United Nations

RECENT POSTS

September 19, 2011 | 8:15 PM | By

Weird and wonderful UN week

Flickr, morten gade

A general UN assemblage

As heads of state, officials and other bigwigs descend on New York City for the United Nations General Assembly meeting, key city streets are closed, the traffic replaced by police officers, patrol cars and vans, and New Yorkers are irritated. It’s UN Week and most of the buzz is about the Palestinian push for UN recognition as an independent state.

President Obama is already in town, scheduled to speak at the UN on Wednesday.

But I’m not here for all that. I just came to see the UN deal with a proposal to re-set the global health agenda — something that, arguably, could do a lot more to increase global stability, our national security and worldwide economic growth than all this other blather. Arguably.

It’s called the UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases. As boring as it sounds, it could be a big deal.

But I discovered upon arrival that even though I’m registered as Official UN Media (yes, with capital letters) I’m not actually allowed into the meeting. I assume that’s because I’m hardly “high-level,” which is fine. I’m not sure I’d even want to get that close to UN headquarters right now.

It’s friggin’ crazy around here.

Instead, I am skirting around the edges of the meeting visiting with others who have come here for the variations on the theme of making the world better.

Tom Paulson

Ted Turner

Like Ted Turner, a so-called media mogul, rich guy and the founder of the UN Foundation. I’m here, along with about two dozen or so other journalists sponsored by him and this philanthropy that promotes black helicopter government takeovers and democracy-hating jihadists (Just kidding. That was how one of the UN press officers described the view some Americans have of the organization.)

I’m a global health fellow sponsored by the UN Foundation to come learn more about the UN, specifically its work on health issues.

We met with Turner briefly before he went on stage at the Social Good Summit – a new media event aimed at stimulating, well, social good, largely aimed at young people.

Somebody asked how can we make the world a better place? Here’s some of what Ted said:

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Health, Mandy Moore, Michael Elliott, ONE Campaign, Ted Turner, UN Week, United Nations
September 19, 2011 | 7:00 AM | By

Guest post: Global health needs to focus on health, not disease

This is a guest post from Wendy Johnson, a physician at the University of Washington with extensive experience working health issues in low-resource communities in Africa.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Wendy Johnson

The UN High-level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) couldn’t come at a worse time.

While the delegates, disease experts and functionaries gather in New York to discuss how to create a more comprehensive global health agenda, political leaders in a smaller city to the south with much more power to set that agenda will likely be dismantling the infrastructure and funding needed to support the fundamental change needed – health systems improvement.

As this story from Reuter’s notes, all foreign aid, and especially the USAID budget, is under serious threat, both from the so-called “super-committee” on debt and the deliberations over current spending bills taking place in Washington D.C.  According to the article, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger is a proponent of deep cuts in aid who believes in limited programs that demonstrate quick impact and further U.S. national security.

This does not bode well for those at the UN meeting who will be arguing that the U.S. and other rich countries should make the long-term commitments necessary to address the disparities in NCDs such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer treatment in poor and middle-income countries.  Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, health systems, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations, Wendy Johnson
September 19, 2011 | 4:15 AM | By

UN summit on global health: Making a longer list or better strategy?

Flickr

I’m in New York this week for a special meeting at the United Nations on matters of global health.

It’s a potentially important meeting, one in which some hope to re-direct the global health agenda. So I’m going to focus on covering, and reporting, out of the meeting. News Rounds will just have to take a break.

The last time the UN held a special meeting devoted to global health, out of it came the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — arguably one of the most significant and successful efforts in the history of international health.

That was a decade ago. At the time, there was fairly strong consensus that the world needed to do something to respond to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The spread of HIV had come under greater control in much of the rich world thanks to new drugs. But in sub-Saharan Africa and many other parts of the developing world, the virus was still burning a deadly swath. It was an intolerably unjust situation.

So the Global Fund was created to fight AIDS and two other top killers, TB and malaria, in poor countries. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private donor to the Global Fund, was on the scene but really just getting started reinvigorating (and remaking) the global health landscape. President George W. Bush jumped in as well, launching Pepfar to fight AIDS in Africa. The global economy, generally speaking, was good.

Those were heady, hopeful days.

Expanding the global health agenda while tightening its belt

Today is the first day of the unfortunately named UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases. I’ve already said why it’s a bad name. More importantly than its branding problem, this meeting faces a number of challenges the UN AIDS summit 10 years ago did not. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Ali Mokdad, Dean Jamison, Jim Logerfo, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations
September 18, 2011 | 7:51 PM | By

What’s so controversial about adding cancer to the global health agenda?

The “High-Level Meeting” at the United Nations that we’re watching carefully on this blog this week is largely overshadowed by the big drama over Palestinians asking for U.N. recognition as an independent state. Still, the debate over “non-communicable diseases” is starting to enter public consciousness.

Case in point: As your intrepid Humanosphere blogger, Tom Paulson, is arriving in New York from Seattle, to report on the meetings, an interview is airing Monday across western Washington on KPLU.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, non-communicable diseases, UN Week, United Nations
September 16, 2011 | 12:05 PM | By

5 reasons to pay attention to a badly named meeting at the UN

Flickr, Ashitakka

Next week, in New York City, the United Nations is holding a big meeting that could affect the future of global health.

If all the gab actually translates into policy changes and action, it could redefine global health in a fairly significant way.

In an apparent attempt to scare off normal people from paying any attention, it’s called the UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (aka NCDs). I’ll be there, joining a group of journalists granted fellowships to attend from the UN Foundation (which got money for this from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

A lot’s going on next week in New York — the UN General Assembly (to which it has been reported Iranian President Ahmadinejad will be bringing gifts this year as well as his usual rants), the Clinton Global Initiative, a new media confab called the Social Good Summit and the poorly named meeting on global health focused on this poorly named category of diseases.

But don’t let the words, or acronyms, fool you. The NCDs are big killers, much bigger than that virus in the current blockbuster movie Contagion could ever hope to be. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Clinton Global Initiative, non-communicable diseases, Social Good Summit, UN Foundation, UN Week, United Nations
September 15, 2011 | 9:53 AM | By

More women in poor countries dying from breast cancer

www.joaquinjara.net

African woman by Joaquin Jara

The number of young women with breast cancer has more than doubled worldwide since 1980, say researchers at Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Most of this, say the University of Washington global health number crunchers, is in the developing world where women lack access to screening, prevention and treatment programs that have reduced the overall risk of breast cancer for women in the rich world.

“Women in high-income countries like the United States and the United Kingdom are benefiting from early cancer screenings, drug therapies, and vaccines,” said Dr. Rafael Lozano, a UW professor of global Health at IHME and co-author of the paper published today in The Lancet.

The findings are almost certainly going to be fodder for those advocating giving cancer more attention on the global health agenda at next week’s UN High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases.

The study, which reviewed health data of 187 countries from 1980 to 2010, looked at both breast and cervical cancer death rates.

Over three decades, the researchers determined that breast cancer cases increased from 641,000 cases in 1980 to 1.6 million cases in 2010 (which far exceeds what would happen from population growth). Cervical cancer cases increased from 378,000 in 1980 to 425,000 in 2010, not as dramatically as breast cancer cases, and the cervical death rate (though 200,000) actually declined.

IHME UW

Breast cancer rates worldwide, 1980-2010

But it is the shift in the disease burden globally that is of perhaps more interest than the overall numbers. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, cancer, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, non-communicable diseases, Rafael Lozano, United Nations
August 19, 2011 | 10:30 AM | By

World Concern delivering aid to drought- and famine-stricken Horn of Africa

Derek Sciba/World Concern photo

12 million people at risk of starvation

News on the 12 million people facing starvation in the Horn of Africa drought today is focusing on the Turkish prime minister’s visit to Mogadishu, Somalia, the first visit to the war-torn capital in nearly two decades.

According to a report in Al Jazeera, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit “follows Wednesday’s meeting in Istanbul by members of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), who pledged to donate $350 million to assist the drought- and famine-stricken Somalis.”

Meanwhile, humanitarian agencies continue to rush aid to the region.

Here is an update from Derek Sciba, in Kenya near the Somalia border. Derek is marketing director of World Concern, a Seattle-based, non-profit humanitarian organization providing community development and disaster response:

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Africa, aid, famine, Somalia, United Nations
August 15, 2011 | 10:30 AM | By

How Somalia food aid is stolen as ‘oppressed people are dying’

Wikimedia Commons photo

Girls carry food aid in the port city of Merca on the coast of southern Somalia.

An Associated Press investigation out of Somalia today shows that up to half of all famine aid deliveries there are being stolen. In the best of times, theft of food aid is deplorable. At a time when 3.2 million Somalis — nearly half the population — are in dire need of food, it is also catastrophic. Already some 29,000 Somali children under the age of 5 have died.

Associated Press reporter Katharine Houreld filed a story today saying the United Nations is investigating the stolen aid:

“Thousands of sacks of food aid meant for Somalia’s famine victims have been stolen and are being sold at markets in the same neighborhoods where skeletal children in filthy refugee camps can’t find enough to eat, an Associated Press investigation has found.

“The U.N.’s World Food Program for the first time acknowledged it has been investigating food theft in Somalia for two months. The WFP said that the ‘scale and intensity’ of the famine crisis does not allow for a suspension of assistance, saying that doing so would lead to ‘many unnecessary deaths.’

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Africa, famine aid, Somalia, United Nations, World Food Program