Category: Health

{{Prime Minister Dr. Pierre Damien Habumuremyi has launched a nationalwide campaign against malnutrition.}}

The campaign expected to last 1000 days was launched on Saturday in Gakenke District aimed improving maternal and child health in the country.

Dr. Habumuremyi noted, “Families must understand the importance of proper nutrition, appropriate care and feeding practices for children as well as pregnant and breast-feeding mothers.”

During the campaign, families will be encouraged to have ‘kitchen gardens’ on which an assorted food varieties can be grown.

Officials said the figures of malnutrition for children under five remain “high” and a survey conducted in 2010 put the figure at 44%.

Parents have been advised to give their children foritfied food, especially vegetables, fruits and milk, to cushion against diseases that are associated with poor feeding.

Dr Anita Asiimwe, the State minister for primary and public healthcare, said the campaign aims at changing behaviour in families, especially among husbands who seem to leave all duties related to children’s health to their wives.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) country representative, Naola Skinner, stressed that the role of husbands and fathers is extremely important in insuring that their pregnant and breast-fedding mothers and children get the right nutrition during this critical period.

source:{ Newtimes}

{{In 2006 when doctors started testing a melanoma treatment made by Roche Holding AG on patients, they were used to facing slim odds – about one in eight – that the tumors would shrink on chemotherapy. This time, they couldn’t believe their eyes.}}

With Zelboraf, a drug that targets specific mutations in cancer cells, eight out of 10 patients in an early-stage trial experienced significant tumor shrinkage. Roche clearly had a remarkable drug, though it only worked for people with a specific genetic makeup.

Research like the Zelboraf tests, that fine-tune treatments to the genetic profile of patients, is fueling a rethink over how new cancer drugs are tested. The promise: medicines that, in theory at least, can win approval more easily and cheaply.

That also raises ethical questions. If you know a certain treatment is genetically bound to work much better on some people than on others, is it right to conduct randomized trials to see which works best?

Zelboraf led some doctors to question whether to go ahead with the trials they had planned, trials that would pit Zelboraf against the standard treatment, a chemotherapy developed in 1975 called dacarbazine.

Some doctors believed that would risk patients’ lives unnecessarily. U.S. Food and Drug Administration cancer drug czar Dr. Richard Pazdur pushed for changes to shorten the trial.

Others, such as Dr. Patrick Hwu of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, refused to participate in a study that seemed bound to disadvantage some patients.

Ultimately, the trial proceeded and the drug won U.S. approval in 2011. But experts say the controversy over Zelboraf broke the mould, potentially pointing the way to lower-cost drug development.

At least one company has already indicated it will cut prices. Earlier this year, GlaxoSmithKline Plc won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Tafinlar, a drug targeting the same mutant genes as Zelboraf, based on a single clinical trial of just 250 patients. It said the drug would cost $7,600 a month, 30 percent less than Zelboraf.

Whether others follow suit in cutting prices will depend on a host of issues, perhaps the biggest of which is the vast difference in the way the United States and Europe regulate drugs.

Pressure is mounting. A new and highly promising class of immunotherapy drugs – which some analysts see as a potential $35 billion a year market – may force companies’ hands.

These therapies will come to market just as more people are asking if health insurers and governments will keep paying sky-high prices.

Dr. Alexander Eggermont, chief executive of Institut Gustave-Roussy, France’s largest cancer center, was one of those who held a hard line on Zelboraf testing, insisting on a randomized trial.

But Eggermont now says the standard of proof has changed and he believes immunotherapies – which he calls the “biggest game changer we have ever seen” – will cement the new approach to testing.

“We won’t have to do those dinosaur trials,” he said. “It will change the whole attitude in drug development.”

{reuters}

{{A new Matenity ward is slated to be established at Muhima Hospital, Nyarugenge District in patrnership between Kigali City and the Belgian Development Agency(BTC).}}

The project expected to be completed in 4years is valued at Frw12Billion to be funded by BTC is part of a string of modern health facilities planned for Remera, Gatenga, Mageragere and Kanyinya in Kigali.

The new facilities will be added to the existing wards to increase the capacity of the hospital to provide quality maternal and child care services in the hospital.

The new ward at Muhima Hospital was commissioned September 6 by the Vice Mayor in charge of social affairs in Nyarugenge District, Pierre Kalisa, together with the director in charge of health and environment at City of Kigali, Blaise Uhagaze.

He noted that there was a gap in health service delivery that prompted the Ministry of Health to ask for aid from development partners to address the challenge.

The clinical director at the hospital, Placide Ntigurirwa said, “We receive 600-700 mothers a month but we didn’t have enough facilities to accommodate all of them. With this new maternity ward being commissioned, we will be able to attend to even more expectant mothers.”

The maternity wing will be a two-storey building, with the ground floor used for cervical cancer screening, cancer registration, family planning, sterilising hospital equipment and some offices, while the upper floor will host labour rooms.

Source: {Newtimes}

{{Life expectancy for women at 50 has improved, but the gap between poor and rich countries is growing and could worsen without better detection and treatment of cardiovascular disease and cancers, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.}}

A WHO study, one of the first to analyse the causes of death of older women, found that in wealthier countries deaths from noncommunicable diseases has fallen dramatically in recent decades, especially from cancers of the stomach, colon, breast and cervix.

Women over 50 in low and middle-income countries are also living longer, but chronic ailments, including diabetes, kill them at an earlier age than their counterparts, it said.

“The gap in life expectancy between such women in rich and poor countries is growing,” said the WHO study, part of an issue of the WHO’s monthly bulletin devoted to women’s health.

There is a similar growing gap between the life expectancy of men over 50 in rich and lower income countries and in some parts of the world, this gap is wider, WHO officials said.

“More women can expect to live longer and not just survive child birth and childhood. But what we found is that improvement is much stronger in the rich world than in the poor world. The disparity between the two is increasing,” Dr. John Beard, director of WHO’s department of ageing and life course, said in an interview at WHO headquarters.

{{Better Prevention and Treatment}}

Beard, one of the study’s three authors, said: “What it also points to is that we need particularly in low and middle-income countries to start to think about how these emerging needs of women get addressed.

The success in the rich world would suggest that is through better prevention and treatment of NCDs.”

In women over 50 years old, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), particularly cancers, heart disease and strokes, are the most common causes of death, regardless of the level of economic development of the country in which they live, the study said.

Health ministers from WHO’s 194 member states agreed on a global action plan to prevent and control noncommunicable diseases at their annual ministerial meeting last May.

Developed countries have tackled cardiovascular diseases and cancers in women with tangible results, the WHO study said.

Fewer women aged 50 years and older in rich countries are dying from heart disease, stroke and diabetes than 30 years ago and these improvements contributed most to increasing women’s life expectancy at the age of 50, it said.

An older woman in Germany can now expect to live to 84 and in Japan to 88 years, against 73 in South Africa and 80 in Mexico.

“That reflects two things, better prevention, particularly clinical prevention around control of hypertension and screening of cervical cancer, but it also reflects better treatment,” Beard said.

“I think that is particularly true for breast cancer where women with breast cancer are much better managed these days in the rich world. That also explains the disparity,” he said.

Low-income countries, especially in Africa, offer community services to treat diseases like AIDS or offer maternal care but many lack services to detect or treat breast cancer, he said.

In many developing countries, there is also limited access to high blood pressure medication to treat hypertension, one of the biggest risk factors for death, he added.

Women with cardiovascular disease and cancers need the kind of chronic treatment provided to those with HIV/AIDS, he said.

{agencies}

A leading researcher Wednesday issued an alert over claims that an anti-cancer drug has proven to be an effective Aids cure.

Dr Patrick Orege of the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu urged the public to remain cautious, warning that there was no cure for Aids yet.

Two patients were purportedly cured of Aids after being treated by Dr Barasa Situma, who administered methotrexate — an anti-cancer treatment drug — and a cocktail of other drugs in Nairobi.

“The purported cure on the two patients is referred to as a ‘chance-finding’ and an interesting observation which is however not (beneficial to the public) since it involves only two patients.

{Photo: Dr Simon Barasa Situma of the Kenya Polytechnic University College. }

“In any case, we don’t know the number of other patients who were administered with the drugs and failed,” Dr Orege said.

During a previous media interview, Dr Situma claimed the HIV patients had turned negative after being tested at three laboratories — Cresent Medical Aid Kenya, Lancet Lab and Kemri in Nairobi.

“The public should not be duped into using the drug which is a known treatment for cancer and not HIV,” Dr Orege, who is also a former director of the National Aids Control Council said.

At the same time, he dismissed the decision by Dr Situma to use the services of three laboratories in determining the HIV results of the patients as “inconsistent with research methodology”.

“To achieve consistent results, Dr Situma should have utilised one laboratory and enrolled between 200 to 300 patients in his trials instead of being enthusiastic in announcing the results involving two patients,” he said.

Dr Orege continued: “I would like to advise Dr Situma to develop a proposal on the treatment and get in touch with medical scientists at either the University of Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital or Kenya Medical Research Institute.”

He warned that methotrexate was known to have adverse effects in the treatment of cancer and should be administered with “a lot of care”.