Health for All

In the realm of Global Health (and other sectors) the call for measuring changes in global health outcomes is increasingly strong. Considering the multi-millions of dollars that are spent on certain initiatives, these claims are not unfounded.

Although not a health outcome improvement per se, a recent BBC News article highlighted a major breakthrough in the field of vaccine delivery.

Oxford University scientists, in collaboration with Nova Bio-Pharma Technologies, have found a way to keep vaccines stable without refrigeration. Their research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The research findings were published in the February Issue of Science Translational Medicine and the free abstract is available here.

In the global health space, there is a lot of talk about silos. It’s quite difficult to get funding for HIV/AIDS and TB or malaria or dengue fever or hepatitis, because the funders typically have money for only one of those diseases. As soon as you try to take a holistic approach to health, you may end up running into this type of challenge.

What if the holistic approach, however, was not about linking different diseases together, but about linking different stages of disease treatment together? There seems to be a small but growing trend of partnerships between diagnostic companies (or those who can diagnose the disease) and pharmaceutical companies (or those who can treat the disease). Below is a list of a few examples of this trend:

This post first appeared on NextBillion.net and has been cross-posted with permission. The original post can be found here.

This post originally appeared on NextBillion.net as part of Al Hammond's Notes from the Field series.

Editor's note: Al Hammond, entrepreneur in residence at Ashoka, writes a series of reports documenting his experiences and the learning involved in started a "base of the pyramid" (BoP) healthcare venture to serve developing countries. This is his third report in the "Notes From the Field" series. You can read the first three parts here, here and here.

The below post first appeared on NextBillion.net and has been cross-posted with their permission. The original post can be found here.

Correction: This post has been submitted by FEC's Chloe Feinberg, who is working on the Healthcare for All Initiative.

With yesterday being World Aids Day, I thought I’d share some news on recent developments in the world of CD4 count diagnostic tests.

CD4 counts are a standard test administered to HIV patients which helps gauge how strong the immune system is. CD4 cells are the type of white blood cells that help to fight infection (also known as T-helper cells).

The CD4 count test measures the number of CD4 cells in a patient’s blood. This helps in telling how strong a patient’s immune system is and indicates the stage of the HIV disease. This helps inform doctors on treatment regimes and also helps predict how HIV may progress in the individual’s system.

What if you cannot smile? Not because you do not want to, but because you are too embarrassed about the condition and state of your teeth. You do not want the outside world to see the stains, disintegration, and damage that have afflicted your previously shining pearly-whites. What is going on? The deformities that are occurring to both your teeth and bones are a mystery to you and those around you. You cannot explain why you have abdominal pain, excessive saliva, and vomiting. And even worse, sometimes seizures and muscle spasms occur. Really, what is going on?

Fluorosis.

The ingestion of excessive fluoride, most commonly occurring with drinking water, can cause a condition called fluorosis, a crippling bone disease that affects the teeth and bones. Initially affecting the teeth, excessive amounts can lead to potential skeletal problems. The obvious solution to this problem is addressing the issue of purified drinking water and removing fluoride from contaminated water. Researchers and active players in this effort know that the process is both difficult and expensive. Defluoridation plants have been installed in many areas, but often times, this is done without teaching and consulting with the community. The disease remains a mystery to the communities and often times, people do not realize that water and the environment are the root causes of the problem.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Transitioning Technologies from Labs to LDCs Workshop at Rice University's Institute for Global Health Technologies.

The workshop was an excellent opportunity to learn about some great new health point-of-care diagnostic technologies, point-of-use water purification technologies, and also many of the regulatory hurdles that must be overcome to get products to market, as well as the many groups whose purpose is to support those working toward this goal. Besides the excellent presentations, discussions, and networking opportunities, there was a very impressive poster session highlighting the research and technologies that have been developed by the undergraduate students in Rice University's Beyond Traditional Borders initiative.

If you haven’t heard, today at 4pm EST Ashoka will be hosting its monthly, twitter-based Social Entrepreneurship Chat. This month’s conversation is on mHealth and eHealth challenges and prospects for the future, and comes just one week after the mHealth World Bank Day and the mHealth Summit, sponsored by the Foundation for the National Institute of Health.

If you are not a twitter user, fear not!, a #SocEntChat is a great way to dive into a topic you are interested in and “meet” many people interested in a similar field.
I encourage you to join in the conversation or at least follow along. More details can be found here.

And in case you missed either of the conferences last week, here is a list of some recent post-conference write-ups and takeaways from others:
Learning from mHealth Summit by John Chilmark; World Bank Day @ mHealth Summit – Aftermath by Florian Sturm; Magic and mHealth at TEDMED and mHS09 by Brian Dolan

A few years ago, the Howard Florey Institute, known as Australia's Brain Research Institute and the University of Melbourne has a mjor breakthrough in developing a cost-effective diagnostic test for Parkinson's Disease (PD). The disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system and typcially affects a person's motor skills, speech, and other functions.

The breakthrough could allow PD to be diagnosed on a chip at the cost of $500 versus nearly $4,000 for a diagnostic test. That is a huge decrease in cost. The PD Gene Chip, as it is called, opens up doors for future understanding of Parkinson's disease and also of gene testing. The need for such a test is high, as it ix expected that over the next 25 years the number of case of Parkinson's Disease Worldwide is expected to double in the world's most populous countries. This again underscores the need for addressing the problems of chronic disease in developing countries.

Unfortunately, much research about chronic diseases results in expensive diagnosis and treatment. And while $500 for a diagnostic test is not cheap, comparing that to $4,000 is remarkable and an important step in driving up the innovation and down the costs of diagnosing conditions not typically thought of as being urgent problems in developing countries.