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Brazil, facing health-care crisis, imports Cuban doctors
Since the 1960s, Cuba has deployed an army of doctors by the tens of thousands to the world’s most inhospitable corners, from Haiti to Africa’s killing fields to the ultra-violent barrios of Venezuela.Now, thousands of Cubans are heading to relatively affluent Brazil to shore up a decrepit health-care system that has become a national embarrassment.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- public health
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Birth Simulator Includes Baby, Blood, Backpack
If Resusci Anne and Resusci Andy had a love child, it would probably look like this baby from the MamaNatalie birthing simulator kit.In fact, the kit was conceived — if you’ll pardon the pun — by Laerdal Global Health, the makers of the CPR dummies, for the purpose of training midwives and medical professionals on how to respond to potential complications during childbirth. As the company website explains, “Details such as weight, head articulation, umbilical pulse, as well as the babies’ breath and heartbeat have been simulated as closely as possible, making the subsequent handling of a real-life baby only a minor adjustment.”
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- public health
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Eye-phone set to revolutionise African optical care
An impressive new mobile phone app is being tested in Kenya. It acts as a mobile visual clinic, and is set to revolutionise eye care in Africa.According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), nearly 300 million people are blind or seriously visually impaired.But a team of doctors from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine armed with an innovative, low cost, smartphone solution, have set out to make an impact on this community.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- public health
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Fighting Poverty, and Critics
Nina Munk’s new book, “The Idealist,” is about the well-known economist Jeffrey Sachs and his “quest to end poverty,” as the subtitle puts it. I know: That subtitle sounds like classic book-industry hyperbole, but, in this case, it’s not. That really is what Sachs has been trying to do. The question of whether or not he is succeeding is where things get tricky.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Impact Investing 2.0 — What $3 Billion Tells Us About the Next $300 Billion
There's an impression that the ongoing effort to use investment dollars to achieve both financial and social returns is elusive, with no coherent core of best practice. This is simply not the case.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Mortality rate in Latin America and Caribbean drops
With the exception of young men, most people in Latin America and the Caribbean are living much longer today than 40 years ago. The mortality rate has dropped by at least 80 percent for children 4 years old or younger and by more than 50 percent for women between the ages of 20 and 44. For men between the ages of 15 and 19, however, the mortality rate has increased by 1 percent, largely due to deaths from road injuries and rising violence.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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Impact Investment Exchange Asia invests in Indian Social Enterprise Spring Health
Singapore based Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIX) has announced today that its Impact Partners platform has successfully facilitated an investment from two private investors, alongside lead investors from the Artha initiative and the Stone Family Foundation, into Spring Health Water (India) Pte. Ltd., a for-profit Social Enterprise that provides safe and affordable drinking water to rural customers in India.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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India’s government hails interventions for reducing maternal deaths
According to the Indian minister of health and family welfare, "various interventions" spearheaded by the country's government have contributed to a successful reduction in maternal mortality over the last 12 years.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- public health