Indonesia to increase Tobacco Excise Tax by 8.5% in Y 2013

The Indonesian government sets to raise Tobacco tariffs by an average 8.5% next year in efforts to increase state revenue and also discourage people from taking up the health-risking habit, local media reported here Wednesday.

Indonesian Finance Minister Agus Martowardojo quoted by the Jakarta Globe Wednesday as saying that the government expects revenue from tobacco excise will rise to 88.02-T Rupiah, some US$9.17-B, year fro, 9.80-T Rupiah, about US$8.31-B this year.

Indonesia is Southeast Asia's largest economy and one of the world's largest Tobacco markets, with liberal advertising and low taxes.

Due to weak law enforcement, no minimum age has been set for buying cigarettes. Efforts to reduce advertising, promotion and sponsorship of Tobacco products have failed to significantly curb the number of smokers.

About 70% of adult males smoke in Indonesia, which provides jobs to millions of industry workers.

(source: www.livetradingnews.com)

A biomedical engineering professor and director of several Duke organizations that apply an engineering framework to the world's great health inequities, Robert Malkin has made himself known—both at Duke and across the planet. Malkin's "Pratt Pouch," a ketchup-like packet that facilitates the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, was recently named one the World Health Organization's "Top 10 Most Innovative Technologies," and was recently selected as an awardee of the "Saving Lives at Birth" Grand Challenge. In light of the upcoming World AIDS Day, Towerview's Matthew Chase sat down with Malkin to discuss the role that biomedical engineers play in the field of global health.

Can you briefly explain how the Pratt Pouch works, and describe its design process?

The idea is that a mother who is HIV-positive would, if given no other HIV intervention, have an HIV-positive child, and then there would be no hope for curing the AIDS/HIV problem because each generation would simply inherit it from their parents. That cycle can be broken with pharmaceuticals. The problem is mothers... who end up delivering at home for any reason—because they go into labor very late or the labor is very quick, or they are many, many, many hours from a hospital—they don't have access to the drugs for their child. And you do need to provide a drug to both the mother and the child to give you the highest probability of preventing the transmission of the disease from the mother to the child.

So the Pratt Pouch allows the mother to take the meds home with her, and if for whatever reason she can't make it home to the clinic in time to have her baby there, she can just tear open the pouch and drip the medication into the child's mouth, preventing the child from becoming HIV-positive, and then later on go back into the clinic and pick up a more consistent and steady set of meds for the child to prevent longer-term exposure and transmission to the disease. So essentially it's a drug delivery system that allows the medication to be preserved so that the mother can deliver it to her baby appropriately and safely to her baby at home.

As you transition from design to implementation, what challenges are you facing?

We've been meeting with Ministers of Health of Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Ecuador, Namibia and Kenya to see whether they'd be interested in using the pouch in their systems, but there are many significant problems. First of all, we're only looking to solve the problem for the very hard-to-reach mothers. Any mother who is near the clinic should go to the clinic to have the baby.... They often, even at those very remote sites, have some access to midwives or other traditional birthing assistants, but that does not mean they have access to medication. Those traditional birthing assistants are, in some locations, allowed to distribute medications; and in other locations, they're not.

So that's the first hurdle: how are we going to get medicine, legally, to somebody who actually distributes it to the mother, very far from a hospital or clinic or pharmacy? So for example, in Uganda, traditional birthing assistants and something called community health distributors are permitted to distribute certain medications. And so for Uganda, what we're looking for is permission to add another medication to their list, and then those mothers whose status is known to be positive could have access to this medication through community health distributors.

In other places, like Tanzania, there is no authority given to community health workers or traditional birthing assistants to distribute medication, so in Tanzania we are looking at these vans which drive out from clinics to these very remote sites—sometimes 5 to 10 hours from the site, the pharmacy—with health workers once a month. So once a month they go to this very remote village which is when they do all of the antenatal care...to try to prevent the transmission.

In Ecuador, it's completely different: there are enough clinics, but these clinics are relatively remote. So there is no question of legality: these are regular clinics, they are staffed by nurses who definitely have the authority to distribute, but they're relatively remote, so the issue we are facing there is just training: how do we get the training all the way out to the end of the system there?

You've recently publicly spoken out against interventions that merely provide donations of medical equipment to developing countries. Given that this ideology may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, can you explain this belief?

I am a strong believer that donations do not help, at least in the realm of medical equipment. And just to give you a couple of quick facts, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, stated that 70 percent of critical donated equipment does not work, and 30-40 percent never worked. And in fact there is an interesting study that came out last year that found that 60 percent of donated equipment is known broken at the time of donation. I don't know exactly what the right number is—our data show that the number is around 40 percent, actually—but the problem is if you go into these hospitals you see huge piles of donated, unused medical equipment. And there's a cost associated with that, not only in terms of square feet in a building, which could be used for patient care, but also the proper disposal of medical equipment is not cheap. The hospital across the street here is using $100 to $200 per piece of medical equipment to dispose of the equipment.... And so every time you donate something which doesn't contribute to the hospital, you're placing a burden on that hospital.

The other end of the scale is that it's really, really hard to donate something and make it work. We just completed a study... of almost 1,000 pieces of donated, not-used equipment.... And less than 50 percent of it is working two years later. Think about this for a minute: If I donated you a computer, but the keyboard was in Thai, or the keyboard was in Khmer, and so was the manual, could you really operate your computer, if every screen came up in Cyrillic or Mandarin? You know, we deal with populations all the time who don't speak English, or English is their fourth or fifth language, so that's one issue.

Or they simply can't get the supplies.... If I give you a washing machine, but you can't find laundry detergent, is there really any value to the donation of the washing machine? Of course, that was just a metaphor—medical devices have much more complicated supplies that are required. And also broken parts; everything breaks, but you can't find the replacement parts.... And so for all of these reasons it is very hard to donate medical equipment and make it work.

What do you think of the role that biomedical engineers currently play in the global health community? Do you feel that your profession is under-represented?

Well the answer to this is very simple—just think about the last time you went to the doctor. Probably within about 10 minutes of being called back, they had weighed you, taken your temperature, probably your blood pressure and they may have taken a blood sample, which would have to be sent off to a lab somewhere.... Every single one of those measurements—and you're only 10 minutes into your visit at the doctor—has required a piece of medical equipment.

The fact of the matter is that when you go into a developing world clinic, almost none of those things work. Simple things like taking your blood pressure may be impossible, taking your weight may be impossible, taking a blood sample and sending it off to a lab might be a dream. And so I think it's very clear that biomedical engineers have a critical role for the future of global health, and I think we're taking up the challenge. I think it's slow, and I think the reason is fairly clear. Compared to other areas of biomedical engineering, there is relatively little funding for addressing global health challenges.

But I don't think that's the only reason: I also think we're relatively late to the game. Public health officials have been working on questions of malaria for probably 100 years or even more, not that they have ignored biomedical engineers in addressing that—remember that building dams and other things is also a key part to fighting malaria. But biomedical engineers are relatively late to the game. It's only in the past 30 or 40 years that you've seen biomedical engineers at all, and probably only in the past 10 to 20 that you've seen biomedical engineers focusing on global health.... And I think another issue its that, unlike the public health professionals which have realized for many, many years that they have to be on the ground to address the problem, biomedical engineers are just getting there, where we have key partnership in key locations on the ground.... Even the concept that an engineer would benefit from rotating through a developing world site for 5 to 10 months—or even 5 to 10 weeks for that matter—which is common in public health professionals that are interested in global health issues, even that concept is relatively new. So I think we need to give it some more time before we really develop a full head of steam in this area.

Four years ago, you accepted a role as a representative to the Executive Board of the World Health Organization. What was that experience been like, and in general what role should the WHO play in addressing global health challenges in upcoming years?

There are a few things that you need to understand to understand the role of the WHO. First of all, I was surprised—and I will take full blame for being ignorant—I was surprised at how political of an organization it is. It really is an organization of nations who are trying to cooperate and collaborate to solve these global health challenges, and there really is a huge range of views on these issues. So you end up with a really political body.

But I'll tell you another thing that you need to think about when you think about the WHO: the entire budget is like $850 million. My son's school district has a larger budget to serve the county that we live in than the WHO has to serve the entire globe. So this is actually a very small organization, and yet the challenges are enormous. From the point of view of medical equipment, which is really what I know and have interacted the most with the WHO, there basically is now one person at WHO who is focused on medical equipment, exclusively. So of the entire globe, there is one person. As you can imagine, this is a very talented person, but a huge amount of responsibility for a small amount of staff. So I would like to be able to say that the WHO is going to play a very critical role in health care technology, but the reality of the matter is that they are a relatively small player. I think that companies, nongovernmental organizations and private sector actors, like universities, are going to play a much, much larger role moving forward than the WHO is just able to.

I really want to encourage undergraduates to get involved in global health—they can make a difference right now, they don't need to wait until they have an MD or a biomedical engineering Ph.D. or something like that. There are lots of programs on campus right now—from DukeEngage to the global health certificate and many others—that they can get involved in right now to make a difference.

(source: www.dukechronicle.com)

The reporting of four more novel coronavirus infections in recent weeks, raising the total to six, has prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to suggest that governments consider a major escalation of testing for the virus, a potentially burdensome undertaking.

In a Nov 23 statement, the WHO reported three new cases, with one death, in Saudi Arabia and one new case in Qatar. The latest Saudi Arabian cases included two in the same household, but it was not known if person-to-person transmission was involved.

The global case count since the virus emerged in June has reached six, of which two were fatal. The latest cases noted by the WHO apparently include two that were reported earlier by Saudi health officials and the news media.

Until more is known, the WHO statement said, "It is prudent to consider that the virus is likely more widely distributed than just the two countries which have identified cases. Member States should consider testing of patients with unexplained pneumonias for the new coronavirus even in the absence of travel or other associations with the two affected countries."

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), in a risk assessment released today, said it was considering the implications of the WHO recommendation and commented that increasing testing to that extent would probably be burdensome for European countries.

The novel coronavirus, a relative of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus, emerged in June, but it was not publicly announced until late September.

The first case was in a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian man who died in a Jeddah hospital Jun 24. The second case struck a Qatari man who fell ill in early September and was flown to London, where he apparently remains hospitalized. Both patients had pneumonia and acute renal failure.

A Saudi health official reported the third case on Nov 4, in a Saudi man in Riyadh who had been critically ill but was recovering. The fourth case, as reported Nov 21 by a Saudi newspaper quoting government sources, involved another Saudi man who was hospitalized in Riyadh and was said to be improving.

The Nov 23 WHO statement gave few details on the latest four cases, but it said two of the patients came from the same family and household and had similar symptoms. One of the patients died and the other recovered, the agency said.

Further, two more members of the same family were sick with similar symptoms, and one of them died, the WHO said. Test results for the deceased family member are pending, and the other patient, who is recovering, tested negative.

Investigations concerning the source of infection, the route of exposure, and the possibility of human-to-human transmission are ongoing, the WHO said.

The latest Qatari patient got sick in October and was flown to Germany, where he was hospitalized and received intensive care but eventually recovered and was discharged this week, according to Germany's Robert Koch Institute.

In a Nov 23 statement, the institute said the patient was treated for 4 weeks at a hospital in North Rhine–Westfalia. No illnesses have been reported among hospital personnel, though an investigation of the patient's contacts is ongoing.

The institute said samples taken while the patient was still in Qatar were tested in the United Kingdom and found to be positive.

The WHO in its statement did not list specific reasons for its suggestion that the novel virus may exist in countries other than just Saudi Arabia and neighboring Qatar.

In response to a query on the topic today, WHO spokesman Glenn Thomas told CIDRAP News via e-mail, "This is based on the fact that the cases confirmed to date are geographically far apart, and that investigations are still ongoing into the characteristics of this novel coronavirus."

The ECDC, in its statement today, noted that the possibility of person-to-person transmission in the Saudi Arabian family case cluster has not been excluded. It added, "There is indication that some cases had a history of visits to farms prior to illness, but no details are available concerning the kind of farms or related animal contact."

The agency said healthcare workers who treat people from the Middle East who have severe respiratory infections may be at risk for infection with the novel virus. It's possible, though, that the infections are more widespread, as suggested by the WHO, and seroepidemiologic studies are needed to investigate the possibility of mild and asymptomatic cases, the EU agency said.

"The fact that there have not been any expanding clusters of cases indicates that currently the risk for EU citizens to acquire these infections has not increased and remains very low, based on the current information," the ECDC said.

The ECDC statement evidenced some wariness about the WHO suggestion to consider testing patients with unexplained pneumonia even if they have no ties to Saudi Arabia or Qatar. The ECDC said it is considering the recommendation in relation to the potential burden of testing and the possibility of false-positive results.

For European countries, following the WHO testing suggestion probably would mean a "high" burden, the ECDC said. It estimated that EU countries have roughly 750,000 cases of community-acquired pneumonia of unknown cause each year.

(sumber: www.cidrap.umn.edu)

The World Health Organization has warned countries to heighten their surveillance for possible cases of infection with the new coronavirus, suggesting patients with unexplained pneumonias should be tested even if they don't have links to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The agency also suggested investigating clusters of severe respiratory infections, and clusters of such illnesses in health-care workers, regardless of where they happen in the world.

Up until now the WHO has said that testing for the new coronavirus should be restricted to patients with severe respiratory infections who had recently travelled to or who were residents of a country that had recorded cases. To date the only confirmed infections have been in Qatari and Saudi nationals.

That change in advice, the basis for which the WHO did not explain, raised eyebrows among some infectious diseases experts, who were quick to try to read between the lines.

"That suggests that they have the idea that it's more widespread. Where does that idea come from? What's the evidence?" wondered Dr. Ron Fouchier.

The Dutch virologist leads the laboratory which in June found that a new coronavirus — from the same general family as the virus that caused SARS — was behind the infection of the first identified case, a man from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

If the WHO has any evidence that the virus has spread further afield, it hasn't revealed it.

But its concern may stem from the fact that over three million Muslim pilgrims have recently returned to their home countries after attending this year's Hajj, which ended in late October.

The WHO's new advice was contained in a statement the agency released Friday in which it announced the global count of confirmed infections with the new virus has risen to six. Two of the confirmed cases have died. All six cases were male.

It also revealed that Saudi Arabia has reported a cluster of cases, with two men confirmed and two others under investigation. The four men shared a household in an undisclosed part of the country.

All four were sick around the same time, suffering similar symptoms, the WHO said. Of the two men under investigation, one died. Test results are still pending on samples taken from the man during his illness.

The other man survived and tested negative for the virus, the WHO said. But it did not disclose the type of test used or when the testing was done.

Until more information is known, it is not clear that the test result can be considered reliable, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

The reliability of the test could vary, depending on when the person was tested, what kind of test was used and the kind and calibre of the specimen being tested, he said.

"If the person had an illness similar to the other illnesses, then ... I believe that you'd have to consider that this test may have been a false negative," said Dr. Osterholm, adding testing the survivor's blood for antibodies would shed some light on the situation.

Both the changing WHO advice and the lack of clarity on the testing underscore a problem with this situation, both Dr. Osterholm and Dr. Fouchier suggested.

Very little about the cases is being publicly shared. And the international teams of scientists who travelled to Saudi Arabia to look for possible sources of the virus have released no information about their investigations.

Dr. Fouchier was front and centre in the laboratory effort during the 2003 SARS outbreak. It was his lab, at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, that proved what's called Koch's postulates — the test that confirmed that the newly identified coronavirus was actually causing the disease SARS.

During the early days of the SARS outbreak, the WHO rapidly put together a virtual network of laboratories, tapping into expertise around the world to combat the alarming new disease.

But this time? In the summer, Dr. Fouchier's lab identified and sequenced the new coronavirus and developed a test for it. But since then, it's been "radio silence," Dr. Fouchier said in an interview Friday.

"Everything I've heard since then has just come from the lay press, which is completely in contrast to how we acted back in the SARS era," he said.

"That was completely different during the SARS outbreak. We were all talking together, exchanging results and giving each other ideas about what to test, how to test, where to test. And none of that is happening now. We just have to rely that they're doing the right thing."

Officials in the know should be sharing more information, Dr. Osterholm agreed.

"At this point in any outbreak investigation, there clearly is more information that is known by health officials than likely has been shared," he said.

"But if there were ever a time for complete transparency, now is the time. We've learned that in the past and I'd hate to see us have to relearn the lesson again."

(source : www.theglobeandmail.com)

21 November 2012 – African countries must improve the ways in which they collect, organize and transmit health information to their citizens, a United Nations official said today at a regional meeting in Luanda, Angola.

In his report presented to the UN World Health Organization's (WHO) 62nd session of its Regional Committee for Africa, WHO Regional Director for the continent, Luis Sambo, also highlighted the challenges facing countries to produce good quality and timely information to their cities.

Among these are efforts and initiatives that seek to acquire health information, which are fragmented across sectors, levels, projects, disciplines and specialties. Other challenges include poor generation of evidence to implement policies and a lack of collaboration among stakeholders to analyze and share data and evidence.

To address these challenges, Dr. Sambo recommended that each country establish an online platform to archive and monitor national information on health. A clear road map and timeline should be established for this process, he added, while assuring African countries that WHO is ready to provide detailed advice and technical support on this process.

The creation of each online platform, called a National Health Observatory (NHO), should involve and coordinate all health stakeholders in each country, the WHO official said, including public health policymakers, experts, and international partners.

In addition, countries that have already established NHOs should ensure that these are meeting the specific needs of their countries and are used to share and use important information that will lead to better health for Africans.

During his presentation, Dr. Sambo also underscored that African countries should draw from resources from global health initiatives (GHIs), which target specific diseases, to strengthen their health systems.

"The dramatic increase in the number of GHIs means that countries need to improve how they work with different stakeholders in the health sector," WHO stated in a news release on Dr. Sambo's report. Pooling resources from different sources would lead to good quality, integrated health services.

Sharing information among countries is also vital to prevent the spread of diseases, Dr. Sambo said, noting that although countries are making efforts to detect and control the international spread of infectious diseases, more needs to be done to effectively respond to them.

In particular, Dr. Sambo underlined the importance of countries implementing their plans under the International Health Regulations (IHR), which were agreed to by all African countries in 2007. While 43 out of the 46 Member States of the WHO African Region have conducted capacity assessment in line with IHR requirements, none has fully implemented their national IHR plans.

IHR aim to quickly identify an outbreak or any other public health threat, including chemical and radiological hazards that could have an international impact, so that a fast and effective response can be organized.

To implement the IHR plan, Dr. Sambo recommended countries carry out needs assessments to map unmet needs, mobilize and allocate adequate human and financial resources, strengthen surveillance systems and health laboratory capacities, and empower IHR focal points with the skills and resources that will ensure timely verification and notification of public health events to governments and WHO.

He also advised that, as a first step, countries should request a two-year extension to enable full implementation of IHR core capacities by 2014.

The WHO Regional Committee for Africa is the Organization's governing body in the continent. There are currently 46 Member States in the region, and the Committee's main functions entail formulating regional policies and programmes, and supervising the activities of the regional office.

(source: www.un.org)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has come under fire for allegedly blocking the attendance of non-governmental organisations at its latest meeting on counterfeit and otherwise illegal medicines in Buenos Aires.

The complaint has been raised by a group of academics led by Professor Amir Attaran from University of Ottawa, Canada, who have called for an international treaty to tackle the trade in what the WHO currently refers to as substandard/spurious/falsely-labelled/falsified/counterfeit medical products.

The latest development comes against a backdrop in which efforts to coordinate an international, regulatory or legislative response to medicines counterfeiting have been routinely undermined by political and commercial in-fighting.

Attaran claims that NGOs are being kept away from the WHO meeting at the request of India, although India's Health Ministry has denied the accusations. Another NGO - the World Federation of Public Health Associations - also says it has been excluded from the meeting.

The WHO's executive board adopted a resolution earlier this year to set up a member state 'mechanism' to tackle the trade in counterfeit medicines from a public health perspective and without any consideration of intellectual property (IP) issues.

Last year, the WHO agreed to set up the intergovernmental working group to look into its handling of SSFFCs amid claims that counterfeits and legitimate generics were being conflated by those pursuing an IP rights agenda.

The Buenos Aires meeting is the first to be held since the mechanism was proposed, and has been convened to make decisions on the structure and governance of the platform. The agenda and documents from the ongoing meeting are available here.

Meanwhile, Attaran et al make the plea for an international treaty in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), in which they write that "the twin challenges of safeguarding the quality of genuine medicine and criminalising falsified ones has been held back by controversy over intellectual property rights and confusion over terms".

The international treaty should follow similar lines to those already in place to help fight counterfeiting of banknotes since the 1920s, and the recently-agreed Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) that will "legally mandate global tracking and tracing for tobacco products and internationally criminalise illicit trade".

Among the measures proposed are a clear definition for the different types of illegitimate medicines - an attempt to tackle the oft-repeated claim that in some cases legislation confuses the term counterfeit with legitimate generic medicines - and the drawing up of specific crimes in international public health law on the manufacture, trafficking or sale of falsified medicines.

The academics also call for intergovernmental cooperation on the reporting, investigation and prosecution of falsification cases, including seizure of criminals' assets, and the drawing up of standards to assist in the creation of a track-and-trace system for medicines.

"WHO's member states should ask WHO staff to embark on a similar process to that which created the FCTC," write the authors of the article.

(source: www.securingindustry.com)

GENEVA (Xinhua) - The World Health Organization (WHO) said Saturday evening it is deeply concerned with the escalating situation in the Gaza Strip and Israel and its impact on the health and lives of civilians.

WHO said in a statement that before the hostilities began, health facilities had been severely over stretched mainly due to the siege of Gaza -- there has been a lack of investment in training, equipment and infrastructure, poor maintenance of medical equipment and frequent interruptions of power supplies.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza was also facing critical shortages of drugs and disposables, according to WHO.

Consequently, Gazan hospitals are now having to deal with the growing number of casualties with severely depleted medical supplies.

WHO is working with its partners and local authorities to ensure that essential medicines and medical consumables are delivered to where they are needed most.

WHO has appealed to the international and regional community for urgent financial support to provide essential medicines to cover pre-existing shortages, as well as emergency supplies for treating casualties and chronic illness.

The death toll of Palestinians has risen to 45 since Wednesday afternoon, with another 500 people injured, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said Saturday night.

(source : philstar.com)

SEOUL, South Korea - A South Korean Health Ministry official says 176 countries, including European Union members and China, have agreed on an international protocol to eliminate tobacco black markets.

If the protocol is ratified, the countries will be required to introduce systems to track tobacco products and regulate supply chains.

Illegal trade accounts for about 10 per cent of the tobacco market and results in lost tax revenue of $40.5 billion annually.

The agreement was reached at a meeting in Seoul of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The parties will also discuss guidelines on taxation.

The United States, Switzerland and Cuba are not bound by the pact since they are not parties to the convention.

(sumber: www.canadianbusiness.com)