Initiative to help reporters cover European health
AHCJ has launched an effort to help reporters understand and cover health issues in Europe.
This new resource includes a series of web pages devoted to European issues and resources, as well as a listserv to allow journalists to share information, ask questions, join a debate, open fresh debates or post requests and queries similar to what happens on AHCJ’s main discussion list.
There is substantial health news in Europe that is certainly relevant there, but understanding those issues may help reporters everywhere put their reporting on in a global context. European countries are seeing proposals for cross-border health care, issues around the movement of health professionals and the drain of qualified staff from the world’s poorest countries to Europe, the United States and Australia.
Trudy Lieberman, AHCJ’s immediate past president, is coordinating the effort.
“For many years we have wanted to enlarge the reach of AHCJ to help journalists in Europe tell the stories of their own health care systems,” Lieberman said. “We believe that American journalists can learn from their counterparts overseas and vice versa, especially when it comes to covering infectious diseases, new drugs and treatments, access to care and what it costs. This new resource now allows them to do that. We look forward to our new trans-Atlantic dialogue.”
AHCJ Executive Director Len Bruzzese says John Lister, a veteran health journalist in England and a senior lecturer at Coventry University, has agreed to serve as the European web coordinator. He will help identify issues and bring together resources from across Europe that will improve the quality of health and medical journalism and enhance its professional standing. On these pages, you will find some discussion points and background on some emerging issues in Europe, as well as a resource page, identifying useful sources of official and alternative information on topics in the news.
“John is excited about finding contributors from other European nations who can feed into the website and start some cross-border discussions – and perhaps collaborations,” Bruzzese said.
UN: Africa plagued by counterfeit malaria/HIV pills
Filed under: Hot Health Headline, Public health, Studies
A recent assessment by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that weak and or/useless drugs have proliferated across Africa and Asia, with malaria-ridden West Africa being the hardest hit (102-page PDF). Smugglers, organized criminals and shady manufacturers in more developed countries are getting rich at the expense of individuals and countries with little capacity to distinguish between fraudulent pharmaceuticals and the real thing.
From the accompanying press release:
As much as 50-60 per cent of anti-infective medicines tested in Asia and Africa have been found to have insufficient amounts of the active ingredients. Medicines with low levels of active ingredients pose a greater hazard than those with none, because substandard antibiotics and anti-malarial drugs can promote the development of drug resistant strains, or “super bugs” that can spread beyond the region.
The UN report calls for immediate action, including the naming, shaming and banning of companies producing the faux pills and stronger government regulatory efforts.
Lancet assesses Gates Foundation achievements
The journal Lancet tackled the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a recent issue, assessing the heavyweight’s grants and spending. The study seeks to chronicle the foundation’s grants from 1998 to 2007 (a time period in which it handed out almost $9 billion), and the accompanying editorial provides a clear-eyed, critical review of the foundation’s work, transparency and priorities.
Some of the more striking numbers from a report full of them:
- The $1.2 billion spent by the foundation in 2007 on global health alone rivaled the World Health Organization’s entire annual budget (some of which is, not coincidentally, itself provided by the Gates foundation).
- Three quarters of global health funding went to “HIV/AIDS, malaria, vaccine-preventable diseases, child health,
tuberculosis, and other tropical diseases and neglected
diseases.” - The 1094 grants issued from 1998 to 2007 ranged from $3,500 to $750 billion.
- Twenty organizations shared 65 percent of the foundation’s global health funding.
- As a whole, NGOs and nonprofits got $3.3 billion while Universities got $1.8 billion. The rest went to other organizations and governments.
- Administrative expenses totaled $264 million in 2007.
The report also breaks down Gates funding by geography:
In terms of the geographical location of primary recipients, $3·62 billion (40%) of all funding was awarded to supranational organisations such as global health partnerships and intergovernmental organisations. Of the remaining amount, 82% ($4·39 billion) went to recipients based in the USA, 13% ($0·70 billion) to recipients in Europe and other high-income countries (eg, Australia), and 5% ($0·24 billion) to recipients in low-income and middle-income countries.
(Hat tip to Rahul Parikh, who provides a particularly useful breakdown of the numbers involved.)
Prevention vs. treatment in global health
AHCJ members Christine Gorman and Maryn McKenna participated in a blog experiment, in which a group of people decide to blog about the same topic at the same time - similar to a blog carnival. The experiment, focused on global health and “prevention vs. treatment,” generated posts from a variety of viewpoints:
- Prevention vs. Treatment: A False Choice
- The gradual abandonment of anti-tobacco/anti-smoking programs in the U.S.
- Why we tend to value current health more than future health“
- The need for a vaccine against methicillin resistant staph aureus
- Why prevention vs. treatment is the wrong way to think about drug resistance to malaria
- Proving prevention works is a lot harder than you might think
- HIV Information for Myanmar offers a few words on the greater good from the late Bogyoke (General) Aung San, who led the fight for Burmese independence after World War II.
- Whether concerns over health reform in the U.S. will crowd out discussion of global health
- On why good decisions in public health “are about balance, and looking for long-term systemic solutions instead of the quick fix“
- And, from a public relations perspective: differences between ’selling-in’ stories that have a prevention angle over those that emphasise treatment“
-
Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
