As Breast Cancer Awareness Month ended in the U.S. last week, new information reminds us that focus shouldn't be delegated to just one nation, let alone to just one month. AP had a story yesterday not only on the rise of breast cancer in poverty-striken nations, but on how women are developing the disease at a much younger age than in the developed world. Additionally (and not surprisingly), diagnosis is often made late in the game:

International cancer specialists meet this week to plan an assault on a troubling increase of breast cancer in developing countries, where nearly two-thirds of women aren't diagnosed until it has spread through their bodies.

Adding to the problem, some worrisome data suggests that breast cancer seems to strike women, on average, about 10 years younger in poor countries than it does in the U.S. No one knows why.

"Today in most developing countries you see a huge bulge of young, premenopausal women with breast cancer," says Knaul, who heads Harvard's Global Equity Initiative and was herself diagnosed at age 41 while living in Mexico.

New Harvard research is estimating that developing counties will account for 55 percent of the world's 450,000 expected breast cancer deaths this year. Fortunately, there are some initiatives in place like the Global Equity Initiative and the Breast Health Global Initiative working towards increasing access to care and early diagnosis in various countries worldwide, but it's apparent that things aren't getting better. There just simply isn't enough being done.

by Adele Waugaman

Could a mobile phone be a key tool in the prevention of disease outbreaks and epidemics? Judges on the Wall Street Journal’s Technology Innovation Awards panel believe so.

DataDyne.org, a core partner in the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation’s mHealth (mobile health) program, has just won the prestigious award in the Healthcare IT category. An article in today’s paper explains:

In developing countries, gathering and analyzing time-sensitive health-care information can be a challenge. Rural health clinics typically compile data only in paper records, making it difficult to spot and to respond quickly to emerging trends.

With EpiSurveyor, developed with support from the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, health officials can create health-survey forms that can be downloaded to commonly used mobile phones. Health workers carrying the phones can then collect information—about immunization rates, vaccine supplies or possible disease outbreaks—when they visit local clinics. The information can then be quickly analyzed to determine, say, whether medical supplies need to be restocked or to track the spread of a disease.

A key advantage of EpiSurveyor is its sustainability: the software is free and open source, meaning that country health officials can download health surveys and modify them to meet local needs. For example, last month Kenyan health officials adapted EpiSurveyor to help track and contain a polio outbreak in the northern Turkana district. 

Although large-scale immunization efforts eliminated the last indigenous cases of polio in Kenya in 1984, recent inflows of refugees fleeing violence in neighbouring Sudan renewed the threat of a polio epidemic. Health workers in Kenya used a web-enabled version of EpiSurveyor to help track and contain these outbreaks. On the DataDyne blog, health worker Yusuf Ajack Ibrahim noted how immediate access to health data enabled health workers to refine their emergency vaccination campaign:

Weakness noted were acted upon immediately. Some of the actions taken were redistribution of the vaccines, on the job training for our health workers, staff redeployment, immediate case investigation of suspected AFP cases, and change of [the] social mobilization strategy.

The Foundations invested $2 million to support the development, piloting and subsequent expansion of DataDyne’s EpiSurveyor health data-gathering software for mobile devices. In partnership with the World Health Organization and national ministries of health, the Foundations are helping to bring to scale the EpiSurveyor mHealth program in over 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The new mHealth Alliance, announced earlier this year by the UN Foundation, Vodafone Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, will build on this effort by promoting thought leadership, global advocacy and public-private sector collaboration to help bring the smartest ideas in mHealth to scale around the globe.

Appendicitis is a weird illness. It’s more common in the wealthy world than the developing world, even though it doesn’t seem to be lifestyle based. Poor people in wealthy countries have the same low appendicitis rate. It’s more common now, all over the world, than it was fifty years ago but it isn’t contagious from person to person.

We used to blame the appendix for this. We called it vestigial, and removed it at the drop of a hat. Charles Darwin himself told us it no longer had a purpose.  We don’t need it to digest, and you don’t find it in other mammals.

We’ve got new research, though, and it’s not the appendix causing the trouble – it’s our modern lives. The appendix only started getting useless about a hundred years ago. It’s a reservoir for the healthy bacteria we need to recover from revolting intestinal ailments like diarrhea. When we don’t get sick that often, however, the immune system doesn’t have enough to do. Appendicitis is one result; allergies are another.

That’s also why appendicitis rates are lower in the developing world. Without consistent access to clean water, our immune systems – and our appendixes - have work to do.  They help us fight off cholera and dysentery instead of getting all wound up and attacking our own bodies.

Nothing but Nets, as part of its efforts to deliver bed nets to vulnerable populations in Africa, has put a panel of experts together to give you the answers, whether that question be how long a bed net lasts or how do you keep them off the black market. Check 'em out.