SciDev.Net: Focus on Poverty: Sharing genetic data in health crises “Genetic information that could help slow disease outbreaks may be kept private by researchers out of fear of violating patients’ rights — that was one of the concerns expressed in a Nature article recently. … That’s problematic, since the open…

U.N. News Centre: Eliminating sheep and goat plague will boost livelihoods and nutrition, says U.N. official at conference “The United Nations agricultural agency…outline[d] a strategy in Côte d’Ivoire [Tuesday] for the total eradication of sheep and goat plague by 2030 at an international conference that began [Tuesday] in the country’s…

Media outlets report on results from two Ebola experimental drug trials published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday. The reports, titled “A Recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Ebola Vaccine — Preliminary Report” and “Phase 1 Trials of rVSV Ebola Vaccine in Africa and Europe — Preliminary Report”, suggest…

FORYOYYA Newspaper/allAfrica: Gambia to Introduce Inactivated Polio Vaccine “The Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) under the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare … on Wednesday, 1st April introduced the Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV) in line with the global polio eradication initiative spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO) to maintain…

Humanosphere: Study: Zambia’s malaria success story masks basic health failures Tom Paulson, founder and lead journalist at Humanosphere, discusses findings from a study examining health trends in Zambia. He writes, “that while Zambia has made great progress against malaria over the past decade or so, it was losing ground on many…

Médecins Sans Frontières: Liberia: No vaccinations for months has put children at risk “Routine vaccination activities in Ebola-affected West African countries have been significantly reduced since the outbreak began. In Montserrado County, Liberia, MSF recently conducted a measles vaccination campaign with adapted safety protocols. Philippe Le Vaillant, MSF representative in…

The Guardian: Foreign aid close to record peak after donors spend $135bn in 2014 “Aid spending by the world’s richest states hovered around an all-time high last year, but development assistance to the least-developed countries (LDCs) fell by 16 percent from the year before, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and…

Reuters summarizes criticism of the global community’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Reuters: Ebola response of MSF and ‘boiling frog’ WHO under scrutiny “A decade ago, scientists would have laughed at the idea of Ebola as a public health emergency of international concern. Today, they are shocked…

News outlets report on actions undertaken in countries worldwide to prevent or prepare for Ebola. Agence France-Presse: Benin postpones Africa health meet over Ebola “A meeting of African health ministers scheduled for early September in Benin has been postponed because of the Ebola epidemic, an official said Sunday…” (8/24). Bloomberg…

Humanosphere: Booming African population leads UNICEF to call for more investments in children Development blogger Tom Murphy discusses a report (.pdf) released by UNICEF that supports the prioritization of investing in children’s health, education, and protection to achieve economic benefits in Africa (8/22).