctor, the owner and head doctor of a local hospital in Addis Ababa. The question is a familiar one to investors in many of Sub-Saharan Africa’s emerging economies. Many foreign-trained doctors are returning home to the desperate health sectors in Africa. The perilous state of health care in Sub-Saharan Africa begs for more investment. Communicable and parasitical diseases persist, with few countries able to provide basic sanitation, clean water and adequate nutrition to all of their citizenry. Few countries are able to spend the $35 per person that the World Health Organization (WHO) considers the minimum for basic health care. But despite the extensive poverty, more than 50 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s health expenditure is paid out-of-pocket by individuals.
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- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Organization Rallies Global Oncology Community to Eliminate Cancer Health Disparities
Today, more than half of new cancer cases and over two-thirds of cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Underlying this burden of cancer is an unequal distribution of global resources, a lack of coordinated care for oncology patients, and a multitude of social, cultural, and economic factors that lead to late diagnosis and incomplete palliation in the developing world. To combat the growing cancer burden, concerted action is needed from the global health and oncology communities. In her Presidential Address to the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Sandra Swain, MD, highlighted the “possibilities and promise in global health equity,” encouraging oncology leaders worldwide to join the effort to bridge the “access gap” in cancer care. The Global Oncology Initiative, an academic and grassroots volunteer organization based out of Boston, Massachusetts, seeks to do just that. GO connects local and global oncology communities and is developing programs aimed at alleviating worldwide cancer care disparities.
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- Health Care