Beryl Benderly's blog

Diabetes and hypertension are dangerous non-communicable diseases (NCDs) common in many countries, but people often do not know that they have them until a complication occurs.  In the Central American country of Belize, for example, where 13% of the population of 330,000 is diabetic and nearly 30% are hypertensive, they rank as the top two causes of death. Health care professionals can, however, diagnose them easily through simple tests and they are are manageable, and sometimes even reversible, if identified early and treated properly. That’s why accessible health care is vital for finding and treating those affected and preventing serious or even fatal complications. 

Health experts recognize smoking as one of the world’s leading causes of preventable death. Each year, according to the World Health Organization, smoking-related deaths top 5 million worldwide, a toll that WHO predicts will rise by more than 3 million a year by 2030 if numbers of smokers continue to increase in low- and middle-income countries. Tobacco’s strong addictive effect makes quitting di

Vaccinating children against communicable diseases is “one of the most cost-effective public health interventions available,” says the authoritative Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, which was published in 2006 It is, according to UNICEF, also vital to reaching Millennium Development Goal 4 (MGD4), reducing childhood mortality by two thirds by the year 2015.

Giving people cell phones and free phone minutes or small quantities of cash may seem an unlikely way of helping to cure a disease that each year kills 2 million people worldwide. Researchers at the Innovations in International Health (IIH) group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe, however, that a system they have devised that uses phones and small rewards of free minutes or money can help to overcome the central challenge of treating tuberculosis in developing countries. A controlled trial in Pakistan will soon test whether they are right.

A year and a half ago, only 10 people a week came to a health clinic in Kamuli, Uganda, seeking family planning services. By January 2011, that number was nearly 8 times greater, thanks to a results-based financing grant awarded in September 2010 by STRIDES for Family Health, a Ugandan agency funded by the United States Agency for International Development, to Family Life Education Program (FLEP), the local organization that runs the clinic. The new funding now permits the clinic to provide its clients counseling and a complete range of contraceptive options, from short-term methods such as injectables, condoms and

Long-term participation in a results-based health program influences women to make safer childbirth choices, reports an article published online on January 28 in the journal Health Policy and Planning and scheduled to appear in the March paper issue.

Performance-based programs could play a significant role in programs to increase efforts to prevent vertical transmission of HIV in resource-poor situations, write three French public health experts in a peer-reviewed article published in mid-November. Early in the HIV epidemic, more than a third of babies born to HIV-positive mothers acquired the infection during birth or from breastfeeding. Today, with regimes of antiretroviral drugs for HIV-positive expectant mothers now the standard of medical practice in high-income countries, fewer than 2% of such infants in those countries become infected. 

Today’s event launching the new Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health appears to have been quite a hot ticket in New York.  “Hundreds of people” had to be turned away from the meeting room, said the session’s moderator, TV journalist Zeinab Badawi.  Interest may have been extra high because a digital “Maternal Death Clock” above Times Square has been recording a death in childbirth somewhere in the world every 90 seconds since Monday morning.