Category: Berita

This week, the World Federation for Mental Health met in Cairns, Australia to discuss mental healthcare, particularly suicide and self-harm. Approximately one million people a year lose their lives to suicide, according to the World Health Organization. That’s one person every forty seconds dying by their own hands. Yet we have heard almost nothing about mental health in the 2016 US election cycle. With millions of people suffering from a variety of mental health issues in every part of the globe, why are so few talking about access to mental healthcare?

Here are three of the biggest issues that need to be addressed as part of comprehensive health policies:

Addiction: Around the world hundreds of millions of people are currently considered addicts, including 23.5 million people in the United States. Social stigmas suggest that those who abuse alcohol or drugs are morally or ethically reprehensible, but mental health providers know that addiction is often the result of early trauma. It can also be a response to poverty or limited life circumstances. What addiction is at its core is a mental and public health issue, not a choice to behave badly.

There is no question that addicts in almost every country in the world would benefit from healthcare reform, particularly improving access to addiction treatment. We can all learn from Portugal’s commitment to helping addicts recover. Connecting those addicted to drugs or alcohol to mental healthcare either through drug courts or individually sought-out therapeutic treatments, including counseling, has been shown to greatly decrease the likelihood that an individual will continue using. We know what good treatment entails, but it takes policy makers willing to invest in it to make it available to those in need.

Depression: The debilitating pain of depression affects an estimated 350 million people worldwide. Unfortunately, too often those who suffer from depression do not have access to quality mental health care. Whether the problem is lack of insurance to cover costs, long-wait periods to see psychotherapists or too few professionals to help those in need, those with depression will often go untreated. This lack of treatment can lead to suicide. World suicide rates have increased 60% in the last 45 years and suicide is now a leading cause of death internationally. Now is the time to invest in mental healthcare to provide treatment to those who suffer from depression.

Displacement: The world is now “home” to more than 65 million refugees, more than after World War II. The need for mental healthcare among this population, which by definition has experienced trauma, has never been greater in anyone’s living memory. While xenophobic concerns paint those escaping conflict as possible perpetrators of violence themselves, mental health care professionals and the nations that welcome these individuals, have an obligation to assist displaced persons in their psychological healing, while educating the larger community on the lasting effects of violence and trauma.

Failing to provide refugees with access to mental health care could leave a generation of people with deep psychological wounds. Ensuring refugees and the communities that host them have access to timely mental health services may prevent generational trauma and form meaningful relationships between communities in a time of increasing isolation and fear.

Mental health issues cost more than 2 trillion dollars a year, which is nothing compared to the untold human suffering that mental illness and addiction create. Yet we can do something to help those in need, one person at a time, by advocating for better access to mental health care in our communities. We know how to address this suffering; we simply need to be sure that those who need care can access it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

 

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – NGOs, state organizations and the military must coordinate to provide the primary care that people fleeing Mosul will need, the World Health Organization (WHO) said at a conference in Erbil Thursday, as Peshmerga and Iraqi forces tightened the noose on ISIS in its stronghold of Mosul.

“The primary purpose of the meeting was to try to identify who either from the department of health or the NGOs could potentially step up and provide service coverage in those sites and identify where those gaps are,” Scott Pendergast, Director of Strategy Planning for Emergency for WHO told Rudaw. “The first stage is to try to match those gaps.”

Pendergast said “gaps” referred to the distance from those in need of care, the screening process for health security regulations and receiving the assistance required.

As much as security is a raised concern, health concerns, particularly preventing the spread of disease is just as prevalent.

“As we have been led to believe and understand, should ISIS use a population and as human shields and as the offensive goes on we can anticipate a lot of trauma and injury,” Altaf S. Musani, Representative of Mission at World Health Organization told Rudaw.

“That access trauma and injury will need to be managed within hours if not minutes to ensure survival. So an unknown factor is, what is the distance between the mustering side and the screening side and the actual settlement period?” he asked

“If it’s short,” Musani explained, “then obviously health care providers can easy stabilize and trauma and triage out those who are the most wounded. If it’s a distance that is great and a distance that is not accessible, it just lends to the complexity of ensuring survival. This is why we are encouraging the coordination with the military by the departments of health and those NGOs who actually have the appetite to work in conflict zones to close that gap.”

“In Mosul, the displacement flows will happen in multiple directions,” Musani added. “That is forcing us to plan, not in one governorate but in five. These are just a few complexities that bring concern on how do we better prepositioned health capacity”

Pendergast felt confident in the coordination established from the conference. “From what we did today, there doesn’t seem to be enormous gaps,” he reflected. “There seems to be enough people around who can provide those services but we just have to make sure we can provide them at the right quantity and that they are supported throughout financing staff or supplies.”

“I think this is one of the first times where we are actually creating a structure where we can bring the department of health, the NGOs together with the military to actually plan the health operations,” Pendergast relayed. “This needs to be continued primarily at the zone level where they are going to be making day to day decisions about movement of particular capacities to meet moving needs and then we need to bring this up to this level on a regular basis to make sure planning out our resources well.”

Since the operation to liberate Mosul commenced Monday morning, 135 buildings have been destroyed crucially damaging the city’s infrastructure, according to Anna Soave, Human Settlement Advisor for United Nations Human Settlement Programme. This was particularly true for the city’s airport of which there is “nothing left”.

From the damage, massive looting has been occurring to the point where there is nothing left from the remaining buildings. “How will things be restarted,” she rhetorically asked the attendees at the conference.

http://rudaw.net/

 

The number of cases of sexually transmitted infections (STI) reported in the US in 2015 is at an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s because budget cuts to state and local STI programs have left fewer people with access to testing and treatment, the agency says.

“We’re very concerned about these unprecedented high number of cases of STIs in the United States,” Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC’s Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention, tells The Verge. “These new number are making it really clear that many Americans are not getting the preventive services they need.”

In 2015, there were more than 1.5 million reported cases of chlamydia (up nearly 6 percent since 2014), about 400,000 cases of gonorrhea (up nearly 13 percent), and about 24,000 cases of primary and secondary syphilis (up 19 percent), according to a report released today by the CDC. These three diseases are also the most commonly reported sexually transmitted infections (also known as sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs) in the US.

Chalamydia is an infectious disease that affects both men and women, but is particularly dangerous for women. If left untreated, it can make it difficult or impossible for women to get pregnant later on. Gonorrhea can lead to lasting health problems like infertility, long-term abdominal pain in women, and even death if the infection spreads to a person’s blood or joints. And syphilis can create skin rashes and sores, and can damage the brain, nerves, and heart if left untreated. (Syphilis is divided into four stages: primary, secondary, latent, and late.)

All three STDs can be cured with antibiotics, but drug-resistant versions of the disease are much more dangerous and harder to treat. In July, the CDC announced that gonorrhea may soon become resistant to the only two antibiotics left to treat it. “We’re very concerned about the threat of untreatable gonorrhea,” Bolan says. Chlamydia and syphilis are also increasingly becoming resistant to antibiotics, according to the World Health Organization.

The uptick in the number of cases is caused by reduced access to STD testing and treatment, the CDC says. More than half of state and local STD programs have experienced budget cuts, the agency says, and more than 20 health department STD clinics closed in one year alone. Sexually transmitted infections cost the US health care system nearly $16 billion each year, according to the CDC.

“We have reached a decisive moment for the nation,” Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, said in a statement. “STD rates are rising, and many of the country’s systems for preventing STDs have eroded. We must mobilize, rebuild and expand services — or the human and economic burden will continue to grow.”

Young people, as well as gay and bisexual men, are most at risk of contracting an STD. In 2015, about two-thirds of chlamydia diagnoses and half of gonorrhea diagnoses were among Americans ages 15 to 24 years old. Men who have sex with men accounted for the majority of new gonorrhea and primary and secondary syphilis cases. But women’s rate of syphilis diagnosis also increased by more than 27 percent during that period. That’s concerning because pregnant women who have syphilis can pass the infection onto babies, causing the baby to be born dead or have developmental problems.

The only way to respond to the increasing number of STD cases is to expand access to screening and treatment, according to the CDC. “STD prevention resources across the nation are stretched thin, and we’re beginning to see people slip through the public health safety net,” said Mermin. “Turning the STD epidemics around requires bolstering prevention efforts and addressing new challenges — but the payoff is substantial in terms of improving health, reducing disparities and saving billions of dollars.”

Update October 19th 04:41PM ET: The story has been updated to include comments from Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC’s Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention.

http://www.theverge.com/

 

The Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases 2013–2020 proposes that “as appropriate to national context, countries consider the use of economic tools that are justified by evidence, and may include taxes and subsidies, to improve access to healthy dietary choices and create incentives for behaviours associated with improved health outcomes and discourage the consumption of less healthy options”.

The Comprehensive Implementation Plan on Maternal, Infant and Young Child Nutrition 2012 also considers that “trade measures, taxes and subsidies are an important means of guaranteeing access and enabling healthy dietary choices”. Furthermore the Report of the Commission on Ending Childhood recommends to “implement an effective tax on sugar-sweetened beverages”.

To address the increasing number of requests from Member States for guidance on how to design fiscal policies on diet, the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened a technical meeting of global experts in fiscal policies on 5–6 May 2015 in Geneva.

The main objectives of the meeting were to review evidence and existing guidance, discuss country case studies and provide considerations with regards to the scope, design and implementation of effective fiscal policies on diet.

It was concluded that there is reasonable and increasing evidence that appropriately designed taxes on sugar sweetened beverages would result in proportional reductions in consumption, especially if aimed at raising the retail price by 20% or more.

http://www.thedailystar.net/