World Bank to invest $700 mn on
women, children's health
United Nations: World Bank President Jim Yong Kim announced
Monday that at least $700 million would be invested by 2015 to help developing
countries reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for women and
children's health.
The funding will come from the International Development
Association (IDA), the Bank group's fund for the poorest countries, Xinhua
reported citing a statement from the World Bank president.
It will enable national scale-ups of successful pilot
projects that were made possible by support from the World Bank's Health
Results Innovation Trust Fund (HRITF) and IDA, the statement said.
"We need to inject greater urgency into our collective
efforts to save more women and children's lives, and evidence shows that
results-based financing has significant impact," said Kim at a high-level
forum at the United Nations.
"The World Bank Group is committed to using evidence-based
approaches to help ensure that every woman and every child can get the
affordable, quality health care necessary to survive and live a healthy,
productive life," he added.
The announcement follows Kim's last year's commitment to
help boost funding for the MDGs as part of the UN secretary general's Every
Woman Every Child global partnership.
Reducing child mortality and improving maternal health by
2015 are two of the Millennium Development Goals, a blueprint agreed to by all
the world's countries and leading development institutions.
24.09.2013
Universal flu vaccine closer to
reality
Washington: Scientists including an Indian-origin are now
closer to developing a universal flu vaccine, after they used the 2009 pandemic
as a natural experiment to study why some people resist severe illness.
Lead researcher Professor Ajit Lalvani from the National
Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and his team rapidly
recruited 342 staff and students at Imperial to take part in their study in
autumn 2009.
The volunteers donated blood samples and were given nasal
swabs. They were sent emails every three weeks asking them to fill in a survey
about their health. If they experienced flu symptoms, they took a nasal swab
and sent it back to the lab.
They found that those who fell more severely ill with flu
had fewer CD8 T cells in their blood, and those who caught flu but had no symptoms
or only mild symptoms had more of these cells.
Professor Lalvani said that the immune system produces these
CD8 T cells in response to usual seasonal flu.
He said that unlike antibodies, they target the core of the
virus, which doesn't change, even in new pandemic strains and the 2009 pandemic
provided a unique natural experiment to test whether T cells could recognise,
and protect us against, new strains that we haven't encountered before and to
which we lack antibodies.
Lalvani asserted that their findings suggest that by making
the body produce more of this specific type of CD8 T cell, you can protect
people against symptomatic illness and this could provide the blueprint for
developing a universal flu vaccine.
The findings have been published in Nature Medicine.
24.09.2013
It is not good enough to have a good mind; the main
thing is to use it well
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