CIDRAP News: Experts review 1918 pandemic, warn flu is global threat
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu with a symposium about influenza pandemics: when and if they will strike, how ready the United States is to confront a pandemic, and how to do so. … Luciana Borio, MD, of the White House National Security Council, said the administration also sees the threat of pandemic flu as a global health crisis. ‘Flu is our number one health security issue,’ said Borio. ‘We do not close borders to control flu.’ Borio … said that a universal vaccine is a focus of the Trump presidency…” (Soucheray, 5/7).

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Government Executive: State Department Clashed With USAID Over Redesign
“While the Trump administration continues to delay the promised release of last year’s agency-submitted reorganization plans, the inspector general for the U.S. Agency for International Development has offered a detailed portrait of how the ‘redesign’ process unfolded at both USAID and the State Department. USAID and State staffers clashed over a shared project that many employees felt lacked transparency and reliable data on promised savings, according to a recent letter the watchdog sent to three senators. … State’s team criticized many of the USAID-initiated proposals in such areas as humanitarian assistance, foreign policy, and strategic international financing because State’s decisions regarding these areas had not been finalized. In the end, six of USAID’s 21 original plans were removed, said the report to Senate Appropriations Committee members Thad Cochran, R-Miss. (since retired); Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C…” (Clark, 5/7).

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Reuters: Taiwan blames China for absence from U.N. health meeting
“China is disregarding the health of the people of Taiwan by blocking the island’s participation in an annual U.N. health meeting later this month, the Taiwan government said. Taiwan’s China policy-making body said late on Monday the exclusion of Taiwan from the World Health Assembly (WHA) for a second consecutive year showed Beijing’s lack of will to improve relations…” (Yu, 5/8).

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Reuters: U.N. food agency aims to boost aid to North Korea but lacks funds
“The United Nations food agency said its chief [are scheduled to] visit North Korea on Tuesday to look into boosting food distributions to hungry women and children, in the latest sign of an opening in the isolated country. … ‘Funding shortfalls have meant that rations have had to be reduced and suspended in some cases,’ WFP said in a statement coinciding with the start of the May 8-11 visit by WFP Executive Director David Beasley…” (Nebehay, 5/8).

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U.N. News: Largest-ever global response to cholera targets 2 million people in Africa
“The largest cholera vaccination drive in history targeting two million people across Africa is underway, the United Nations announced on Monday, in response to a series of recent deadly outbreaks of the waterborne disease. … The drive targets Zambia, Uganda, Malawi, South Sudan, and Nigeria, and will be completed by mid-June. The vaccines are funded by the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership known as Gavi, and were sourced from the global stockpile…” (5/7).

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Associated Press: Bootleg liquor, not water, killed Cambodian villagers (5/7).

Devex: Q&A: CARE Bangladesh country director on Rohingya crisis (Welsh, 5/8).

Financial Times: India’s health care: does Modi have the right cure? (Kazmin, 5/7).

The Guardian: U.N. sexual misconduct chief was promoted while facing harassment claims (Ratcliffe, 5/8).

The Hill: How Ebola entered the American consciousness: A Trump tweet (Wilson, 5/8).

Intellectual Property Watch: Unitaid Calls For Proposals On TB, Hails New Insecticide (Adepeju, 5/7).

Intellectual Property Watch: U.S. State-By-State Analysis Shows Benefits Of Funding Global Health Research (Adepeju, 5/7).

News Deeply: Nutrition Interventions Alone Not Enough to Reduce Stunting: New Report (Green, 5/8).

Thomson Reuters Foundation: ‘Game-changer’ phone app aims to end child marriage in Bangladesh (Banerji, 5/6).

TIME: How Imams, Royalty, and Family Celebrations are Wiping Out Polio in Nigeria (Kluger, 5/7).

U.N. News: U.N. forum to coordinate global efforts to address worsening water shortages (5/7).

Xinhua News: Feature: Midwives in war-torn Afghanistan eager to work despite cultural, economic barriers (Behbud, 5/7).

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The Week: Cannot be complacent
Stephen S. Morse, professor of epidemiology and director of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Certificate at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health

“The response to the Zika virus is fairly typical of both our strengths and weaknesses in dealing with infectious diseases, especially when they emerge. … [B]ut these efforts were somewhat slow to get started and preceded by the usual complacency. … We really need to be more agile and proactive in our response. We neglect public health measures at our peril. Vaccines are good public health measures, but public health is not just vaccines. … Aedes aegypti, the chief mosquito vector for yellow fever, dengue, and Zika (among others) came to the Western hemisphere with the slave trade, over 400 years ago. … Ironically, if the mosquito control efforts [of the 20th century] had been kept up, we probably would not be talking about [dengue or Zika] today. The Indian subcontinent, fortunately, has never had yellow fever but has plenty of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Only our vigilance and good fortune can prevent yellow fever from becoming established the same way dengue and Zika have in South America. We really cannot afford to remain complacent until the crisis hits” (5/5).

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Forbes: A Framework for the Design of Effective Primary Care Systems
Taara Chandani, consultant with ACCESS Health International, and William A. Haseltine, chair and president of ACCESS Health International

“Primary care is often the weakest link in many health systems. It is also the most important. … As part of our work on improving access to high quality and affordable primary care, ACCESS Health International created a framework for the design of primary care systems that are responsive to local needs. … The framework creates a strategic path for the design and evaluation of primary care interventions. Successful primary care needs to be an integral part of the broader health system, with clear linkages to secondary and tertiary care. Integration into the broad continuum of social and health care must underlie all our efforts, including implementation of this framework. We developed the framework in the context of India. We believe that it can be adapted and applied elsewhere anywhere, including here in the United States” (5/4).

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UNAIDS: Measuring progress against the 10 commitments through Global AIDS Monitoring
“At the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Ending AIDS in 2016, countries pledged to achieve a set of 10 Fast-Track commitments by 2020 — an acceleration agenda that aims to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. To help ensure that the deadlines are met, the United Nations General Assembly requested an annual report on progress achieved in meeting those 10 commitments. UNAIDS supports countries to collect information on their national HIV responses through the Global AIDS Monitoring (GAM) framework — an annual collection of 72 indicators on the response to HIV in a country. These data form part of the data set used to report back to the General Assembly. … GAM is yet another way that UNAIDS is helping countries to monitor and respond to their HIV epidemics and work towards ending AIDS by 2030” (5/7).

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U.N. Dispatch’s “Global Dispatches Podcast”: Can Tom Frieden Save 100 Million Lives?
Mark Leon Goldberg, editor of U.N. Dispatch and host of the Global Dispatches Podcast, speaks with Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, about why Frieden “believes that he can achieve [the goal of saving 100 million lives] by focusing on two health issues: cardiovascular disease in the developing world and shoring up our global defenses against pandemics” (5/7).

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London School of Economics and Political Science’s “British Politics and Policy”: Superbugs: are we returning to an era where bacteria are a major killer without a cure?
Anthony McDonnell, senior health economist at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine and co-author of the new book ‘Superbugs: An Arms Race Against Bacteria’ with Will Hall and Jim O’Neill, discusses antibiotic drug resistance, provides an overview of the current situation, and outlines recommendations for actions that can be taken to prevent the rise of drug resistance (5/7).

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Devpolicy Blog: Diplomacy will have more weight in China’s foreign aid program
Denghua Zhang, research fellow in the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs, discusses China’s decision to establish an international development cooperation agency and the potential impacts of restructuring the Chinese foreign aid system. Zhang writes, “[T]he establishment of China’s new aid agency will have significant implications for the region in the near future. Diplomatic interests will continue to prevail over other considerations when China delivers aid to the region” (5/2).

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Kaiser Family Foundation: The U.S. Government and International Family Planning & Reproductive Health: Statutory Requirements and Policies
This updated fact sheet summarizes the major statutory requirements and policies pertaining to U.S. global family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) efforts over time and identifies those currently in effect. These laws and policies collectively serve to direct how U.S. funds are spent, to where and which organizations funds are provided, and generally shape the implementation and define the scope of U.S. global FP/RH activities (5/3).

Kaiser Family Foundation: UNFPA Funding & Kemp-Kasten: An Explainer
On March 8, the Trump administration invoked the “Kemp-Kasten amendment” in order to withhold
FY 2018 funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA, the lead U.N. agency focused on global population and reproductive health), the second year it has made this determination. This updated explainer from the Kaiser Family Foundation provides an overview of the history and application of this provision on global family planning funds (5/4).

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