In The News

The Caribbean Brain Drain: Nursing a Grievance

April 12, 2010
According to the World Bank, only one-quarter of nurses in the English-speaking Caribbean remain working in their countries. The rest leaves to work abroad, where working and living conditions are significantly better. The economic incentives of working abroad outweigh the challenges of staying. This is not a new phenomenon: it has been taking place for almost two centuries and is not confined to...

Armenians Struggle for Health Care and Medicines

Monika Mkhitaryan, Onnik Krikorian August 5, 2009
Faced with unemployment and lower remittances in the current global economic slowdown, Armenians face a vicious health care cycle. Since the country’s independence in 1991, the government has created numerous healthcare programs which generally succeeded in providing for the health needs of its people. About half of the total expenditure on health is financed through the private sector, of which...

Indonesia Relents Over Bird-Flu Sample Release

February 28, 2008
The high cost of health care has developing nations thinking ahead and balking at participating in global studies. After refusing to share H5N1 avian-flu samples with the World Health Organization, Indonesia has since relented and sent the samples on to researchers in the US. Indonesia “wants a material transfer agreement to protect its rights over the samples,” as well as access to any...

Virus On Jet Plane

Nayan Chanda January 22, 2008
The speed and frequency of today’s travel has placed individuals at risk to the spread of many infectious diseases. As Nayan Chanda points out, governments facing these challenges should be more vigilant than ever to avoid future epidemics. Full cooperation with the WHO must also be achieved. In an interconnected world, it is important everyone recognizes that our health and well-being is...

Israeli Surgeons Helping Swaziland in Drive to Curb HIV

Craig Timberg October 24, 2007
A series of studies conducted in the past several years finds that circumcised men are 60 percent less likely to contract HIV than their uncircumcised counterparts. In response to these results, Israeli doctors, well-versed in the procedure, reach out to areas afflicted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In countries such as Swaziland, with the world’s highest reported rate of HIV infection, the problem...

Spread of Viral Diseases

Paul Reiter October 5, 2007
Yellow fever in Tennessee? Malaria in Russia? Chikungunya in northern Italy? There is no denying the fact that mosquito-borne diseases once thought of as strictly tropical now conquer cooler climes. The World Health Organization blames global warming, but Paul Reiter, writing for the Straits Times, suggests that that the spread of mosquito-borne diseases has more to do with the dramatic increase...

Number of Obese Growing on Global Scale

Stephen J. Hedges October 5, 2007
While some countries suffer from hunger, a growing part of the world struggles with the opposite problem of obesity. The problem is no longer confined to rich countries: Nigeria and Uganda struggle simultaneously with hunger and obesity. With a 2000 percent increase in the share of China’s population considered obese, the growth in waistlines outpaces the nation's economic growth. Obese...