Health

Global health is primarily about public health, medical and research efforts aimed at assisting poor countries.

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RECENT POSTS

April 25, 2012 | 12:10 PM | By

Infectious hope: When getting malaria makes sense

Flickr, Aya Rosen

It’s World Malaria Day. There’s been great progress against malaria over the past decade but most experts agree the best hope is to find an effective vaccine. Seattle Biomed is one of the world leaders in malaria vaccine research, but testing these experimental vaccines relies on people volunteering to get the vaccine — and get bitten. What it’s like to get infected for science.

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By Cyan James, special correspondent

Cyan James

Lane Rasberry wants to better arm the world against malaria

“I’m going to get infected and I’m going to love it,” Lane Rasberry says with a smile.

Rasberry is about to spend at least five minutes with more than a dozen mosquitoes full of malaria parasites.

The mosquitoes huddle in a screened, pint-sized container, waiting for Rasberry to roll up his left sleeve, lay his forearm over the container, and drape a towel over his arm to simulate night. Then they launch, feeding on Lane until their breakfast clock runs out.

A Wikipedia editor by day, Rasberry also volunteers in a malaria vaccine trial at Seattle BioMed, where he belongs among a unique group of clinical subjects who intentionally get infected.

Why? For Rasberry, it’s because the research is both altruistic and convenient, and because it plays to his interest in science. “I actually enjoy participating,” he says, emphasizing research trials’ ability to create community and help others learn about scientific advances. Plus, since he grew up in Texas, the mosquitoes don’t really faze him.

Seattle Biomed, Earl Harper

Mosquito dissection

After Rasberry’s five minutes are up, a technician dumps his mosquitoes into an ethanol bath to kill them, then flicks off the mosquitoes’ heads, presses their torsos to extrude their innards, and swiftly isolates their salivary glands.

Cyan James

Skeeter dissection

The technician scans the tiny sickle-shaped glands under a microscope, searching for P. falciparum, the parasite that infects up to 500 million people with malaria every year and kills nearly two people every hour.

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FILED UNDER: Health, Science, Cyan James, malaria, Malcolm Gardner, Sara Healy, Seattle Biomed, Stefan Kappe, vaccine
April 19, 2012 | 5:07 PM | By

IHME study: Many girls in U.S. will have shorter lives than their mothers

In this screen grab from the IHME website, you can see some lifespan comparisons of women in 2009. Go to the Institute’s website to interact with this and other graphics to learn more.

By Claudia Rowe, special correspondent

Despite living in a country with one of the best health-care systems in the world, thousands of American girls will have shorter lives than their mothers, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

In 661 areas of the country life expectancy for women has stagnated or decreased since 1999.

“It’s tragic,” said Dr. Ali Mokdad, who lead the team of researchers evaluating American health and mortality trends across the country.

Nationwide, they found a range of life-spans is so broad that in some areas, such as Stearns, Minn., life expectancies rivaled those in Japan, Hong Kong, and France – which are among the longest on earth.

But elsewhere, particularly in the rural south, average life-spans were lower than in Egypt, Indonesia, and Colombia, countries that spend far less on health care than the U.S.

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FILED UNDER: Health, health metrics, life expectancy
April 17, 2012 | 12:59 PM | By

‘Species gaps’ exist in hunt for diseases that can jump to humans

The Associated Press

Animal disease experts examine a pig on a farm in Yunlin County, central Taiwan.

By Lisa Stiffler, special correspondent

HIV, West Nile virus, swine flu, ebola – all are human diseases that are traced to livestock, wild creatures and insects from locations scattered around the globe. It can be harder to think of infectious ailments that didn’t start in animals, and in fact these so called “zoonotic pathogens” are to blame for more than 65 percent of emerging infectious disease events over the past 60 years, according to research.

Yet experts in the field say we’re still doing a crummy job watching for new disease outbreaks in animals that could jump to humans.

“One of the lessons of West Nile virus is that we have major species gaps in terms of surveillance, even today,” said Dr. Tracey McNamara, a professor of pathology at Western University of Health Sciences’ College of Veterinary Medicine in California.

The problem includes a lack of monitoring and reporting for wild animals, as well as urban and domesticated animals.

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FILED UNDER: Health, animal health, zoonotic diseases
April 17, 2012 | 8:02 AM | By

Seattle council moves to strengthen research in life sciences

Alex / Flickr

The Seattle City Council hopes fewer government regulations and lower taxation on federal research dollars brought into the city will save lives, here and abroad.

The council introduced legislation last week it hopes will strengthen the growing  life science industry in Seattle.

The legislation, CB 117438, will waive city business and occupation taxes on government research funds by allowing a deduction for grants, contracts and sub-awards received as compensation towards the support of life science research and development.

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FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Science, health care, life sciences, research
April 13, 2012 | 9:19 AM | By

NPR feature: Port-au-Prince is a city of millions and no sewer system

John W. Poole / NPR

A makeshift latrine hangs over the water at the edge of Cite de Dieu, a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Port-au-Prince is about the size of Chicago. But it doesn’t have a sewer system. It’s one of the largest cities in the world without one.

That’s a big problem, but never more so than during a time of cholera.

Since cholera was introduced into Haiti 18 months ago – most likely by United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal, where the disease is endemic – more than a half-million people have gotten sick and at least 7,050 have died.

Public health authorities say cholera will stay in the environment for a long time, because Haiti has the worst sanitation in this hemisphere.

It’s hard for Americans to imagine what this means.

The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage. Each night an all-but-invisible army of workers called bayakou descend into man-sized holes with buckets to remove human waste from septic pits and latrines, then dump it into the canals that cut through the city.

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FILED UNDER: Health, Haiti, water
April 12, 2012 | 10:30 AM | By

NPR: Update on Haiti’s battle against cholera

Two reports by NPR’s Richard Knox provide a great overview of the cholera outbreak in Haiti, beginning with coverage of the launch of a (much delayed and fairly small) vaccination campaign aimed not so much at stopping the outbreak as demonstrating vaccines — if more widely used — can stem the epidemic.

Despite yet another tiresome headline riff off Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ book Love in the Time of Cholera, the accompanying report by Knox examines what really drives the cholera explosion — poverty and lack of access to clean water.

 

FILED UNDER: Health, cholera, Haiti, NPR, Richard Knox
April 5, 2012 | 11:00 AM | By

Seattle global health expert issues call to arms in the war on fake drugs

Flickr, by Rodrigo Senna

Fake drugs are on the rise.

Did you know that 80 percent of all drug ingredients, and 40 percent of all finished pharmaceutical products, are made outside the U.S.?

Did you know a small, but increasing number of these drugs are fake?

What looks like a very boring academic and institutional report, entitled “Ensuring Safe Foods and Medical Products Through Stronger Regulatory Systems Abroad,” is in fact a call to arms. A Seattle man is a leading voice in sounding the alarm on the problem of counterfeit drugs.

Fake drugs are on the rise worldwide, including in the United States, and nearly a million people are estimated to die every year due to taking medications that are useless or worse.

The problem of fake or counterfeit medications in the developing world is massive, in some regions estimated to constitute perhaps half of all drugs sold, says the World Health Organization. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Justice, Andy Stergachis, counterfeit drugs, FDA, regulations
April 4, 2012 | 2:25 PM | By

Nils Daulaire brings his fight to Seattle – Global is local!

“Our only chance to keep Americans safe is if the systems for preventing, detecting and containing disease … also stretch across the globe,” Nils Daulaire.

By Lisa Stiffler, special correspondent

Many Americans just don’t get it – Global health is a domestic issue.

That was the main message last night at Seattle’s Broadway Performance Hall from Dr. Nils Daulaire, director of the Office of Global Affairs for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

One might think that Americans would be anxious about the next bird- or bug-borne pandemic, the strength of disease surveillance abroad.

Not exactly. At the “Diseases without Borders” forum Daulaire said that the question he’s most frequently asked is this: “Why does (Health and Human Services), a domestic institution, even have an Office of Global Affairs?”

Luckily, Daulaire makes a compelling case for spending taxpayer dollars on health issues arising outside our borders.

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FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, development, foreign aid, foreign policy