Tagged: Humanosphere

One of the chronic problems the international community has with almost every disease-fighting campaign has been the need to overcome mistrust — mistrust of government, of foreign health workers or outsider do-gooders in general.

This is, for a variety of reasons, especially true of vaccines.

So many worry that such global health efforts will suffer from the revelation, reported first in The Guardian and later by the New York Times and others, that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a fake vaccination program in Pakistan in order to collect DNA samples.

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A year ago the Seattle microfinance firm Unitus closed its doors, laid off most of its staff and didn’t really tell anybody (including some major donors) why it did so.

Unitus, which had claimed its primary mission was to help poor people, also happened to have made a lot of money — having invested in an Indian company, SKS Microfinance, which had pursued this anti-poverty financing scheme as a for-profit venture.

Now, Unitus has been resurrected as Unitus Labs.

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There’s a Twitter war going on right now that has prompted Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn to write to Jim Larkin, the CEO of Village Voice which also owns the Seattle Weekly, regarding child sex trafficking. McGinn has also asked the Seattle Police Department to look into these allegations.

The Twitter battle is basically an assault on the Seattle Weekly based on claims that the periodical, as part of the Village Voice Media chain, publishes ads that put minors at risk of prostitution. Here’s the Weekly’s rebuttal to those claims.

The story now is that actor Ashton Kutcher has taken up the Twitter assault on the Weekly and other publications carrying these ads.

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The southern African nation of Botswana has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV infection and yet is also widely considered one of the big success stories in the fight against AIDS.

On Tuesday, at a Seattle event sponsored by the World Affairs Council, former Botswanan President Festus Gontebanye Mogae spoke and took questions from an audience of several hundred people at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has compiled a list of the top 10 achievements in global health over the past 10 years.

The report notes, however, that “major disparities persist” and much remains to be done even in these areas that have shown most improvement.

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In 2009, Seattle-based PATH, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched a project aimed at combating cervical cancer in India by introducing the HPV vaccine.

The vaccine program didn’t work out as planned.

This week, several “invitation-only” meetings will be held in Seattle featuring hundreds of leading experts in global health from around the world.

They all revolve around the Pacific Health Summit, which starts Wednesday. For an audio summary and Q & A about the summit, listen to the above podcast.

One of those confabs orbiting the summit is the Global Health Research Congress, which starts today.

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There appears to be a deep-seated intellectual boil festering at the base of our discussions around philanthropy, foreign aid and development, reports our global health blog Humanosphere.

Tom Paulson, who runs the blog, says he’s not sure anyone really knows what they mean.

He is sure the experts on philanthropy, aid and development all think they know what they mean, “but as a journalist assigned to cover this stuff — and asked to translate it into “normal” language — I’m increasingly running into debates about fundamentals, if not outright confusion.”

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