Recent releases in Global Health

USAID's Work In Asia: "In 25 countries across Asia, from Kazakhstan to Papua New Guinea, we work to support the success of emerging economies and help address the challenges of hunger and poverty. We do this not just by extending a helping hand, but sharing the hope of the American Dream to people around the world - the mother who eats less so her children can eat more, the girl who risks her life to get an education, the entrepreneur who beats the odds to create a small business that employs his neighbors," Rajiv Shah, USAID administrator, writes in a post on the agency's "Impact blog" (5/5).

PEPFAR's Annual Meeting: "As we wrap up this year's meeting in Johannesburg, today we have focused on what we can do to advance the vision of shared responsibility at the country level," Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, writes on State's "DipNote" blog. Goosby highlights the role the Global Fund plays in ensuring "partner countries have ownership of the full continuum of response," which he blogged about earlier in the week (5/5).

Communicating Health Information Through Websites: This "ScienceBlogs" post examines a recent report from Eurosurveillance on "the role of health information on the Internet in influencing decisions to vaccinate or not to vaccinate." The post concludes, "The resurgence of measles stresses the particular urgency to answering the question of how to communicate science and relative risk accurately to the public in a way they can understand. Failure could well result in the return of, if not the bad old days before vaccines could prevent so many deadly diseases, days that are quite bad enough" (5/5).

Global Health Diplomacy: The CSIS Global Health Policy Center report is the culmination of three seminars that featured "experts on regional politics, global health policy, and diplomacy," who addressed "the linkages between health and foreign policy in key countries" (Bliss, 5/4).

Peace Corps, Save the Children Partner On Health: A new Memorandum of Understanding between the Peace Corps and Save the Children will allow the two groups to collaborate on resources for HIV/AIDS, nutrition and education, according to a Peace Corps press release (5/3).

Doctors' Letter Urges Mass. Senator To Support Global Health: Three physicians associated with Harvard Medical School recently shared with Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) a letter signed by 127 Massachusetts-based health professionals, which urged him to "support sustained and increased funding for life-saving, cost-effective global health programs," the Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog reports (Lubinski, 5/3).

U.N. Special Rapporteur On The Right To Food To Continue Serving: Olivier De Schutter's term as special rapporteur on the right to food has been extended by the U.N. for three years, according to the Foreign Policy Association's "Global Food Security" blog (5/2).