Study: Newborns are 40% of preventable child deaths

Study: Newborns are 40% of preventable child deaths
Gucci Joy Medium Boston Bag 193603Newborns now account for 40% of preventable child deaths worldwide, but only a tiny fraction of international aid targets newborns, according to a report to be published in the medical journal Health Policy and Planning Tuesday.The study, which was spearheaded by the advocacy group Save the Children and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, comes as the Obama administration, India and Ethiopia prepare to host a summit in Washington on Thursday focused on bolstering efforts to reduce the number of children younger than 5 who die from preventable ailments.The world is far off track in achieving one of the Millennium Development Goals set in 2000 — of reducing preventable child deaths by 66% by 2015 — but U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Raj Shah told USA TODAY he hasn’t given up hope of reaching the target.”This meeting is about that acceleration,” Shah said. “It’s about looking at the evidence, making the tough calls and doing things much differently and engaging a much broader set of partners so that we can accelerate progress.”President Obama has emphasized the need to reduce child mortality rates, and USAID has attempted to raise the profile of the issue by enlisting celebrities (Kim Kardashian and Mandy Moore) and politicians (former president Bill Clinton) to submit childhood photos for an online project called Every Child Deserves a 5th Birthday.The world has made progress in reducing preventable child deaths in recent years.
Gucci Tote 229852 More than 7 million children are expected to die from preventable illnesses this year, down from the approximately 12.4 million who died worldwide in 1990. But the numbers — roughly 20,000 children dying each day — continue to have a transformational effect on societies seeking to achieve peace and stability, Shah said.In 2010, 3.1 million newborns worldwide died in their first month, 17% fewer than in 2000. But the annual reduction rate of deaths of newborns, now at 2.1%, lags behind that of children ages 1-59 months, which stands at 2.9%.Official development assistance for maternal, newborn and child health doubled from 2003 to 2008, yet only 6% of this funding mentioned newborns in 2008 and 0.1% of these funds exclusively targeted newborns. The U.S. accounted for $619.5 million in aid from 2002 to 2009 targeting newborns and maternal care, doubling the next biggest donor, the World Bank.”When we did the funding analysis, it made you feel like laughing and crying at the same time,” said Joy Lawn, lead author of the Save the Children study. UNICEF said in a report last week that pneumonia and diarrhea are two of the leading killers — accounting for 29% of deaths among children under age 5 worldwide — and said the global community should increase its focus on those diseases.”Deaths due to these diseases are largely preventable through optimal breastfeeding practices and adequate nutrition, vaccinations, hand washing with soap, safe drinking water and basic sanitation, among other measures,” the report said.
Gucci Tote 247183hah said the global community needs to do more on all fronts to reduce the yawning death toll.Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo— five countries that account for nearly half of all preventable deaths of children under 5 — are expected to announce a series of initiatives and new policies at this week’s meeting in Washington. Performance needs to improve dramatically among these countries in order to get back on track, Shah said.”Unlike in prior efforts, where maybe donor countries like the United States, the U.K. or others would dictate the solutions,” he said, “in this effort, these countries are co-convening and are defining their efforts.”The U.S. government, however, still classifies diesel exhaust as a likely carcinogen. Experts said new diesel engines spew out fewer fumes but further studies are needed to assess any dangers.”We don’t have enough evidence to say these new engines are zero risk, but they are certainly lower risk than before,” said Vincent Cogliano of the Environmental Protection Agency.Experts in Lyon had analyzed published studies, evidence from animals and limited research in humans. One of the biggest studies was published in March by the U.S. National Cancer Institute. That paper analyzed 12,300 miners for several decades starting in 1947. Researchers found that miners heavily exposed to diesel exhaust had a higher risk of dying from lung cancerLobbyists for the diesel industry, facing argued the study wasn’t credible because researchers didn’t have exact data on how much exposure miners got in the early years of the study;
Gucci Tote 247220 they simply asked them to remember what their exposure was like.Diesel engine makers and car companies said emissions from trucks and buses have been slashed by more than 95 percent for nitrogen oxides, particulate and sulfur emissions.”Diesel exhaust is only a very small contributor to air pollution,” the Diesel Technology Forum, a group representing companies including Mercedes, Ford and Chrysler, said in a statement. Female doctor-researchers make an average of $12,000 per year less than their male counterparts, even after their work hours and area of specialty are taken into account, according to a study out Tuesday.The wage gap between men and women is nothing new, but among doctors in particular it wasn’t clear if the disparity was due to different career choices and work habits in men and women that could have affected their pay.Disturbingly, even after we controlled for all those other factors, we found that male doctors were paid more than female doctors for doing the same work,” said Dr. Reshma Jagsi, the lead author of the new study from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.She and her colleagues sent questionnaires to 800 doctor-researchers in the United States, all of whom had previously won a mid-career award from the government. The doctors were an average of 45 years old at the time of the survey and three-quarters of them were white.Men reported making an average of slightly over $200,000 per year and women about $168,000, according to findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.The researchers found women were more likely to work in lower-paying specialties such as pediatrics and family medicine.
Gucci Large Boston Bag 247572 Female doctors also tended to work slightly fewer hours than their male peers — 58 hours per week, on average, versus 63 for men.Those differences were responsible for some of the salary gap. But even after Jagsi’s team accounted for income disparities that could have been due to career and life choices, the researchers found women still made about $12,000 less than men doing the same type and amount of work.That’s similar to what has been found in past research, such as in studies of early-career doctors, according to Anthony Lo Sasso, a health policy and economics researcher from the University of Illinois at Chicago.But the finding still leaves many unanswered questions, said Lo Sasso, who wasn’t involved in the new research.”It really doesn’t get at what the underlying driver is, and I think that remains the puzzle at this point — what is accounting for this unexplained salary difference?”One explanation, according to the researchers, is that women are less aggressive about negotiating for pay or may take factors other than salary, such as location and community, into account when choosing a job.Lo Sasso said the disparity is “not necessarily a bad thing,” as it’s possible women in the study accepted slightly lower pay in return for less time being on-call and more predictability in their schedules. Those types of questions were not included in the survey.”We don’t really have the answer to that, so we’re kind of just left to speculate,” Lo Sasso told Reuters Health.The researchers calculated that over her career, the average female doctor-researcher would make about $350,000 less than a man doing similar work because of unexplained salary differences.Jagsi said she worries the findings may hint at unconscious biases in hiring and pay at the academic institutions where these researchers worked. One way to address that, she said, is for employers to have clear policies about how salaries are determined so doctors can know if they’re being paid fairly.
Gucci GG Large Tote 247179And that applies outside of hospitals and universities as well, she pointed out.A report out in April showed American women make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gap that is even bigger in certain professions, such as financial management. Brain imaging with a beta amyloid-specific tracer identified patients who had a high risk of rapid progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease, an Australian study showed.Three-fourths of patients with high uptake of 18F-florbetaben (18FBB) progressed to Alzheimer’s disease within 24 months. In contrast, half of patients with hippocampal atrophy met diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease within 2 years.The results suggest that PET imaging with 18FBB could offer the earliest test yet developed for diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study reported at the Society of Nuclear Medicine meeting in Miami Beach, Fla.”Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease can now be made when the patient first presents symptoms and still has largely preserved mental function,” Christopher Rowe, MD, of Austin Health in Melbourne, said in a statement.”Previously, there was an average delay of 3 years between consulting a doctor over memory concerns and the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, as the diagnosis required the presence of dementia,” he added.
Gucci Vintage Web Medium Boston Bag 247205 BlackThe study was one of several linking the burden of beta-amyloid to Alzheimer’s disease.Rowe and colleagues presented data from two of the studies. In the first, they longitudinally assessed beta-amyloid accumulation in 45 patients with mild cognitive impairment, performing 18FBB-PET imaging and 3D MRI at 12 and 24 months.At baseline, 53% of the study participants had high neocortical FBB binding (>1.4 SUVR), and 76% had hippocampal atrophy, both of which correlated with the patients’ composite memory scores.At the 24-month follow-up, investigators observed increased neocortical SUVR in patients who had high FBB binding. Three-fourths of those patients had progressed to Alzheimer’s disease, which represented a 10.9-fold increased risk of progression compared with patients who had low FBB binding (P<0.0001).Rowe reported that 53% of patients with hippocampal atrophy had progressed to Alzheimer’s disease (RR 4.1, P=0.03). For progression to any dementia, hippocampal atrophy had a predictive RR of (P=0.009).The authors pointed out that hippocampal atrophy lost significance in multivariate analysis.In their second study, Rowe and colleagues evaluated 194 healthy individuals, 92 patients with mild cognitive impairment, and 70 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, using a PET imaging agent known as Pittsburgh Compound C