Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

Through an international collaboration, more than 200 medical and scientific journals are publishing theme issues this week on the relationship between poverty and human development.

The initiative, coordinated by the Council of Science Editors, includes presentations on seven of the journal articles which will be webcast live from the National Institutes of Health on Monday, October 22, 2007.

In "Improving Child Survival Through Environmental and Nutritional Interventions," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Washington set out to determine (1) whether programs to improve child nutrition and provide clean water, sanitation and fuels, three of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, could also impact the MDG of reducing child mortality and (2) how the benefits of those interventions varied based on how poor the targeted population of these programs were.

In "Human Resources for Treating HIV/AIDS: Needs, Capacities, and Gaps," published in AIDS, Patient Care and STDs, lead author Till Bärnighausen, doctoral candidate at HSPH and Associate Professor of Health and Population Studies, Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and colleagues investigate a simulation model of the nature of the gap between needed and available healthcare personnel for scaling up HIV/AIDS antiretroviral treatment in the developing world.

They conclude that universal coverage is unlikely to be achieved even if the education of healthcare personnel in developing countries is substantially increased, unless the emigration of health workers or the rate of new HIV infections is decreased at the same time.

Reducing child mortality rates for children under five year -- which in 2004 was 6.5 (per 1,000 children annually) in Latin America and the Caribbean, about 20 in South Asia and 39 in sub-Saharan Africa -- is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

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