Health Care News and Research

RSS

Meeting promotes partnership to end malnutrition in first 1,000 days of life

Government officials, nutrition and health experts, as well as civil society advocates from around the world, met in Washington, D.C., on Monday to promote the 1,000 Days Partnership, which launched in September 2010, VOA News reports in a piece featuring quotes from U.S. officials about efforts to end child deaths from malnutrition.

15 Jun 2011

Improve water access to avoid serious public health crisis in Pakistan

Haider Warraich, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, examines how a "lack of access to water in Pakistan only exacerbates the country's already dire public health situation" in this post on Foreign Policy's "AfPak Channel" blog.

15 Jun 2011

Obama administration regulatory review won't include health law rules

An official from the Department of Health and Human Services told a House oversight subcommittee that the health law's regulations are too new for a second look. However, some Republican members of the panel disagreed, saying that the waivers that have been granted are reason enough for such examination.

15 Jun 2011

Editorial, opinion pieces respond to GAVI pledging conference

Editorials and opinion pieces are responding to the GAVI Alliance pledging conference, which raised $4.3 billion for childhood vaccinations.

15 Jun 2011

Studies examine surgery survival odds, hospital readmission risks

News outlets report on a pair of studies related to Medicare populations. The first concludes that the odds for a Medicare patient surviving a complex surgery are improving. Meanwhile, a second study found that better informed patients have lower costs, do better managing their medications and can slow the rate of readmissions.

15 Jun 2011

Panel discusses funding for universal access to HIV treatment

The Center for Global Health Policy's "Science Speaks" blog includes a summary of a recent Global Fund meeting on HIV financing. "The most dynamic and passionate remarks came from Morolake Odetoyinbo, CEO of the non-governmental organization Positive Action for Treatment Access in Nigeria and a woman living with HIV/AIDS. She argued that African nations were not doing enough to use their resources to care for their own people," according to the post.

15 Jun 2011

New York Times examines evolving role of social media in disease tracking efforts

The New York Times examines how social media is changing efforts to monitor the spread of diseases. According to the article, technology is democratizing the disease-hunting process, upsetting the old equilibrium by connecting people through channels effectively outside government control.

15 Jun 2011

AARP releases report about Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment

An Oregon-pioneered program aimed at improving health care for those with advanced illness is now receiving national attention. AARP recently released a report about the Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment, or POLST, program.

15 Jun 2011

Where does non-emergency food aid fit in development?

"Pre-positioning food stocks has some important advantages besides saving time: it can lower program costs for the food itself and shipping. Mostly, however, it's crazy that the Congress still requires that U.S. food aid be bought here and transported around the world on U.S.-flagged ships," Kimberly Ann Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, writes on the "Views from the Center" blog.

15 Jun 2011

EOW hosts national conference to highlight practice of Female Genital Mutilation

Girls from the UK are being subjected to illegal genital mutilation, despite the devastating consequences, a University of Leicester postgraduate student claims.

15 Jun 2011

FAO initiative aims to expand sustainable crop production methods among small farmers

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a report on Monday outlining a new initiative that aims to expand sustainable crop production, Wall Street Journal's "The Source" blog reports.

15 Jun 2011

World Economic Forum on East Asia panel calls for governments to do more to achieve MDGs

Economists at a meeting of the World Economic Forum on East Asia called on governments to do more to meet the Millennium Development Goal targets, VOA News reports.

15 Jun 2011

Meningitis vaccine showing success in West Africa

The New York Times reports on the success of a new meningococcal vaccine in West Africa, where very few cases of the disease have been detected in countries that use MenAfriVac, which costs 50 cents per dose.

15 Jun 2011

Large donations help GAVI raise $4.3B, exceeding goal

"Large donations from the U.K., Norway and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helped a global vaccine charity raise $4.3 billion at a summit Monday, exceeding its targets and allowing it to carry out all its immunization plans through 2015," the Wall Street Journal reports.

15 Jun 2011

NYU Langone implements biometric technology to identify patients

NYU Langone Medical Center announced today that it is the first medical center in the Northeast to use PatientSecure™ - a cutting-edge biometric technology - to identify patients. Utilizing near infrared light to map an image of the blood-flow pattern through the veins in a person's palm, the digital palm image is converted into a unique patient identifier that interfaces with the medical center's electronic health record system.

15 Jun 2011

Local misconceptions of children's immune systems hindering HIV treatment in Malawi, study says

Some caregivers in rural Malawi have expressed a reluctance to begin antiretroviral therapy for children living with HIV because of a belief that their "bodies were too weak for pills and their blood was 'still raw,' but that as it 'ripened' with time, HIV-related opportunistic infections would leave them," according to a study presented this week at the 1st International HIV Social Science and Humanities Conference in Durban, South Africa, PlusNews reports.

15 Jun 2011

Regulators remove restrictions on Aetna's Medicare sales

The sanctions had blocked Aetna Inc. from marketing Medicare plans and enrolling new beneficiaries. Now that they have been lifted, Aetna has indicated it will again promote its Medicare Advantage offerings.

15 Jun 2011

GOP presidential candidates touch on the health overhaul, Medicare plans in first major meeting of 2012 contest

The spotlight was trained squarely on Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, who has come under withering attack for the health care plan he signed into law that resembles the plan Mr. Obama pushed through Congress. But his rivals treaded lightly, and he relentlessly turned the conversation back to Mr. Obama, emerging unscathed from his return to the debate stage four years after losing his first bid for the party's nomination.

15 Jun 2011

Report: Health care industry offers significant opportunity

A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that four types of companies can take advantage of the huge opportunity that health care epitomizes in the coming years.

15 Jun 2011

Ventana Medical receives FDA approval for new breast cancer genetic test

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new genetic test that will help health care professionals determine if women with breast cancer are HER2-positive and, therefore, candidates for Herceptin, a commonly used breast cancer treatment.

15 Jun 2011