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Experts discuss disease-fight dollars for developing world

The debate over how to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked to fight AIDS and other killer diseases in developing countries will come under the spotlight at a meeting of international experts.

5 Apr 2009

Financial crisis strikes at health in all parts of the world

WHO last issued a public statement on the financial crisis in the days prior to the Washington meeting of the G20.

1 Apr 2009

Retention is part of the answer to the nursing shortage

A new research study, published in the March/April issue of the journal Nursing Economics, has determined what factors can help keep new nurses from leaving their jobs and - in doing so - save health systems money.

30 Mar 2009

$44 billion needed by 2015 to control TB, health officials say at close of stop TB partnership forum

About 1,300 health officials on Wednesday at the close of the 3rd Stop TB Partnership Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said that $44 billion is "needed from now until 2015 to reach" World Health Organization targets aimed at controlling the disease in the 22 countries with the highest TB burden worldwide, AFP/Google.com reports.

30 Mar 2009

New survey tracks behavioral health treatment trends

Behavioral healthcare systems are playing a major role in responding to the needs of the millions of Americans of all ages who experience psychiatric and substance use conditions each year, according to the latest annual survey from the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems (NAPHS) released.

30 Mar 2009

About 25% of tuberculosis deaths occur among HIV-positive people

About one-quarter of tuberculosis-related deaths involve an HIV-positive person, twice as high as previous estimates, according to the Global Tuberculosis Control Report 2009, which the World Health Organization released Tuesday to coincide with World TB Day, the Wall Street Journal reports.

25 Mar 2009

Lancet opinion piece examines progress made against HIV/AIDS

"Nearly 30 years into the AIDS epidemic, we are able to access our progress in tackling the disease with both increased knowledge and the benefit of hindsight," former UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot of Imperial College London, who also serves as an adviser on global health strategy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Michel Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Mark Dybul of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and former U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator; and Julian Lob-Levyt of the GAVI Alliance write in a Lancet opinion piece.

24 Mar 2009

HIV-related tuberculosis deaths higher than past estimates

The total number of new tuberculosis (TB) cases remained stable in 2007, and the percentage of the world's population becoming ill with TB has continued the slow decline that was first observed in 2004, according to a new report released by WHO today.

24 Mar 2009

Asian countries should strengthen health systems to address increasing drug-resistant tuberculosis

World Health Organization officials on Monday ahead of World TB Day on March 24 said that Asian countries should increase efforts to strengthen health systems to address an increase in cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis, AFP/Google.com reports.

23 Mar 2009

Health impacts of climate change require global action

The health impact of climate change is a critical issue that policy-makers should be aware of while setting priorities for action and investment to mitigate the impact of global climate change. This is the key message that WHO experts delivered at the Climate Change Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions conference in Copenhagen.

11 Mar 2009

Diagnostic errors: The new focus of patient safety experts

Johns Hopkins patient safety experts say it's high time for diagnostic errors to get the same attention from medical institutions and caregivers as drug-prescribing errors, wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections.

11 Mar 2009

For psychiatric services, wait for the beep

Two-thirds of patients referred for psychiatric services following an emergency room visit are likely to reach only an answering machine when they call for help, compared to about 20 percent of patients calling medical clinics with physical symptoms.

25 Feb 2009

Racial disparities in colorectal cancer screening persist

Colorectal cancer screening among patients with Medicare coverage is increasing, but a persistent gap remains between whites - who are screened most frequently - and all other racial and ethnic groups, according to a new study by researchers at UC Davis and the University of Washington.

20 Feb 2009

New weapon in the battle against obesity

A new system proposed by Canadian and US obesity researchers may provide another weapon in the battle against obesity.

10 Feb 2009

Diabetes epidemic shows no signs of abating

In the United States, nearly 13 percent of adults age 20 and older have diabetes, but 40 percent of them have not been diagnosed, according to epidemiologists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose study includes newly available data from an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT).

27 Jan 2009

Study finds failure to include nurses in process of admitting errors to patients, families

Even though nurses routinely disclose nursing errors to their patients, a new study published in the January 2009 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety shows that nurses often are not included when physicians tell patients about more serious mistakes.

7 Jan 2009

Debate on treating fevers in African children

A new debate in the open access journal PLoS Medicine questions whether all African children with fever should be treated presumptively with antimalarial drugs, or if treatment should wait until laboratory tests confirm malarial infection.

5 Jan 2009

Specialized kidney transporter improves transplant results

A landmark study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) demonstrates that use of a specially-designed machine to store kidneys for transplantation offers significant benefits in kidney survival and function when compared to those stored in a traditional "ice box", or cold storage.

1 Jan 2009

Family rejection of lesbian, gay and bisexual children linked to poor health in early childhood

For the first time, researchers have established a clear link between family rejection of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adolescents and negative health outcomes in early adulthood.

30 Dec 2008

Policymakers, the media and the public should use 20 specific health indicators

Policymakers, the media, and the public should focus on 20 specific health indicators as "yardsticks" to measure the overall health and well-being of Americans, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

17 Dec 2008