New Health Affairs Issue Focuses On Global Health
July 14th, 2009
by
Chris Fleming
|
Eliminating polio everywhere will require global cooperation on several fronts, including lowering the cost for poor countries to vaccinate with inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), says a leading global health researcher in the July/August Health Affairs thematic issue on global health.
Eradicating the wild polioviruses was supposed to have been achieved by 2000, but the effort to fight the disease is still ongoing. Polio cases reached an all-time high this century — 1,997 cases — in 2006. In 2008 there were more than 1,600 cases identified in 18 countries. For polio eradication efforts to succeed, countries must focus on several “weak links” to sustain population immunity from the virus, argues Scott Barrett, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York City.
In a related paper, Judith Kaufmann and Harley Feldbaum, of the Global Health and Foreign Policy Initiative of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, examine the diplomatic actions taken by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the United Nations, and the U.S. government to address the 2003-2004 northern Nigeria boycott of polio vaccination.
Other highlights from the issue, which was produced with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, include the following:
– Margaret Kruk of the University of Michigan and colleagues report that out-of-pocket payments account for 70 percent of health financing in low-income countries, compared to 14.9 percent in high-income countries. In an analysis of data from the World Health Survey, the researchers found that one in four families in these countries borrow money or sell assets to pay for health services.
– Ramanan Laxminarayan and Hellen Gelband of Resources for the Future discuss a global subsidy that uses the distribution channels of the public and private sectors to make effective antimalarial drugs accessible to those who need them, while simultaneously reducing the risk of the development of resistant strains of malaria.
– Marwa Farag of Brandeis University and colleagues report that a 1% increase in funding from public and private donors was associated with a 0.19% decrease of government health spending in low-income countries, holding everything else constant. Donor funding is thereby partly replacing, rather than simply supplementing, government health spending, as “donors seem to regard the health sector as more important than governments do.”
