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Global Health Rounds

Thanks to everyone for taking their time to come and join Global Health Rounds with us this year.  With everyone's busy day to day schedule we are going to wrap up this year's Academic year.  We look forward to the next upcoming academic year.

Thanks for Everyone's Support in the Our Rich Man Poor Man Event 2018

The Global Health Program of the Division of Community Engagement along with our partners the School of Public Health and Students Invested in Health Association (SIHA) would like to thank everyone who came to Rich Man Poor Man 2018.

 

Thank you to the medical students who provided musical entertainment for the evening. Dr. Jane Namatovu, Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, shared information about initiatives are her medical school and updated us on the value of the partnership between Makerere University and the University of Alberta. Money raised at this event supports the global health initiatives of the three partner organizations.

The first known epidemic of extensively drug-resistant typhoid is spreading through Pakistan, infecting at least 850 people in 14 districts since 2016, according to the National Institute of Health Islamabad.

 

The typhoid strain, resistant to five types of antibiotics, is expected to disseminate globally, replacing weaker strains where they are endemic. Experts have identified only one remaining oral antibiotic — azithromycin — to combat it; one more genetic mutation could make typhoid untreatable in some areas.

 

Researchers consider the epidemic an international clarion callfor comprehensive prevention efforts. If vaccination campaigns and modern sanitation systems don’t outpace the pathogen, they anticipate a return to the pre-antibiotic era when mortality rates soared.

 

“This isn’t just about typhoid,” said Dr. Rumina Hasan, a pathology professor at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan. “Antibiotic resistance is a threat to all of modern medicine — and the scary part is, we’re out of options.”

 

Due to effective medications like chloroquine and artemisinins, malaria deaths dropped an estimated 60 percent worldwide between 2000 and 2015. The Americas and Africa saw the greatest improvements.

 

Still, 216 million new cases of malaria were reported in 2016, the latest data available. Most of them occurred in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Mozambique. And of the 445,000 people who died from the infection, about 70 percent were children under the age of 5.

 

If malaria is a curable disease with effective treatment, why does it still kill so many?

Three African countries will soon start rolling outthe world's first malaria vaccine.

 

Last year, more than 200 million people around the world were affected by the disease.

Most of those cases were reported in Africa.

 

Kenya, Ghana and Malawi will be among the first nations to try out the vaccine.

 

Al Jazeera's Fahmida Miller reports from Kenya's Kisumu County.

Invariably, the people best placed to decide what help they need to stop their children catching malaria or to avoid another pregnancy are those confronted with the risks on a daily basis.

 

Yet much more needs to be done to hand control to communities who understand what would improve their own health and wellbeing, said speakers in a panel discussion on innovation in healthcare, hosted by Zilient.

 

"Community empowerment starts with giving people the capacity to draw down and build knowledge - we don't really have good infrastructure in place for that," said Paul Richards, author of “Ebola: How a People's Science Helped End an Epidemic”.

 

The Ebola outbreak that swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014-2016, killing around 11,300, blindsided everyone, including governments and international aid agencies.

 

But local people quickly realised how the potentially fatal disease was being spread, and found home-grown ways to quarantine victims and cope with the devastating outbreak, said Richards, an anthropologist and university professor who has worked in West Africa for over 40 years.

Tomorrow kicks off World Immunization Week, a reminder that, just as disease can cross borders, so should our efforts to prevent it. Especially when we have an effective vaccine for one of the world’s top causes of cancer — but the people who need it most are less likely to get it.

 

Almost 90 percent of cervical-cancer deaths strike women in developing countries, where it is the second-most common cancer among women. In fact, over vast swaths of Africa, cervical cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer death in women. (In the United States, it doesn’t even crack the Top 10.) While cervical cancer rates are holding steady in the developed world, in the coming decades they are projected to increase sharply in less developed regions.

 

Since 2006 there has been a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus that causes cervical cancer. Unfortunately, while this vaccine is making impressive strides in the developed world, it is almost out of reach in the developing world, where it could save the most lives. To fully realize this vaccine’s potential, it needs to be distributed worldwide — not just within rich countries that can afford it.

 

To read more about this article go to http://advocatesaz.org/

 

 Global Health Rounds

April 23, 2018
Noon - 12:50

Room:  1-182 ECHA

 

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