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Global leaders — from politicians and CEOs to academics and Nobel laureates — will gather next week in Davos, Switzerland for the 44th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. At this year’s forum, which runs from January 22-25 and will focus on the theme The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business, health and wellness will be a bigger focus of the conversation than ever before.

The forum’s first-ever health summit will feature 25 sessions on topics including mental health, personalized medicine, health systems in emerging economies, and other pressing public health issues. More than 2,000 participants representing over 100 nations will take part in the discussions, many of which will focus on the intersection between health and broader economic and social issues.

“The time is right to elevate the conversation on health,” said Robert Greenhill, managing director and chief business officer at the Forum, in a press release. “For the past few years, the critical state of the financial system absorbed much of Davos participants’ attention. This year, there is a sense that the global economy is out of intensive care and embarking on rehabilitation. As we ask how metaphorically to improve the economy’s health, literally improving the population’s health is a good place to start.”

Mental health issues will be a particular focus of the conversations. The global costs of poor mental health and its repercussions are estimated at $16 trillion over the next 20 years, according to the World Economic Forum. The World Health Organization has estimated that at least 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression, and that it is the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But the participants at Davos won’t just be talking about health — they’ll be actively encouraged to make healthy decisions of their own. As part of the Davos health challenge, participants will be encouraged to make healthy choices when it comes to food, sleep and physical activity, and to track their activity for the week using Jawbone fitness trackers.

Some of the week’s notable speakers on technology and health-related panels include Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer; Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini; Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group; actor Matt Damon; and Peter Salovey, president of Yale University.

Arianna Huffington and Mika Brzezinski are taking The Third Metric on a 3-city tour: NY, DC & LA. Tickets are on sale now at thirdmetric.com.

source: www.huffingtonpost.com

 

Humans face the very real risk of a future without antibiotics, a world of plummeting life expectancy where people die from diseases easily treatable today, scientists say.

Experts tracking the rise of drug resistance say years of health gains could be rolled back by mutating microbes that make illnesses more difficult and expensive to cure and carry a higher risk of death.

Some say the threat to wellbeing is on the scale of global warming or terrorism — yet resistance is being allowed to spread through an entirely preventable means

— improper use of antibiotics.

“It is a major public health problem,” Patrice Courvalin, who heads the Antibacterial Agents Unit of France’s Pasteur Institute, told AFP.

“It is about more than not being able to treat a disease. It will erase much progress made in the last 20-30 years.”

Without antibiotics to tackle opportunistic bacteria that pose a particular risk for people who are very ill, major surgery, organ transplants or cancer and leukaemia treatment may become impossible, he explained.

“In some parts of the world, already we have run out of antibiotics,” said Timothy Walsh, a professor of medical microbiology at Cardiff University.

“In places in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, possibly Russia, Southeast Asia, central South America, we are at the end game. There’s nothing left. And unfortunately there is nothing in the pipeline either.”

Resistance to drugs emerges through changes in the bacterium’s genetic code — altering the target on its surface to which antibiotics would normally bind, making the germ impenetrable or allowing it to destroy or “spit out” the antibiotic.

These super-germs triumph through Darwinian pressure, helped by humans.

The wrong antibiotics, taken for too short a period, in too low a dose or stopped to early, will fail to kill the altered microbes.

Instead, the drugs will indiscriminately damage other bacteria and give the resistant strain a competitive advantage — allowing it to dominate and spread.

At the base of the problem is doctors prescribing antibiotics wrongly or unnecessarily, and the ease with which medicines can be obtained without a script in some parts of the world, including Asia and Africa.

As much as 70 percent of antibiotics are given for viral infections, against which they are wholly ineffective, the experts say.

Then there is the problem of farmers in countries like the United States adding antibiotics to animal feed to help herds grow faster.

Compounding all of this is the rise in global travel — a boon for bacterial spread, and a sharp drop in antibiotics development blamed on a lack of financial incentives for the pharmaceutical industry.

A return to the pre-antibiotic era?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says drug resistance “threatens a return to the pre-antibiotic era”.

“Many infectious diseases risk becoming untreatable or uncontrollable,” it states in a factsheet on antimicrobial resistance.

A case in point: some 450 000 people developed multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB in 2012 and 170,000 died from it. MDR TB does not respond to the most potent TB drugs — isoniazid and rifampin.

Nearly 10 percent of MDR cases are thought to be of the even deadlier XDR (extensively drug resistant) variety which does not respond to a yet wider range of drugs.

Like other drug-resistant microbes, MDR and XDR TB can be transferred directly between people — you can get it even if you have never taken antibiotics in your life.

“Antibiotic resistance is an emerging disease and a societal problem. The use you can make of an antibiotic depends on the use made by others,” said Courvalin.

Another worry for health planners today is the spread of a multi-drug resistant strain of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae — a common cause of infections of the urinary tract, respiratory tract and bloodstream, and a frequent source of hospital outbreaks.

In some parts of the world, only the carbapenem antibiotics class remains effective, but now signs are emerging of resistance even to this last line of defence.

Antibiotics are thought to have saved hundreds of millions of lives since Alexander Fleming first discovered penicillin in 1928.

But even Fleming’s own warnings of impending drug resistance went unheeded, and now scientists say peop

le may start dying from infections like meningitis and septicaemia that are eminently curable today.

“If we keep going like this, the vast majority of human bacterial pathogens will be multi-resistant to antibiotics,” said Courvalin.

The answer? Prudent drug use — better and faster diagnosis to determine whether an infection is viral or bacterial and whether it is even susceptible to treatment.

Farmers must stop feeding antibiotics to their livestock, and hospital and individuals improve their hygiene to prevent bacterial spread.

Yet few experts believe the damage can be undone.

“The bugs have become very sophisticated, they’ve become very complex,” said Walsh.

“You can decrease resistance or reduce it, but never completely reverse it.”

source: www.nst.com.my

 

And the U.S. didn’t even make the top 20. The Netherlands came out on top because of low diabetes rates, low food prices and nutritional diversity. Chad landed last on the list for its costly, unhealthy food options.

Thanks in part to a diet that places the emphasis on vegetables and dairy products, the Netherlands has been named the healthiest country in the world to eat.

Though the country is better known for its liberal drug laws than its cuisine, the Dutch diet ranked the healthiest out of 125 countries in a wide sweeping report out of Oxfam that looked at factors like food availability, affordability, food quality and obesity rates.

According to the index “Good Enough to Eat,” the Netherlands emerged the leader thanks to relatively low food prices, low prevalence of diabetes, and better nutritional diversity than its European rivals.

Overall, the list is dominated by European countries, with France and Switzerland tying for second place, followed by Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden tying for third.

Notable absentees include the UK, Canada and the U.S.

Asian giants South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, performed the best when it comes to healthy eating habits and food availability, given their lower rates of diabetes and obesity and equally low rates of malnutrition in children.

At the other end of the spectrum, Chad landed dead last on the list, due to high food prices, poor nutritional value as well as limited sanitary conditions that includes access to clean water.

Second from the bottom are Angola and Ethiopia.

Interestingly, when it comes to unhealthy eating habits, Saudi Arabia was the lowest scoring country, ranking the worst for its high prevalence of diabetes — a whopping 18% of the population is diabetic. A third of the population is also considered obese.

The fattest country on the list is Kuwait, where 42% of the population is obese.

To compile their ranking, researchers looked at figures from eight studies published out of international groups like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Labor Organization.

Meanwhile, a 2006 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that a healthy traditional Dutch diet — defined as a high intake of vegetables, fruit, dairy products and potatoes — was more feasible and healthier for the longevity of older Dutch women, compared to a Mediterranean diet.

Here are the top countries for healthy eating, according Oxfam’s “Good Enough to Eat,” index:

1. Netherlands
2. France, Switzerland
3. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden
4. Australia, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal

Source: www.nydailynews.com

 

Lack of health care providers or lack of money to pay for medicine results in 100 million people being reduced to poverty every year, the head of the World Bank said Tuesday.

In remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said economic growth is not possible without universal health care.

“All countries must harness investments in other sectors beyond health that provide the essential foundations for a healthy society,” he added.

“Achieving universal health coverage requires solutions beyond the health sector, including investments in people, like education and social protection, but also things like roads, water and sanitation, and information technology. For example, policy interventions to curb tobacco use or improve air quality, diet and road safety can all play a critical role in addressing the alarming increase in chronic conditions and injuries in so many emerging economies.”

Devising programs to help people requires tremendous political will, Kim said, but efforts in many parts of the world are succeeding.

“What is the lesson for us here today, as we hear the same negative arguments about universal health care?” Kim asked. “We saw with AIDS that concrete action often only happens when there is a powerful political and social movement behind it.

“And just as the AIDS activists drove the movement for treatment — and brought along the scientists, policymakers, the donors and businesses — today around the world we are seeing a large, and growing, movement to achieve universal health coverage.”

Good health and related improvements are an investment, Kim stressed.

“The new report of the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health estimates that about 24 percent of growth in ‘full income’ in developing countries from 2000-2011 resulted from health improvements,” he said. “Full income is defined as the sum of the income growth measured in the national income accounts, plus the value of the change in mortality (or life expectancy), in that period.

“Projecting forward to 2035, the commission report says that better investments in health could yield a 9-to-20-fold return in full income.”

How health care improvements come about will vary from country to country, he said.

“When Ethiopia launched its free universal primary care program in 2003, at its center was a network of health extension workers,” Kim said. “These 35,000 women — 10th-grade high school graduates recruited from their communities —were trained for one year and redeployed back into their communities.

“The latest survey data show that child mortality fell by over one quarter, as did child stunting. For women, anemia rates fell and contraceptive use nearly doubled, helping to reduce the total fertility rate.”

source: www.allvoices.com

 

It is three years since India last reported a case of polio. Patralekha Chatterjee reports on how the country appears to have finally managed to beat the disease.

Despite a healthcare system beset by severe problems, India has ushered in the new year with an achievement to be proud of.

In 2009, India reported 741 polio cases, more than any other country in the world, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. The last case was reported from the eastern state of West Bengal in 2011, when an 18-month-old girl was found to have contracted the disease.

The country faced unique challenges in eradicating polio.

Among them was the high population density and birth rate, poor sanitation, widespread diarrhoea, inaccessible terrain and reluctance of a section of the population, notably members of the Muslim community in certain pockets, to accept the polio vaccine.

Nicole Deutsch, head of polio operations in India for UN children’s charity Unicef, said: “Despite these obstacles, India proved to the world how to conquer this disease: through the strong commitment of the government, seamless partnership comprising the government, Rotary clubs, WHO and Unicef, and above all the tireless hard work of millions of front-line workers – vaccinators, social mobilisers and community and health workers – who continue to implement innovative strategies to rid India of polio,”

The introduction of bivalent oral polio vaccine in 2010 also helped India to battle the disease. Previously, India had been using a monovalent vaccine that protected only against type 1 poliovirus transmission, not type 3. which was causing repeated disease outbreaks.

But it was organisation that was key in enabling India to cover the last mile in its battle against polio.

In a vast country of more than a billion people who are culturally, economically, linguistically and socially diverse, “micro-plans” helped because they tossed up precious data about the specifics of a particular place – areas to be covered by each vaccination team on each day of the immunisation campaign, names and designations of the vaccinators, supervisors and community workers assigned to the area along with the vaccine, logistics distribution plan and so on.

But data alone did not deliver results. Unicef set up the Social Mobilisation Network for polio in 2001 in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

The initiative was a response to resistance against the polio vaccine. Families were refusing to immunise their children in some districts in Uttar Pradesh.

There were many reasons why this happened – parents did not see polio as a risk; repeated immunisation rounds had created doubts in their minds; and some believed rumours that linked the polio vaccine to impotency.

The Indian government and its polio partners realised that a new approach was needed.

This led to strategies to make polio vaccination more acceptable among people who had been resisting it.

‘Holistic’

Children who suffered from severe bouts of diarrhoea did not fully benefit from the oral polio vaccine.

So, community mobilisers started talking about the need for hand-washing, hygiene and sanitation, exclusive breastfeeding up to the age of six months, diarrhoea management with zinc and oral rehydration therapy, and routine immunisation, necessary to sustain the success of polio eradication.

This holistic approach has paid off.

India’s polio campaign gathered momentum when it focused on marginalised and mobile people, and began working in earnest with religious leaders in Muslim communities to urge parents to immunise their children.

For example, in Bihar in eastern India – once a polio hotspot in the country – a key focus of the polio programme is migrants.

In recent years, continuous vaccination has been conducted at 51 transit locations at the state’s international border with Nepal and 11 important railway stations. Bihar also saw special drives during popular festivals and fairs.

While India appears to have stopped indigenous transmission of wild poliovirus, the risk of importation is real and has increased since 2013 with outbreaks in the Horn of Africa region and the Middle East, in addition to the continuing poliovirus transmission in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

“India needs to stay extremely vigilant and continue its efforts to ensure that the children remain protected against polio, until the disease is eradicated globally,” said Nicole Deutsch of Unicef.

“India plans six polio campaigns in 2014 and 2015. In each campaign, 2.3 million vaccinators will immunise nearly 172 million children.”

India has also set up polio immunisation posts along the international borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma and Bhutan to vaccinate all children up to the age of five years crossing the international borders.

India’s dramatic turnaround paves the way for polio-free certification of the entire South East Asia Region of the World Health Organization. The South-East Asia Regional Certification Commission for Polio Eradication (RCCPE) is expected to meet in Delhi in the last week of March 2014.

“If the commission is convinced that there is no wild poliovirus in the region and the surveillance quality is good enough to pick up any wild poliovirus and phase 1 laboratory containment work has been completed, it will certify the South East Asia Region of WHO as polio-free,” a WHO spokesperson told the BBC.

India’s successful control of polio has had other benefits.

A health ministry official connected with India’s National Polio Surveillance Project (NPSP), a collaboration between the government and the WHO, said strategies that worked in the case of polio were now being used to push up routine immunisation.

This is good news. Too many Indian children still die because they do not get the vital vaccines.

source: www.bbc.co.uk