We are the GlobeMed chapter at the University of Chicago. We partner with Asociación de Personas Afectadas por Tuberculosis del Perú, or ASPAT-Peru, to improve the lives of TB patients in Callao, Peru. Check out our snazzy tweets or our fancy new blog to learn more!
Some tags to explore:
- global health
- tuberculosis
- peru
This is amazing
Peruvian Inca water-wind instruments
Saturday, May 4th marked GlobeMed at UChicago’s inaugural Benefit Dinner, which was hosted at the University Center in Downtown Chicago. Guest speakers Jonathan Smith and Jeffrey Sachs talked at the event, which was attended by medical professionals and students from all around the city.
Enlarge the photos for the captions, and check out more photos of the wonderful event here!
Well, my name is Margarita. I am 28 years old. I am an auxiliary in a local high school. When I was told that I had tuberculosis, I had never heard of the disease. Then representatives from ASPAT came to my local health center to give us an educational seminar on TB. Thanks to them, I was able to understand that everyone is susceptible to TB. I decided to join with ASPAT to help others who need educational seminars to understand the reality of TB.
I am grateful to ASPAT and GlobeMed for their support. Without their concern for me, I might not have finished my treatment.
I loved working to make the earrings and rings beautiful, and sharing this work a support network of girls like me.
Ethel Y. and Cindy S., Co-Presidents of GlobeMed at UChicago
Read more about our partnership with ASPAT Peru here.
Learning How to Cough Around Drug Resistant TB
Medecins Sans Frontiers counselor, Rano Safarova, tries to teach a group of children near Vose, Tajikistan how to stop the spread of tuberculosis in their homes. Several members of this extended family have active TB including the 66 year old grandmother/matriarch of the clan. The youngest victim in the family is a 4 year old boy who’s been left partially paralyzed and unable to speak from TB meningitis.
The grandmother refuses to accept that TB spreads through the air. She insists that the 4 year old got it from swimming in a cold river.
“I have several concerns with this family,”says MSF nurse Tina Martin during a visit to the family’s cluster of mud-walled houses in southern Tajikistan. “Mostly I’m concerned with the level of education, the lack of understanding of what TB is and how it’s transmitted. This is highly concerning. This is a very close family. They live together, eat together, sleep together. And as TB is airborne transmission the family is reinfecting each other over and over.”
MSF is working to try to improve TB treatment for children in the Central Asian nation, particularly children infected with drug-resistant strains of the bacteria.
photos: Jason Beaubien, NPR
A $5.5 Billion Road Map To Banish Polio Forever
Polio isn’t going easily into the dustbin of history.
The world needs to push it in, throw down the lid and then keep an eye out to make sure it doesn’t escape.
That’s the gist of a new plan released Thursday by the World Health Organization and other foundations at a vaccine meeting in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
It’s a six-year, $5.5 billion program, and its goal is to wipe out polio for good.
The plan calls for attacking the remaining pockets of polio in the last endemic countries — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria — with mass immunization campaigns. It would boost polio surveillance globally and set up systems to respond rapidly in case outbreaks do occur.
The road map also looks at how to contain existing samples of the virus in laboratories and how to secure stockpiles of the vaccine in case polio somehow comes back.
Photo by Ben Curtis/AP
Tuberculosis poised between elimination and millions more deaths
A WHO report on tuberculosis warns progress could be lost if drug-resistant strains are not kept in check and money for new tools is not forthcoming
(via caraobrien)
Sputum bacilloscopy is widely used by primary health clinics in Peru to determine the drug susceptibility of TB infected patients (whether the patients are affected by sensitive TB, multidrug resistant TB, or extremely drug resistant TB). Patients wait up to 2 months for the results of these sputum tests, losing critical time for appropriate treatment and increasing the potential for patients with drug-resistant TB to infect others.
In comparison, MODS or Griess Testing reduces the waiting time for test results up to 2 weeks – and molecular testing reduces the waiting time to 2 days. The Peruvian Ministry of Health, along with the National Institute of Health of Peru, aims to make such tests more widely available throughout Peru.
(The original article from ASPAT-Peru can be accessed here.)
UNICEF: U.S. kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts
American children are on average worse off than children in Western Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic states and the former Yugoslavia, according to a recent report from United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the welfare of children in developed countries.
The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety, behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The United States is joined at the bottom by “emerging” European economies, while the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands come out on top. The report notes that this latter group of countries tends to spend far more per capita on social welfare programs.
The countries with the best reported child well-being tend to invest in strong social safety nets. Norway, Iceland and Sweden sink nearly 7 percent of their GDP, according to an OECD report, into education. Countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which until the ‘90s had GDPs per capita of less than $5,000, have been able to put less money into such services. Though U.S. GDP per capita was more than $48,000 in 2012, that money is not spread evenly cross the unusually large U.S. population.
(From The Washington Post)
