World Health

At a UN-backed meeting in Beijing, experts called for the promotion of increased condom use for sex workers and clients as a way to stop the spread of HIV.

The meeting offered an opportunity for participants to review successful local efforts to promote "100 per cent condom use" or "no condom, no sex" in relations between sex workers and clients. Approaches vary, but generally involve cooperation among health authorities, police, entertainment venue owners, and sex workers trained to be peer educators, the agency said.

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In any given year, the number of measles related deaths in the United States can be counted on a single hand. But throughout much of the developing world hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children under five, still die each year from measles. In response to this often overlooked public health threat, a coalition of American and international organizations (including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Red Cross, UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Foundation) teamed up in 2000 to form the Measles Initiative. The goal: cutting measles deaths by 50% in 2005 and 90% by 2010. This week, a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet confirmed that that the Measles Initiative in fact exceeded its interim goal, and have cut worldwide measles deaths by 60% from 1999 to 2005. From The Lancet (registration required):

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) announced its plans yesterday to expand their efforts in delivering immunization and preventative treatments using a multi-disease strategy. Noting the 60 percent reduction in measles death over the past six years and the related health gains, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said, "Increasingly, this initiative is delivering a bundle of life-saving and health-promoting interventions: bed nets for malaria, vitamin A to boost the immune system, de-worming tablets that help keep children in school, polio vaccine, and tetanus vaccine for pregnant women." More Related: Dont forget to check out Nothing But Nets, which partners with the Measles Initiative.

"Surveillance for the HIV virus is weak in most of the world and prevention and treatment programmes often fail to reach high-risk drug users, homosexuals and sex workers, the World Health Organisation said on Friday. In a message marking World AIDS Day, being celebrated under the theme of Accountability, the WHO's acting director-general Anders Nordstrom said that tackling the AIDS epidemic remained one of the world's most pressing public health challenges." More

"New research says if the world acts now to decisively contain the AIDS pandemic, 28 million lives could be saved by 2030.... AIDS accounts for about 2.8 (m) million deaths every year. But in a paper, two researchers with the World Health Organization estimate at least 117 (m) million people will die from AIDS by 2030. Global mortality projections were last calculated a decade ago. At the time, researchers assumed the AIDS outbreak would start declining around the year 2000. One of the researchers, Dr. Colin Mathers, says what happens in the future depends very much on what the international community does now." More

"The global HIV epidemic is growing, leaving an estimated 39.5 million people worldwide infected with the deadly virus, the United Nations said Tuesday. AIDS has claimed 2.9 million lives this year and another 4.3 million people became infected with HIV, according to the U.N.'s AIDS epidemic update report, published on Tuesday. Spread of the disease was most noticeable in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia." More

BBC News: "A new report from the United Nations Development Programme has demanded a big increase in spending to provide clean water. The UNDP wants another $4bn a year spent, and says that water has not received the attention it deserves.

"Ten years after the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome, which promised to reduce the number of undernourished people by half by 2015, there were more hungry people in the developing countries today - 820 million - than there were in 1996.... The report listed a series of steps which, it said, was needed to eradicate hunger in the years ahead. They included: focussing programmes and investments on "hotspots" of poverty and undernourishment; enhancing the productivity of smallholder agriculture; creating the right conditions for private investment, including transparency and good governance; making world trade work for the poor, with safety nets put in place for vulnerable groups; and a rapid increase in the level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to 0.7 percent of GDP, as promised." More

"In a week marking both World Poverty Eradication Day and World Food Day, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today called for simultaneous action on both issues, warning that it will be impossible to eradicate one blight without the other. "Hunger and poverty are ugly siblings. You cannot get rid of either unless you tackle the other as well... Hunger, after all, is both a source and a consequence of extreme poverty. A hungry man cannot think beyond his next meal... This has devastating consequences for the economic and social development of society as a whole," Mr. Annan told government representatives and other officials at UN Headquarters." More