Global News Journal

from Photographers Blog:

How did the Haiti earthquake affect you?

A year after the Haiti earthquake killed about 250,000 people and left more than a million homeless, a major multimedia documentary by Thomson Reuters Foundation takes viewers to the streets and tent cities of the shattered capital.

From the homeless schoolgirl who studies science by candlelight to the doctor who built a makeshift operating theatre in the ruins of a hospital, One Day in Port-au-Prince tells stories of resilience, ingenuity and courage.

We’d like to add the experience of Reuters readers. Perhaps you were directly involved, or maybe someone you know. Perhaps the catastrophe moved you to respond in a special way.

Whatever your experience, use the comments section below to share your story.

Quadriplegic in an age of austerity

Every time I write a story on European countries cutting public spending, I feel a frisson of panic. I can’t help but fear my health, lifestyle and liberty could be a casualty of the “age of austerity”.

On assignment covering the Sri Lankan civil war for Reuters four years ago, I broke my neck in a minibus smash. It left me quadriplegic, almost entirely paralysed from the shoulders down and totally dependent on 24 hour care. I was 25.

Nine months later, in a wheelchair, using voice recognition software and supported by government-funded personal assistants, I got back to work in Reuters London headquarters the day after leaving hospital. Now political risk correspondent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, I write about the interplay of politics and markets. For the past year and a half, much of that has been the drive to cut government spending as Europe rebalances its books.

That hasn’t done my personal mental health any good at all. I even had my doctor tweak my medication to make sure worry didn’t produce a gastric ulcer.

Britain’s new coalition government intends to cut more than many countries, some 25 percent over five years. Some details will emerge in an Oct. 20 spending review, but I may have to wait until the end of the financial year for details on how that will affect my care and that of others.

In many respects, I have already been very lucky. Stringent UK employment law meant it was hard to pension me off just because of my disability. Improvements in voice recognition software meant I could still write at roughly the same speed as before – crucial to continuing work as a newswire journalist.

Most important of all, decades of growth in Britain’s social welfare system meant that – after a substantial struggle – enough state funding was available to look after me in my own home.

Madeleine Albright pumps iron — and vouches for healthy lifestyle

We knew she was tough — but this tough?

“I can leg press 450 pounds,” the former U.S. Secretary of State modestly told a panel on health in Mexico City on Friday.

Albright, who also served in the 1990s as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke of the importance of good nutrition at a panel sponsored by dietary supplement company Herbalife, which counts some 50,000 Mexicans among its global distributors.

The challenges of eating right have not been lost on the eminent Albright, who now sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairs global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge, and is a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University. “The only thing I can tell you is that as Secretary of State and before that as UN Ambassador I got very fat because I was eating for my country,” Albright said.

When seated at dinners next to global heads of state, Albright was inevitably presented with sumptuous — and caloric — national dishes, which took a measure of skilled diplomacy to decline. “I would try to diet and push it around the plate and the person would look at me and say ‘Why aren’t you eating our national whatever?’ It was a very fattening job.” But a healthy lifestyle has come easier in recent years, Albright said, who shared the following tidbit from her exercise regime. “One of the things that nobody ever believes about me that’s true is that I can leg press 450 pounds and I exercise three times a week,” she said.

Health is a crucial, yet under emphasized component of Mexico’s economic development, health experts said. The pressing problem of security in the midst of a brutal drug war that has cast a shadow over the country and slowed a recovery from recession. Whereas partnership between the United States and Mexico in the auto and high-tech sectors has already been established, to the benefit of both countries, the market in Mexico for health products has been “barely touched,” said the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual. “One area we have only just started to touch is health. Health and healthcare and the provision of health products,” said Pascual.

The stakes are high for Mexico, a country with some 45 million who live in poverty, according to the ambassador. And the link between poverty and insufficient nutrition is strong. The country has the highest percentage of overweight citizens, at 70 percent, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, followed by the United States at 68 percent. Mexico is No. 2 in obesity, with 30 percent of the population so affected, compared to 34 percent in the United States. “It undercuts what Mexico is trying to do in terms of developing a healthy, hard-working population that can change the economic picture in Mexico,” said Albright.

Groundbreaking new cancer report?

The President’s Cancer Panel has issued a new report saying that Americans are being bombarded — their words — with carcinogens.

Advocates of more research into the potential chemical causes of cancer had been waiting for the report, which they call groundbreaking.  But it’s made less of a splash than they expected. Asked about the report, one White House spokesman replied,

“What report?”

The National Cancer Institute remained stolidly silent, even though the NCI logo is on the report. The chemicals industry spent languid hours writing a terse response and only one member of Congress jumped on the bandwagon.

PhotoCredit: REUTERS/Chip East (The New York City skyline is seen behind part of a chemical plant at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, May 27, 2005)

U.S. public servants sacrifice cash prizes

President Barack Obama had to give up his $1.4 million Nobel Peace prize award, but at least he got to choose which charities would benefit — he named 10, with the largest share going to Fisher House, which houses families of wounded veterans while they receive treatment.

No such luck for Dr. Francis Collins, head of the U.S. National Institutes of  Health.

Collins just won a one-third share of the $500,000 Albany Medical Center prize, the award for medicine or science in the United States.

Collins shares the glory with Dr. Eric Lander of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University and David Botstein, the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.

But Collins cannot accept the cash, and he said he can’t even designate a charity to receive it instead.

“But it’s good to be a public servant,” he says.

By the way, Collins’s federal contract also does not allow him to promote his two recent books, “The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine” and “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”.

from Africa News blog:

Nigerian president on the way back?

So Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua has ended weeks of silence with comments on the BBC that he is getting better and hopes to be back home soon.

That at least appears to have answered speculation in local media that he could be brain damaged, in a coma or even dead.

But it hasn’t satisfied critics who say that to fulfil his constitutional duties he should be handing over powers to Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan, at least temporarily.

"Whether he is alive or brain damaged or spoke to the BBC is not our bone of contention. He left a vacuum which we want filled,” as one put it.

It has been a particularly difficult time with Yar’Adua away and doubts over his future.

Not only has the speculation slowed government in Nigeria and fuelled the maneuvering by politicians only too eager at the unexpected chance for an opening to power, but Nigeria has come under new pressure internationally following the failed plane bombing by a Nigerian passport holder.

J. Peter Pham, senior fellow and director of the Africa Project at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, recently suggested that Yar’Adua’s death or further decline in 2010 could lead to major instability or even a slide towards a failed state.

Swine flu vaccination finally starts

  Swine flu vaccination is under way in the US, although the CDC admits it is a bumpy start .

 The World Health Organization is worried that people may believe rumors about the safety of the vaccine and avoid it .  What could happen with H1N1 anyway?

  All this is great news for  vaccine makers

from Maggie Fox:

Swine flu update

WHO has given up on trying to keep any kind of precise count on swine flu, which is just about everywhere now. It's fairly mild but hardly anyone has any immunity, so it will infect far more people than seasonal flu does in an average year. That may mean more serious cases and more deaths than usual, just by virtue of sheer numbers.

It is affecting lots of kids but there are some clear guidelines for health care workers to protect themselves and their families.

Lots of companies are working on vaccines, which likely will not be ready for most countries  until the middle of October.  In the meantime, most patients do not need any treatment at all. People with diabetes, asthma, pregnant women and children who seem to have trouble breathing need prompt treatment, however, and the good news is the antiviral drugs still work well.

from Maggie Fox:

Confusing news

Ok so we are not supposed to eat sugar any more and in fact all junk food is targeted.

And you can't even take solace in the midnight snack.

But yet, Thunder Thighs rule.

Guess the only option is to fatten up on broccoli...

U.S. cancer case the best? It is if you can pay for it…

Angela Kegler McDowell thought she was doing everything right.

A 38-year-old small business owner, she had bought her own personal health insurance and kept paying her premiums, even as they rose from $293 a month to $804 a month.

The insurance company said it had to raise her premiums when her breast cancer came back and she was forced to undergo expensive chemotherapy.

“When the renewal came up in January, they told me I was a high risk to insure and they were dropping my insurance,” McDowell told Reuters in an interview. “Even if I had a million dollars a month to pay for insurance, I couldn’t get it.”  See her on video here in a related story, young adults.

McDowell has been lobbying her members of Congress to ask them to make sure the healthcare reform plan ensures that private insurance — sure to be part of any reform package –cannot drop patients if their coverage becomes too expensive.

Plans also need to be more affordable, says McDowell, who estimates she spent $42,000 out of pocket on her 20 percent co-pays and wiped out her family’s life savings even before her insurance company dumped her.

McDowell was struggling to hold her company together, battle cancer, and fight with her health insuance company– which she doesn’t want to name because she is still negotiating to be reinstated. “It was truly more than a medical battle. It was a financial battle,” she said.