Global Health Progress

Countries in North Africa are boosting precautionary measures in heightened efforts to prevent bubonic plague from spreading to their territories.

According to the London-based Al-Quds Al-‘Arabi, Algeria has documented 50 cases of the plague, some within 15 kilometers (9 miles) of the border with Libya, where two people have died of the disease. As a result, Algiers has tightened medical surveillance on its borders with Libya.

Countries that received the most airline passengers from Mexico this spring were the most likely to see H1N1 swine flu infection, new research says.

The finding confirms that tracking global flight patterns to determine where an infectious disease may strike next could provide governments and public health officials with a means of preventing and dealing with such threats, according to an analysis by researchers in Canada.

When former Santa Maria resident Tsige-Roman Gobezie returned to her native Ethiopian village after decades spent abroad, the abject poverty of the people living there stunned her.

Five years later, the woman known as “Ziggy” to friends and family cashed in on her retirement savings to open the Gobezie Goshu Home for the Elderly, a haven for disabled and or destitute seniors in Adwa.

The Ajloon region in Jordan received a shipment of 15,000 pneumococcal 7-valent conjugate vaccine doses, as a donation from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals in order to help boost Jordan’s efforts to combat pneumococcal disease.

Ajloon was selected by The Ministry of Health being an isolated area where all 5000 children living there will be vaccinated against life threatening diseases like meningitis, bactaeremia and septicaemia.

University of Minnesota Medical School researchers have discovered an important new insight into how a commonly prescribed drug may work to treat those infected by a parasitic flatworm.

The Schistosomasis parasite infects about 200 million people in tropical areas worldwide and is endemic in more than 70 countries, where people become infected simply by bathing, drinking, or cooking water contaminated with the flatworm. Although not immediately deadly, left untreated, the disease can permanently damage the lungs, kidney, liver, and intestines and ultimately lead to death.

Developing countries like Rwanda need to conserve as much water as it can sustain so as to counteract the problems of global warming and maintain its agriculture at a level commensurate to the needs of the whole population.

Rwanda being a hilly, makes it possible to collect water from the steep landscape, conserve it and used for agriculture and domestic purposes.

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The International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research (ISSTDR) promotes research on sexually transmitted diseases and facilitate the timely exchange of information among research investigators.

The Berega Orphanage, a cluster of neat stucco cottages in this village of red dirt roads and maize plots, is a far cry from what the name suggests. The 20 infants and toddlers here are not put up for adoption, nor kept on indefinitely without hope of ever living with a family.

Most of their mothers died giving birth or soon after — something that, in poor countries, leaves newborns at great risk of dying, too. The children are here just temporarily, to get a start in life so they can return to their villages and their extended families when they are 2 or 3 years old, well past the fragile days of infancy and big enough to digest cow’s milk and eat regular food.

In one of the most field-intensive efforts to explore the connection between malaria and tropical deforestation, a team led by Jonathan Patz, a specialist in the link between environment and health at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has established a strong correlation between the extent of forest destruction and the incidence of the Amazon’s most dangerous malaria vector, the mosquito Anopheles darlingi.

“The Amazon study site was chosen because of the rapid increase in malaria in the early 1990s there,” Patz notes. “We saw a major upsurge in the incidence of the disease that coincided with an extensive push in human settlement. It was critical to ask why.”

Swine flu has infected 59,814 people in 113 countries worldwide and killed 263 people, according to new figures released by the World Health Organisation Friday.

The data showed 3,949 new infections since the last bulletin only two days ago, and 25 additional deaths, the WHO said.