Health Topics
- Contraceptive implants: providing better choice to meet growing family planning demand
Contraceptive implants are extremely effective, long acting, and suitable for nearly all women—to delay, space, or limit pregnancies—and they are increasingly popular. Now, markedly reduced prices and innovative service delivery models using dedicated non-physician service providers offer a historic opportunity to help satisfy women's growing need for family planning.
- GeneXpert for TB diagnosis: planned and purposeful implementation
Xpert MTB/RIF is a major advance for TB diagnostics, especially for multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB and HIV-associated TB. But implementation concerns including cost, technical support requirements, and challenging demands of providing second-line TB drugs for diagnosed MDR-TB cases call for gradual, careful introduction based on country circumstances.
- Can we stop AIDS with antiretroviral-based treatment as prevention?
Challenges to scaling up treatment as prevention (TasP) of HIV transmission are considerable in the developing-world context and include accessing at-risk populations, human resource shortages, adherence and retention in care, access to newer treatments, measurement of treatment effects, and long-term sustainable funding. Optimism about ending AIDS needs to be tempered by the realities of the logistic challenges of strengthening health systems in countries most affected and by balancing TasP with overall combination prevention approaches.
- Reducing child global undernutrition at scale in Sofala Province, Mozambique, using Care Group Volunteers to communicate health messages to mothers
Care Group peer-to-peer behavior change communication improved child undernutrition at scale in rural Mozambique and has the potential to substantially reduce under-5 mortality in priority countries at very low cost.
- Chlorhexidine for umbilical cord care: game-changer for newborn survival?
A simple technology with potential to prevent 500,000 global neonatal deaths annually.
- Effectiveness of a community-based positive prevention intervention for people living with HIV who are not receiving antiretroviral treatment: a prospective cohort study
In Mombasa, Kenya, a community-based HIV risk-reduction intervention effectively reached people living with HIV who were not receiving antiretroviral treatment (ART)—a difficult-to-reach population because they often fall outside the ambit of health care services—and succeeded in reducing reported risky sex behavior and increasing ART uptake.
- Successful polio eradication in Uttar Pradesh, India: the pivotal contribution of the Social Mobilization Network, an NGO/UNICEF collaboration
Innovative approaches to eradicate polio in hard-to-reach areas included: (1) cadres of trusted community mobilizers who track children's immunization status, (2) responsiveness to people's concerns about immunization, (3) outreach to religious and other local leaders, (4) focus on both individual- and community-level behavioral approaches, and (5) continuous data collection and use.
- Meeting the community halfway to reduce maternal deaths? Evidence from a community-based maternal death review in Uttar Pradesh, India
Even in the face of vigorous commitment to improving maternal health services in India, inadequate staffing, supplies, and equipment at health facilities, as well as transportation costs and delays in referral, appear to contribute to a substantial proportion of maternal deaths in a representative district in Uttar Pradesh.
- Women's growing desire to limit births in sub-Saharan Africa: meeting the challenge
Contrary to conventional wisdom, many sub-Saharan African women—often at young ages—have an unmet need for family planning to limit future births, and many current limiters do not use the most effective contraceptive methods. Family planning programs must improve access to a wide range of modern contraceptive methods and address attitudinal and knowledge barriers if they are to meet women's needs.