An official says the World Health Organization hopes to eradicate polio in 2016, after containing outbreaks in conflict-ridden Syria, Iraq and Somalia by immunizing millions of children over two years.

Christopher Maher, who runs the regional polio eradication program, says there's a chance to "finish polio forever" this year. He says the disease still occurs in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but that the caseload is dropping.

Maher spoke Sunday at the inauguration of a WHO regional center for health emergencies and polio eradication in Jordan's capital, Amman.

The agency says it faces unprecedented demand for basic health services. It says half the region's 22 countries are in conflict or affected by it, and that the Middle East is home to the largest number of internally displaced people anywhere.

source; http://news.yahoo.com/

Mysuru: At a time when healthcare risks have become one of the most difficult issues that the country is dealing with, India's per-capita expenditure on health research is less than $1. And, just 3% of this is spent on public health research.

Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) director general Dr Soumya Swaminathan said out of $1 billion that the country has been spending annually, just 1% is for healthcare and it is 0.06% of GDP. Of the total amount, only 16% is by not-for-profit institutions and 83% by pharmaceutical industry.

More investment is a must if the country wants to focus on solving health-related issues without depending on other countries, feel researchers at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, the Indian Institute of Science and the Jawaharlal Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR).

"Significant mismatches between funding and disease-burden trends must be addressed. Strategic mechanisms are needed in India to address these gaps to enable research to effectively improve public health. The government must focus on translational and implementation research. We (government departments) must complete the chain of product development and ensure it is used in the public health programme, expand clinical trial network and conduct/sponsor more multicentric trials," Soumya said.

According to Nobel Laureate professor Serge Haroche, there must be local critical thinking so that discoveries and inventions are aimed at solving problems at hand with priority.

Echoing this, GJ Samathanam, former advisor, department of Science and Technology, said: "India has a great role to play in novel drug discovery. Our scientists must take up high-risk and high resource-oriented long-term research."

Referring to Bengaluru-based Vasan Sambandamurthy and team's single dose solution to cure malaria and two-drug compounds for Ebola developed by Jayanta Haldar and team at JNCASR, scientists argued that more such discoveries will happen only if investment increases.

"Compared to Japan (77%), the US (65%), and Germany (68%), India has the least investment (30%) coming from the industry for drug discovery which is affecting the sector in which the country has a lot of potential," Samathanam said.

source; http://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

The role of the stethoscope, the ubiquitous tool of the medical profession for over 200 years, is at the center of debate in the US with a leading Indian-origin cardiologist declaring "the stethoscope is dead".

In recent years, the sounds it transmits from the heart, lungs, blood vessels and bowels have been digitised, amplified, filtered and recorded.

Algorithms already exist that can analyze the clues picked up by a stethoscope and offer a possible diagnosis. But whether all this represents the rebirth of diagnostic possibility or the death rattle of an obsolete device is a subject of spirited discussion in cardiology, The Washington Post reported.
The widespread use of echocardiograms and the development of pocket-size ultrasound devices are raising questions about why doctors and others continue to sling earphones and rubber tubing around their necks.

"The stethoscope is dead," said Jagat Narula, a cardiologist and associate dean for global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "The time for the stethoscope is gone," Narula said. Starting in 2012, Mount Sinai began giving its students hand-held ultrasound devices that are little bigger than a cellphone but can generate real-time images of the heart right at the bedside. Several other schools will join the experiment in the coming months, the report said.

Stethoscopes retain their value for listening to lungs and bowels for clues of disease, experts say. But for the cardiovascular system, "auscultation is superfluous. We are wasting [students'] time," Narula said.

"Why should I not have an echocardiogram in my hand if it's as small as the stethoscope?" Not so, counters W Reid Thompson, an associate professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "We are not at the place, and probably won't be for a very long time," where listening to the body's sounds is replaced by imaging.

"It is valuable," he said. One thing on which both sides agree, however, is that doctors are not very good at using stethoscopes — and have not been for a long while, the report said. In 1997, researchers examined how well 453 physicians in training and 88 medical students interpreted the information obtained via stethoscope.

According to their study, "both internal medicine and family practice trainees had a disturbingly low identification rate for 12 important and commonly encountered cardiac events."

19 years later, another team tried to determine when doctors stopped improving at "auscultation" — the art of listening to the body to detect disease. The answer: after the third year of medical school. French physician Rene Laennec had invented the stethoscope in 1816.

source: http://www.hindustantimes.com

As open enrollment season comes to a close for health insurance markets, it's a good time to reflect on the progress of the U.S. health system. With the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. made efforts to close its uninsured gap with other industrialized nations. The U.S. has made progress on that metric with 16.4 million out of an estimated 50 million uninsured gaining coverage through the Marketplace and Medicaid expansions. But will this change finally put the U.S. at the top of the health system rankings?

U.S. policymakers seek to rank as the nation's health system as best in world. Unfortunately, rankings from the World Health Organization and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show the United States as quite a laggard. The WHO rankings that got the most attention placed the United States at 37th of 191 behind all other industrialized countries and Cuba.

As health economists we were convinced that the U.S. might do better if we took into consideration different variables like access to the physicians. The result in a just published study shows that the United States is not necessarily at the bottom, but it is not at the top either. Just like the residents of U.S. fictional small town Lake Woebegone, Americans are just above average — some of the time.

More disturbing was the highly sensitive scoring process. And actually the conceit of a single country-specific metric of health system performance is the futility of the process itself. We show that single country rankings are fraught with challenges around data availability, transparency and comparability across countries.

For example, although individual health behaviors are important predictors of health utilization and spending, measures such as obesity are not regularly or consistently collected across countries. Even when the data are available, we found that rankings at such 30,000-foot levels are highly sensitive to the statistical approach and set of variables used in a model.

Our work suggests that singular rankings are not well correlated with resource and utilization measures such as physicians per capita, which suggests that factors beyond the control of the health system are at play. One would think that more physicians would lead to better system performance.

The training and payment of physicians is one of the costliest attributes of any industrialized nation. Instead, we see countries with higher rank (Sweden) and lower rank (Hungary) have nearly identical per capita physicians.

In this era of big data, analysts have amassed data from a wide range of sources such that could someday provide new signal for a league table metric and truly provide country-to-country comparisons. For example, a metric could be created from an anonymous population's aerobic activity based on cellphone traveled distance and type of transportation (e.g., car, transport or walking).

Unfortunately, our current health system inputs are stuck in the 20th century. More work is needed to make these connections across countries to improve our comparisons. Improvement in health insurance coverage is a start, but much more needs to be done to identify areas of inefficiency in our health system.

Citizens of the 21st century need to have a more comprehensive set of real-time metrics that are relevant to evolving health systems across the globe. The United States and other nations around the globe spend trillions a year on health care with well over half of the expenditures based on tax receipts of citizens.

Industrialized nations around the world owe it to our children's children to develop appropriate metrics to gauge the effectiveness of health systems expenditures. Until then, our current international health system league tables are statistically unworthy of global discussion.

Stephen T. Parente is a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Bianca K. Frogner is an associate professor at the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington. They wrote this for InsideSources.com.

source: http://www.detroitnews.com

A recent Atlantic piece introduces us to Griffin, a teenage addict from California. Poor Griffin. He was woken up in the middle of the night, thrown on a plane and driven out to the Utah desert to start a rehab program.

His addiction? The internet.

Yes, addiction is a word we throw around a lot today. Supposedly we're "addicted" to Game of Thrones, lattes and Crossfit as well. Lest we forget cigarettes, heroin and vodka.

So what about the internet? Is it the digital crack of our networked age?

Yes, says the media – perhaps because they themselves are addicted to the page views generated by sensationalist articles about the internet addiction of teenagers like Griffin.

The psychiatric community however, says no. Internet addiction is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States.

"Internet Gaming Addiction" was included in an appendix, "as a condition warranting more clinical research and experience before it might be considered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder." But that edition came out in 2013 – eons ago in digital history.

Okay, so here's one way to test your internet addiction:

• Can you get through the week without using the internet?
• Do you ever feel bad or guilty about your internet use?
• Have you neglected your family because of your use of the internet?
• Have you been in trouble at work because of internet use?

Replace "the internet" with "drugs" and you've got questions straight from the website of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, Inc.

Did you say yes to any – or all – of them?

So maybe we can be addicted to the internet. But if it's a drug, what kind is it? For some people, it's crack cocaine or methamphetamine — something that destroys careers and families and lives.

A recent poll by a British law firm revealed that one in seven people have contemplated divorce because of their spouse's social media activity. A teenager ran away from home in China 10 years ago; authorities recently found her, alive and well, living in an internet café playing video games all day.

But for most of us, if the internet is an addiction, it may be more akin to fast food or sugary sodas. It's something that perhaps we don't need to ban, something that is available virtually everywhere, but something we should only enjoy in moderation, lest we suffer from its overuse.

It's true that the internet-as-cheeseburger metaphor isn't perfect. Most of us need to use the internet as part of our jobs, while no one needs sugar-laden sodas to survive. We can replace junk food with salad, but there's no low-fat version of tech.

Our options are either: use the Web more or less. If people are addicted to digital technology the way they're addicted to Diet Coke, Oreos or Big Macs, what business is it of anyone else's? We know that obsessively checking Facebook isn't good for us in the same way that a steady diet of sugar, salt and fat isn't good for us.

But what we eat, like what we click on, is a personal choice. True, some people will eat or drink themselves into an early grave, but the consequences for most people stop at heartburn or an expanded waistline.

We've been through this before with unhealthy drinks. A 2012 attempt by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to limit the sales of oversized sodas gave rise to a wide ranging debate about a nanny state and was ultimately defeated in court.

Within the bounds of the law, adults can do what they choose, including gorging themselves on French fries and ignoring their children in order to play games online. And while some people's internet "addiction" will reach a dangerous, destructive level, most of us will "merely" see a decline in our attention spans, our health and our personal relationships.

That's all? Internet addiction will merely destroy our minds, our bodies and our sex lives. So how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?

But what would a future in which internet addiction is a recognized medical condition look like? Yes, the multibillion-dollar recovery industry would, no doubt, welcome the development. Yet what would it do to our already burdensome healthcare costs?

Would our insurance premiums drop if we could prove we look at our families more than our smartphones? Would we see anti-internet television ads, 12-step groups and tech-free zones in public spaces?

This is no abstract debate amongst addiction experts. A world driven by the internet is the only reality hundreds of millions of young people have ever known. How would you protect the next two billion internet users from its overuse?

We don't yet know the answers to these questions, but we need to start thinking about them. The way we're headed, the next global addicts may be millions of teenagers like Griffin. Tomorrow's great health crisis may not be herbal or chemical, but digital.

source: http://thenextweb.com/

Imagine if you had to pay for treatment of illness out-of-pocket, and that doing so posed a significant strain on your family's finances. Unfortunately, this is the reality hundreds of millions of people around the world face when they go to the clinic. This is not a new challenge by any means, and 100 countries are now working to tackle this issue through universal health coverage (UHC).

This idea of protecting people against catastrophic financial ruin as a result of seeking health services has been aspirational for many years. UHC has been championed as an enabler of improving access and quality of health services around the world while protecting people from the burden of high out-of-pocket expenses. This is not an easy feat, particularly for low- and middle-income countries that are struggling with strained resources and a range of health challenges, including infectious diseases, chronic illnesses, child survival and maternal mortality. But the successes of Mexico, Chile, Thailand and other nations have demonstrated that it can be done. Furthermore, the inclusion of UHC in the recently-adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gives countries the impetus to redouble efforts to make universal health coverage a reality and has triggered renewed interest in this issue from bilateral donors, implementing agencies and the private sector.

Why? Because the interconnectedness between health and economic development is well-established. One need not look further than the Ebola epidemic as a poignant reminder of how infectious disease outbreaks can quickly dismantle years of development progress. Similarly, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancers, heart disease, chronic respiratory conditions and diabetes pose long-term financial stress on families because of high out-of-pocket expenses. Because they hit people during their prime working years, NCDs result in lost wages, causing further economic distress. In effect, the greater global prosperity promised by the SDGs cannot be achieved without UHC.

The addition of UHC in the SDGs will foster greater political commitment and help unlock more resources for this issue. We saw this as the global community worked to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The Rockefeller Foundation and its partners deserve our thanks for building the evidence base and raising the profile of universal health coverage as an enabler of better health and greater prosperity for millions of people around the world.

But achieving UHC is difficult at best. It requires a marriage between the art of allocating resources appropriately with the reality of the burden of disease and what can be done to mitigate it. It calls for balancing the provision of services for the poor with reaching low and middle-income families who neither qualify for subsidized programs, nor can afford high out-of-pocket costs.

Each country has to determine its unique path to UHC, develop a strategy to reach that goal and engage other sectors to support their efforts. Multilateral institutions, private providers, patient groups, NGOs, foundations and companies have the expertise, knowledge and human capacity that can assist countries in achieving UHC.

The World Health Organization and governments need to do more to significantly engage the private sector in finding solutions to support countries in realizing UHC. Many companies already do work to advance progress toward global health goals -- from investing in infrastructures to strengthening supply chains, developing life-saving therapies to training health workers. Indeed, Dr. Stefan J. Oschmann, Vice Chairman and Deputy CEO at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, and President of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, is championing the issue of UHC during his tenure as the leader of IFPMA. This is the type of visionary leadership needed to mobilize efforts to tackle complex challenges.

It is only through greater collaboration across sectors that real progress will be made toward achieving UHC. There is too much to do and too much at stake for the global health community to continue to spin its wheels about why it needs to engage the private sector and other non-State actors. Let's focus on how the private sector can help realize universal health coverage for the millions of people around the globe who need it the most. It's about time.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Prevention measures including bednets and sprays help to bring deaths below half a million in previously vulnerable areas of sub-Saharan Africa, shows study

The number of people killed by malaria dropped below half a million in the past year, reflecting significant progress against the mosquito-borne disease in areas of sub-Saharan Africa that were previously among the hardest-hit.

The World Health Organisation's (WHO) annual malaria report showed deaths falling to 438,000 in 2015 – down dramatically from 839,000 in 2000 – and found a significant increase in the number of countries moving towards the elimination of malaria.

The use of bednets, indoor and outdoor spraying and other malaria prevention measures have averted millions of deaths and saved millions of dollars in healthcare costs over the past 14 years in many African countries, the report said. Africa continues to bear the highest malaria burden of any global region, but death rates from the disease have fallen by 66% across all age groups since 2000, and by 71% among children under five.

Margaret Chan, the WHO's director general, said the progress had been made possible "through the massive rollout" of effective prevention and treatment tools.

"In sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of the population is now sleeping under insecticide-treated mosquito nets, compared to just 2% in 2000," she wrote in the report published on Tuesday.

"A rapid expansion in diagnostic testing, and in the availability of antimalarial medicines, has allowed many more people to access timely and appropriate treatment."

Two countries, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accounted for more than 35% of global malaria deaths in 2015. Yet, the WHO said, an estimated 663m cases of malaria have been averted in sub-Saharan Africa since 2001 as a direct result of the scale-up of three key malaria control interventions: bednets, indoor spraying, and the use of malaria drugs known as artemisinin-based combination therapy. Mosquito nets have had the greatest impact, the organisation said.

However, Pedro Alonso, director of the WHO's global malaria programme, cautioned that new challenges are emerging.

"In many countries, progress is threatened by the rapid development and spread of mosquito resistance to insecticides. Drug resistance could also jeopardise recent gains in malaria control," he said.

In the past five years, 60 of the 78 countries that monitor insecticide resistance have reported mosquito resistance to at least one insecticide used in nets and indoor spraying, the report found. Of these, 49 reported resistance to two or more classes of insecticide.

source: http://www.theguardian.com/

The World Health Organization has considered the HIV virus as one of the biggest scares of sexually active individuals over the past few years. There are at least 38.1 million have been infected with HIV, while there are also over 25 million people that have died because of AIDS-related cases.

HIV or human immunodeficiency virus is classified as a virus that gradually attacks the immune system, which is our body's natural defense against illness. This particular disease also spreads all throughout the body since it destroys a certain type of white blood cells by making copies of itself while inside of them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) lists down HIV as a major global health issue. Because in 2014 alone, there are over 1.2 million deaths reported that had something to do with HIV-related disease.

Back in 2013, the World FactBook releases a list of countries with the highest adult percentage victims of HIV. With all of them being in Africa, it has sent a clear message to the entire world that a cure is needed.

There are more than 2 million people that are newly infected with the disease in 2014 alone. And if we're going to consider the ability of people to control themselves and avoid promiscuity, there's a huge chance that this number will go even higher as each year passes by.

Now with the growing rate of HIV victims all around the world, the need to find a solution becomes more imperative than ever. Mr. Timothy Ray Brown, who is also known as Berlin Patient, has been recorded with no HIV in his body after the stem cell of a naturally HIV immune person has been transplanted to him. Another breakthrough in finding a solution for the disease is the production of engineered molecules. These molecules were able to kill the infected cells and remove all the hidden sources of the virus. However, these molecules gave a promising result, further tests are still required before it can be declared as a cure.

source: http://www.sciencetimes.com/