Category: General

The U.S. government on Thursday permanently eased some restrictions on a pill used to terminate early pregnancies, allowing the drug to be sent by mail rather than requiring it to be dispensed in person.

The decision by the Food and Drug Administration comes as the right to obtain an abortion, established in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance.

The medication, generically known as mifepristone, is approved for use up to 10 weeks of pregnancy and is also sometimes prescribed to treat women who are having miscarriages.

“The FDA’s decision will come as a tremendous relief for countless abortion and miscarriage patients,” said Georgeanne Usova, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The restrictions on the pill had been in place since the FDA approved the drug in 2000 and were lifted temporarily by the government earlier this year because of the pandemic. That enabled women to consult health care providers by telemedicine and receive the pills by mail. The FDA’s decision makes that temporary change permanent.

As a result of the FDA rule change, many patients will not need to go to a clinic, medical office or hospital in person to receive the medication but can opt to receive the pill through the mail from a certified prescriber or pharmacy.

The decision will increase access to medication abortion for women in remote and rural areas without providers nearby.

Low-income women who face obstacles reaching clinics such as lack of transportation and inability to take time off work will also gain greater access to the drug.

However, 19 states including Texas have laws that supersede the FDA decision by barring telehealth consultations or the mailing of abortion pills. Women in those states would not be able to make use of the rule change at home but could potentially travel to other states to obtain medication abortion.

States such as California and New York that have sought to strengthen access to abortion may make the drug available to women from other states.

The change is likely to add to the intense U.S. political debate over abortion. Conservative Supreme Court justices indicated in December 1 oral arguments over an abortion ban in Mississippi at 15 weeks of pregnancy that they were open to either gutting Roe or overturning it entirely. A decision is due by the end of June.

The Charlotte Lozier Institute and Susan B. Anthony List, which advocate against abortion, said in a statement that the FDA decision ignored data on complications and put women at risk.

The groups called on the FDA to restore the in-person dispensing requirement and add restrictions.

FDA records show that of the 3.7 million women who took Mifeprex, the branded version of the drug, to terminate a pregnancy between September 2000 and December 2018, 24 died from complications.

Some restrictions remain

The FDA left in place some restrictions, such as the need to use a certified pharmacy and requiring the prescribers to be certified. The ACLU said it was “disappointing that the FDA fell short of repealing all of its medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone, and these remaining obstacles should also be lifted.”

The organization sued the U.S. government on behalf of a Hawaii doctor and several professional health care associations in 2017, challenging the restrictions that it said limited access to medication abortion.

Medication abortion involves two drugs, taken over a day or two. The first, mifepristone, blocks the pregnancy-sustaining hormone progesterone. The second, misoprostol, induces uterine contractions.

Source: Voice of America

African leaders have called on governments across the continent to invest more in healthcare to fight the coronavirus and future pandemics. The appeal came as the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the African Union this week held the first Conference on Public Health in Africa.

Addressing the virtual meeting of African health workers and experts, Rwandan President Paul Kagame said governments could no longer ignore public health investment as the continent grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There needs to be renewed commitment by government and national parliaments to increase domestic financing for health in Africa. This has been a priority for the African Union for several years but progress has not been fast enough. We cannot continue to rely on external funding for something so important for our future,” he said.

Twenty years ago in Abuja, Nigeria, African governments agreed to allocate 15% of their budgets to health care. Only two countries, Rwanda and South Africa, met the target.

Africa has seen economic growth in the past few years but spending by governments on health has rarely increased.

Health experts blame the lack of healthcare spending on low GDP growth, tax collections, and competing priorities.

An Afrobarometer survey showed 46% of African citizens across 36 countries opposed paying more taxes to be used to improve healthcare.

Across Africa, most health facilities are concentrated in urban areas, effectively cutting off millions from accessing advanced medical assistance.

John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the continent needs a new approach to raise health investment.

“You all heard from our various leaders, political leaders, call for a new public health order that hinges on four things: strengthening public health institutions, workforce, expanding manufacturing on both vaccines, diagnostic and therapeutic, a respectful action-oriented partnership, which is all underpinned by the need to invest ourselves in supporting this domestic financing so that we can achieve these four goals,” he said.

African Union Commission Chairman Mousa Faki Mahamat pledged to support the development of health care systems that can deal with future challenges.

“I would like to assure you today that African Union Commission stands firm in our resolve to bolster manufacturing capacity for the vaccine, diagnostic and therapeutics to build resilient health systems capable of detecting future health threats, and to build a finance mechanism that allows member states to respond efficiently and effectively to health needs of the continent,” he said.

According to the Brookings Institute, Africa needs funding models that encourage domestic resource mobilization and prioritization of health.

For example, in 2019 Nigeria signed a $75 million financing agreement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to strengthen the country’s primary health care provision fund.

Africa’s virtual conference on public health ends Thursday.

Source: Voice of America

COVID-19 was first discovered in China, which became the first country to produce a vaccine. Sinovac and Sinopharm are China’s leading vaccine makers, and both manufacture World Health Organization-approved COVID-19 vaccines.

What’s the difference between the two companies?

Sinovac is a privately owned company, while Sinopharm is government-run. Scientists at both companies use the same method to make both vaccines.

How are the vaccines made?

Dr. Andrea Cox, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with a special interest in immunization, has provided expert advice to VOA about COVID-19 vaccines. Cox told VOA that scientists take a type of bacteria — or in this case, a virus — and inactivate or kill it. They then inject it into people. Because the virus is dead, it can’t infect anyone. Then, if a vaccinated person is exposed to the live virus, that person’s body recognizes it and fights it off.

Are these vaccines effective?

According to Cox, the Chinese vaccines are not as effective as the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, so they aren’t the preferred jabs in countries that have access to the others. The Sinovac vaccine is about 50% effective, while Sinopharm’s effectiveness is higher, at 78%, WHO reported. Two doses are needed for both vaccines.

Vaccines are often mixed with an adjuvant, a harmless ingredient such as aluminum salts or a bubble of fat, to make them more effective. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says “aluminum is one of the most common metals found in nature and is present in air, food, and water,” so it’s not a foreign or dangerous ingredient, although anti-vax groups claim it is. For example, Sinovac uses aluminum hydroxide, an ingredient also used to treat an upset stomach. Sinopharm also uses an adjuvant in its vaccine.

Do the vaccines have advantages?

The Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines have a major advantage over other COVID-19 vaccines: They are easy to store and need only normal refrigeration. That’s a huge plus in getting a COVID-19 vaccine to people in areas where there is little or no refrigeration.

“In an ideal world,” Cox said, “we wouldn’t need them. But at this point, we need a way to get the world vaccinated as rapidly and effectively as possible, and it may require a use of vaccines that we know are not as good but are better than not being vaccinated.”

What will end the pandemic?

WHO says safe and effective vaccines are a game-changing tool, but for now and the foreseeable future, it recommends continued mask wearing, frequent hand-washing, good indoor ventilation, physical distancing, avoiding crowds and, above all, getting vaccinated when you can with whatever vaccine is available.

“Having the world’s best scientists — and I do really mean the world’s best scientists — thinking about how to make effective vaccines and deliver them to a global population is critical,” Cox said. “And the more data we get on these vaccines, the more we will be able to select out vaccines that do protect the largest number of the world’s population.”

As WHO says: “It’s not vaccines that will stop the pandemic, it’s vaccination.”

Source: Voice of America

U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he is encouraged by data released by Pfizer Inc on its COVID-19 anti-viral medicine and his administration has ordered enough of the pills to treat 10 million Americans.

“Getting vaccinated and getting your booster shot remain the most important tools we have to save lives. But if this treatment is indeed authorized “and once the pills are widely available” it will mark a significant step forward in our path out of the pandemic,” Biden said in a statement.

Source: Voice of America

The disfiguring disease noma, found mainly in poor areas of sub-Saharan Africa that lack health care, kills 90% of victims, most of them children, when left untreated. Noma is preventable, and to that end, aid groups are urging the World Health Organization to add Noma to its list of neglected tropical diseases.

Eight-year-old Amadou Compaore recently recovered from noma, a little-known tropical disease.

Although noma has scarred his face, Compaore, relatively speaking, is one of the lucky ones. If noma is diagnosed within the first few weeks of infection, it is easily treatable with a course of antibiotics.

His father, Sibiri Compaore, told VOA, he noticed the disease in the run-up to Christmas. To begin with, Amadou said his mouth ached to the point where he couldn’t eat anymore. He even had great difficulty drinking sachets of water.

Compaore senior took his son to the nearest city, Kaya, about 25 kilometers away, where medical staff were able to identify the disease thanks to awareness building by the Swiss non-governmental organization Sentinelles.

Sidi Omar Boena is a nurse at a Sentinelles medical center in Ouagadougou, specializing in the treatment of noma.

He says most health workers in Burkina Faso have not heard of the disease noma and that diagnosing it in people 400 to 500 kilometers from Ouagadougou is very difficult.

He says that he is sometimes forced to diagnose noma with photos sent to him via WhatsApp.

Odette Serene, who also suffered from noma, now receives regular follow-up treatment at the Sentinelles clinic, including support in finding a job.

She now works as a tailor, but she says people still laugh at her, which makes her sad. She says Boena has done a lot to take care of her, however.

Noma is just one of many illnesses currently missing from the World Health Organization’s list of neglected tropical diseases.

Doctors Without Borders, a medical NGO, is running a campaign to have noma added to the WHO list, which already includes diseases like rabies and dengue fever.

“Of course, at the community level, there is discrimination affecting the patients, and so every time there is a case, we might not even be aware because patients are hidden by the communities or they are dying. More than 90% of people are estimated to die,” Jeantet said.

The WHO says when it adds diseases to the list, factors like social stigma and death rates are taken into consideration. The WHO says resources are limited, so some diseases have to be left off.

WHO press officer Ashok Moloo explains the effect of adding a disease to the list.

“It really brings the disease or the condition to another level … It also adds to the advocacy part of the disease, awareness creation and also resources,” Moloo points out.

As for Amadou Compaore, he says what the doctors have done to help him has been an inspiration. He told VOA he wants to become a doctor, to treat people so that they can be cured, like him.

The WHO plans to make possible new additions to its neglected tropical disease list in 2023. It remains to be seen if noma will be among them.

Source: Voice of America

In a major victory for sexual minority advocates, Canada last week banned conversion therapy, a widely discredited practice that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The law makes it a crime to subject anyone in Canada to conversion therapy, profit from the practice or take a Canadian outside the country to undergo conversion therapy elsewhere.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to Twitter to hail the ban of what he called “a despicable and degrading practice.”

University of Ottawa student Jonathan Di Carlo calls himself a conversion therapy survivor, having undergone sessions “primarily in religious settings” for more than a decade starting at age 13.

“They included attempted demon exorcisms in front of people, forced one-on-one counseling where a pastor with no formal psychotherapy training convinced me that homosexuality was caused by an absentee father or that it was caused by being raped at a young age by someone of the same sex such as a father or uncle,” Di Carlo told VOA. “Then I was told to ‘fast,’ a biblical practice where a person doesn’t eat or drink except for water. … I did 40 days [of consuming] only water, twice.”

Conversion therapy has been rejected by an array of Western medical groups, including the American Medical Association, which linked the practice to “significant long-term harm” including depression, anxiety and possibly suicidal behaviors.

Last year, a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council found that conversion therapy is practiced in 68 countries and that victims may be subjected to “heinous physical and psychological violence.” The report added, “Attempts to pathologize and erase the identity of individuals, negate their existence as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender diverse and provoke self-loathing have profound consequences on their physical and psychological integrity and well-being.”

Di Carlo says he knows the consequences firsthand.

“The torture of conversion therapy only made me more depressed with a lot of thoughts of suicide,” Di Carlo told VOA. “I self-medicated with alcohol for several years under the pressure of wanting to be straight but God not making me straight.”

Today, the student wells with a different emotion: pride.

“I think the fact that Canada made this move makes the nation stand out,” Di Carlo said. “It says that we have an approach to human rights that few other longstanding democracies have. It says that Canada acknowledges that this practice has no basis in science. It is criminal and it is torture.”

Canada is already seen as a popular destination for LGTBQ individuals persecuted around the world, hosting a charity aimed at encouraging this migration named the Rainbow Railroad.

LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, questioning. In Canada, “2” is often added to the end of the initials, recognizing some Indigenous people who identify as having both a masculine and feminine spirit.

Some Canadian faith-based groups argued against the ban on the basis of religious freedom. Additionally, an opinion piece appearing in The Globe and Mail newspaper framed the issue as a matter of personal liberty, asking, “should consenting adults be allowed to access services that are harmful to them?”

Canada joins four countries that have legally banned conversion therapy on a national level: Brazil, Ecuador, Germany and Malta. Germany bans the practice for minors or the coerced. It is banned in some U.S. states but not others.

Some worry that, even where it is banned, conversion therapy will continue.

Sexual minority rights advocate Fae Johnstone of Halifax-based Wisdom2Action worries that Canada’s ban won’t “fully eradicate the practice.”

Johnstone noted, “A lot of practitioners don’t describe themselves as conversion therapists.” She added that conversion therapy likely will continue as an underground practice.

For now, however, ban supporters are taking a victory lap.

“Survivors have been fighting for this day for decades, so seeing that advocacy, that struggle and that resilience finally payoff is overwhelming in the best way,” Nicholas Schiavo, founder of No Conversion Canada, told VOA. “This legislation sends a clear message to LGBTQ2 people both here in Canada and around the world that Canada remains a human rights leader and will step up to protect the most vulnerable in our communities.”

Source: Voice of America