Health

  • October 15, 2013

    Simple, but lifesaving: Handwashing with soap

    Written by
    Hanna Woodburn, Communications Director, Global Public–Private Partnership for Handwashing (PPPHW)

    Did you know that an everyday item in your home has the potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year? Soap, when used at critical times such as after using the bathroom or before preparing food, can reduce the risk of diarrheal disease by nearly half and cut the risk of upper respiratory infections, such as pneumonia, by nearly a quarter. While these illnesses may seem like a normal part of childhood, they cause 1.7 million child deaths each year.

    Unlike many solutions to the world’s development challenges, handwashing with soap is simple. It does not require any special skills or equipment, and it is within the economic reach of communities everywhere. In fact, handwashing with soap is the most cost-effective intervention to prevent diarrheal disease. However, making handwashing with soap a habit remains a challenge around the world.

    Today, the world celebrates Global Handwashing Day, which is an opportunity to promote and advocate for handwashing with soap. As the Secretariat Coordinator of the Global Public–Private Partnership for Handwashing, FHI 360 plays a unique role in moving this agenda forward by linking clinical knowledge about behavior change and hygiene promotion to practitioners in the field. Increasing knowledge sharing and collaboration is a necessity if we hope to eradicate preventable childhood deaths.

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  • October 11, 2013

    Focus on Education: To improve education globally we must end child marriage

    Written by
    Lakshmi Sundaram, Global Coordinator, Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage

    It seems remarkable that 11 October 2013 marks only the second time that the global community has come together to celebrate the International Day of the Girl Child. Has it really taken us this long to recognise that adolescent girls hold the key to building a healthier, safer, more prosperous world?

    The theme for Day of the Girl 2013 – ‘Innovating for girls’ education’ – highlights this link, and recognises that we are unlikely to address global poverty if we don’t enable girls to complete their education. The case is clear. Girls who complete secondary school earn significantly more as adults. They are more likely to know about and use reproductive health services. And the benefits spill over to the next generation as well: mortality rates of children whose mothers have at least seven years of education are up to 58% lower than those among children whose mothers have no education.

    Despite all we know about the benefits of education for girls, millions of girls miss out. Indeed, only 30 per cent of girls around the world are enrolled in secondary school. That is why on Day of the Girl 2013, we cannot ignore the practices that keep girls out of the classroom.

    Child marriage is a major barrier to progress on girls’ education. When girls marry as children, they usually drop out of school, forced to abandon schoolbooks for household chores. They are denied the opportunity to learn the skills that could help them earn a safe, dependable income as adults and which are necessary to build a sustainable and prosperous future for their communities. Every year approximately 14 million girls a year marry before they turn 18. While not all of them will drop out of school, most do. How can we get all girls in school, when child marriage keeps pulling them out?

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  • October 8, 2013

    Optifood: A new tool to improve diets and prevent child malnutrition in Guatemala

    Written by
    Monica Woldt, Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III (FANTA) Project, FHI 360
    Gilles Bergeron, Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III (FANTA) Project, FHI 360

    What does it REALLY take to ensure young children get the proper nutrition to grow strong and healthy? This is an especially important question in poor rural communities in Guatemala, where about half of the children under five years of age are stunted (too short for their age—a sign of long-term deficits in the quantity and/or quality of food, including the right vitamins and minerals). In some parts of western Guatemala, more than eight in ten young children are stunted.

    Now there’s a new tool to help answer the question: Optifood is a computer software program, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA), and Blue Infinity, that provides scientific evidence on how to best improve children’s diets at the lowest possible cost using locally available foods. Optifood identifies nutrient gaps and suggests food combinations the local diet can fill—or come as close to filling. It also helps identify local foods’ limits in meeting nutrient needs and test strategies for filling remaining nutrient gaps, such as using fortified foods or micronutrient powders that mothers mix into infant or young children’s porridge.

    The Government of Guatemala is fighting stunting through its Zero Hunger Initiative, which aims to reduce stunting by 10 percent by 2015 and 24 percent by 2022 through nutrition, health, agriculture, and social safety net programs. The U.S. Government and USAID are supporting these efforts through Feed the Future and Global Health Initiatives focused on the Western Highlands. USAID/Guatemala asked the USAID-funded FANTA/FHI 360 to help find strategies to improve the nutritional quality of children’s diets in the region. The challenge was to develop realistic and affordable diets for children that both meet their needs and are firmly based on scientific evidence. FANTA worked with its local partner, the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP), to collect the diet data needed for Optifood from communities in two departments of the Western Highlands, Huehuetenango and Quiché. FANTA then used Optifood to analyze the information.

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  • October 2, 2013

    Women and girls: Beyond 2015

    Written by
    Albert J. Siemens, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    We know what we can achieve.

    And we know what needs to be done.

    We know that improving access to family planning can reduce maternal and child mortality. Moreover, as long as women are unable to negotiate the number and spacing of their children, gains will be limited. We know that exclusive breastfeeding provides an infant the best start in life. Yet, evidence shows that a child born to a mother who has had access to quality education, especially secondary education, has a greater chance of surviving to see her fifth birthday than a child whose mother has no education. In countries around the world, we have reduced dramatically the incidence of HIV. Yet, gender violence and sexual exploitation will need to be addressed as part of the solution if we are to halt the spread of the disease.

    Last week, the United Nations General Assembly debated the post-2015 agenda, and it has never been more clear that women and girls must be top of mind in the global development discussion. Only when we transform unequal gender norms will we be able to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. This means taking a broader approach than what we have done in the past by integrating gender concerns and putting women and girls front and center in every post-2015 priority.

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  • September 26, 2013

    Efforts to prevent HIV must focus on gender equity

    Written by
    Ward Cates, President Emeritus, FHI 360
    Nirupama Sista, Director of the Leadership and Operations Center, HIV Prevention Trials Network, FHI 360

    The latest figures on HIV infections, as reported this week by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), revealed an impressive 33 percent reduction in new infections among adults and children since 2001. To continue down the road to success, future efforts must address the gender inequities that contribute to the disproportionate impact of HIV and AIDS on women and girls.

    More than half of the 35 million people living with HIV are women. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 60 percent of people living with HIV are women. Young women between ages 15 to 24 are at highest risk of and most vulnerable to HIV infection. Closer to home, black women in the United States remain at high risk for HIV infection, and HIV-related illness is now one of the leading causes of death among black women between ages 25 to 34.

    Gender inequity is a key driver of the epidemic, making women more vulnerable to HIV in many ways.

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  • August 15, 2013

    Mat Troi Be Tho: Nutrition today, health tomorrow

    In Vietnam, our Alive & Thrive project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has launched an innovative social franchise model – Mat Troi Be Tho – to provide high-quality nutrition consultation services. The franchise has been exceptionally effective in Vietnam where high malnutrition rates persist. The Mat Troi Be Tho brand signifies professional, trustworthy and high-quality services in a welcoming and child-friendly environment.

    This is the first time that social franchise principles have been applied to infant and young child feeding counseling services. Counseling focuses on recommended feeding practices to optimize child growth and development in the first 2 years of life. Nearly 800 franchises have been set up in government health facilities throughout Vietnam.

    Watch the video below to learn more about Mat Troi Be Tho and our Alive & Thrive project.

  • July 24, 2013

    Save a life: Vote for innovative Mobile for Reproductive Health program

    Written by
    Kelly L’Engle, Scientist, FHI 360
    Heather Vahdat, Associate Scientist, FHI 360
    Stacey Succop, FHI 360 Research Associate, Social and Behavioral Health Sciences, FHI 360

    Degrees recently featured a post “Family planning and text messages: How mobile phones can save lives” from Kelly L’Engle, an FHI 360 scientist, that highlighted Mobile for Reproductive Health (m4RH), a text-message-based health communication program that provides lifesaving information about family planning methods to anyone with access to a mobile phone.

    The m4RH team is now very excited to be considered as a finalist for funding through Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development (Round III). A DevelopmentXChange event taking place in Washington, DC, July 29–31 represents the final stage of the funding competition, and the public showcase will feature displays of the projects for each finalist. The showcase will also feature live and online voting for a People’s Choice Award, which will be considered in final funding decisions.

    m4RH needs your votes!

    To vote for m4RH for the People’s Choice Award in person, attend the showcase from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, July 31st at the Ronald Reagan Building (1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20004).

    To vote for m4RH for the People’s Choice Award online, please visit http://savinglivesatbirth.net/summaries/248 (you must register to vote).

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  • July 19, 2013

    A roadside attraction in Djibouti: Community and condoms at the SafeTStop

    Written by
    Carole Douglis, Development Outreach Coordinator, USAID East Africa

    Whether on foot, camel, dhow, containership, tanker, or truck—traders have likely criss-crossed Djibouti and its waters for as long as there has been trade. Today, the Port of Djibouti, one of Africa’s busiest, lies at the nexus of major shipping routes between Asia, Africa, and Europe.

    From Djibouti, most goods travel inland by trailer-truck: some 800 Ethiopian truckers arrive every day. After offloading coffee, cotton, beans and other commodities from Ethiopia, truckers wait 4 to 6 days to reload with imported electronics, spare parts, construction materials, food aid and much else.

    This range of activity makes a small community, virtually unknown outside Djibouti, both important and vulnerable. It’s called PK-12 for “Point Kilometre 12″ in French, the official language. Meaning that it’s 12 km from Djibouti town, the capital and site of the port. PK-12 looks like the mother of all truckstops. Colorful vehicles lie like flattened dominoes as far as the eye can see — thousands of them.

    Understandably, drivers with several days on their hands also ferry back and forth another invisible item. About 25 percent are thought to be HIV-positive. The number of HIV-positive young women and men from the community is not known, and the stigma is too strong for even the boldest to disclose their status.

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  • July 12, 2013

    Reducing unmet need for family planning — one woman at a time

    Written by
    Trinity Zan, Senior Technical Officer, FHI 360
    Kate Rademacher, Senior Technical Officer, FHI 360

    Albertine,* a 34-year-old mother of five, was determined to get a long-acting family planning method. Because she lives in a remote part of Benin, a country of around 9 million in West Africa, she needed to travel many kilometers in the hot sun with her youngest child on her back to reach a health facility that provides contraceptives. Although she lives in an area where less than 1 percent of women use a modern family planning method, a community health worker had counseled and referred her to the health facility using a mobile phone-based tool (a service provided through the PRISE-C project, which is supported by University Research Co., LLC’s Center for Human Services and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development).

    Once she reached the health facility, Albertine insisted on getting what she called “the five-year method,” the two-rod Jadelle implant that is effective for five years of continuous use. She waited until the late afternoon — when the day’s immunization services were complete — before the midwife could see her. In a scene not uncommon in rural settings, Albertine lay across a small exam table and nursed her son on her right side while the midwife swabbed her left arm, injected the anesthesia, positioned the trocar and inserted the rods one by one. When the insertion was complete, Albertine smiled, took her implant card, and said she would be back in five years for another one!

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  • July 3, 2013

    Millionth baby born HIV-free celebrated on PEPFAR’s 10th anniversary

    Written by
    Ward Cates, President Emeritus, FHI 360
    Rose Wilcher, Technical Advisor, FHI 360
    Heidi Reynolds, Deputy Director for HIV/AIDS and Other Infectious Diseases, MEASURE Evaluation Project

    In recent weeks, global health policymakers, implementers, advocates and others have been celebrating the 10th anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). At the heart of these celebrations has been attention to the incredible gains that have been made in preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). Secretary of State John Kerry marked the anniversary by noting, “Thanks to the support of PEPFAR, we have saved the one millionth baby from becoming infected with HIV.”

    One million HIV-free babies. What a remarkable achievement, and one that symbolizes how far we have come in advancing HIV prevention science and practice over the past decade. The development of Anti-Retroviral (ARV)-based interventions to interrupt transmission from a pregnant woman with HIV to her baby — and PEPFAR’s success in expanding access to perinatal ARVs — has prevented new infections, saved lives, and given hope to women and men affected by HIV who wish to become parents. Indeed, this progress has generated worldwide momentum and political commitment for achieving an AIDS-free generation and led to the development of a Blueprint for getting there.

    But this isn’t the full story. As we applaud the milestones associated with greater access to ARV prophylaxis for PMTCT, we should also take stock of how meeting the contraceptive needs of women living with HIV also contributes to fewer infections among children and better outcomes for mothers. In a previous publication, we estimated that current levels of contraceptive use by women and couples in the 15 PEPFAR focus countries prevented over 730,000 unintended pregnancies to women living with HIV and averted over 220,000 new infant infections annually. That’s on top of the roughly 230,000 infections averted annually through ARV prophylaxis to HIV-positive pregnant women in PEPFAR-supported programs at that time. Thanks to continued access to voluntary contraception for many women, we can safely assume that the number of infant infections averted over the past decade exceeds one million.

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