ROME (AP) — The number of hungry people around the world has dropped to 795 million from over a billion a quarter-century ago despite natural disasters, ongoing conflicts and poverty, the three U.N. food agencies said Wednesday.
India is failing to tackle a tuberculosis epidemic because of chronic shortages of funds and the government's inability to regulate an “exploitive” private health sector, an article in the British Medical Journal said. The article, published ahead of World Tuberculosis Day on Tuesday, called for a massive investment in public health infrastructure to diagnose and treat what it called India's biggest health crisis. India accounts for an estimated 2.2 million of the 8.6 million new cases of tuberculosis that occur globally each year and harbours more than twice as many cases as any other country, according to the World Health Organization. The article by Zarir F Udwadia, a doctor at one of Mumbai's biggest private hospitals, said the government's TB programme was failing to monitor the country's burgeoning private health sector.
South African doctors have successfully performed the world's first penis transplant on a young man who had his organ amputated after a botched circumcision ritual, a hospital said on Friday. The nine-hour transplant, which occurred in December last year, was part of a pilot study by Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town and the University of Stellenbosch to help scores of initiates who either die or lose their penises in botched circumcisions each year. For a young man of 18 or 19 years the loss of his penis can be deeply traumatic,” said Andre van der Merwe, head of the university's urology unit and who led the operation said in a statement. “There is a greater need in South Africa for this type of procedure than elsewhere in the world, as many young men lose their penises every year due to complications from traditional circumcision,” Van der Merwe said.
By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) – Ebola is declining but there is no room for complacency and the World Health Organization (WHO) must respond faster to future emergencies, its director-general told member states held talks on Sunday on the WHO's delay in facing the deadly epidemic. The special session in Geneva was called by member states seeking reforms amid strong criticism of the United Nations agency's response to the outbreak that began a year ago in West Africa. Dr. Margaret Chan also said that vaccines and drugs must be brought to the market more speedily so that the world is not caught “empty-handed” when a severe disease causes an epidemic. Some $4 billion has been spent to try to halt its spread and WHO requires a further $1 billion this year, U.N. special envoy David Nabarro said.
A virulent group of TB germs spread from East Asia in waves propelled by industrialisation, World War I and Soviet collapse to yield some of the drug-resistant strains plaguing the world today, a study said Monday. It evolved into several sub-lineages and strains, spreading eastward to Micronesia and Polynesia and westward to central Asia, Russia and eastern Europe. Among the toughest modern-day versions — two multi-drug resistant (MDR) clones, started spreading through eastern Europe and Asia on an epidemic scale about 20-30 years ago, “coinciding with the collapse of the public health system of the former Soviet Union,” study co-author Thierry Wirth of France's National History Museum told AFP.
China has approved a new polio vaccine, the first of its kind to be produced in the country, a month after local authorities gave the green light for a home-grown Ebola vaccine amid Beijing’s push to become a world leader in producing innovative drugs. The development drew praise from the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday who said the vaccine, which will be given to Chinese children as part of routine disease prevention, would help the global fight against the polio virus. China’s private and state-run medical laboratories have been growing in sophistication, helping reduce reliance on imported medicines and competing with global rivals. “This new vaccine is a critically important weapon in the fight against polio as the world nears the eradication of this dreaded disease,” Bernhard Schwartländer, WHO representative in China, said in a statement.