Europe

THE Department of Health still cannot say when the much-delayed South African Health Products Regulatory Agency (Sahpra) is likely to come into effect.

Despite the April 1 target set by last year’s health budget vote, there is still no sign of the new entity. The department envisaged Sahpra as the solution to the problems besetting the medicines regulator, the Medicines Control Council (MCC), which takes longer than regulators in the US and Europe to approve new drugs or clinical trials.

THE Western Cape provincial government is taking the lead in establishing an African Incubation Unit in a bid to help roll out information and communication technology (ICT) hubs, such as the Bandwidth Barn.

Only 16% of the continent’s people have direct access to the internet and in South Africa the penetration level is a mere 17.5% of the population.

In Europe and North America, internet access averages between 70% and 90%.

The Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town have invested heavily in broadband infrastructure in recent years and are now looking to assist other regions in Africa with internet access. The province is also home to the town of Stellenbosch, where moves are under way to provide free WiFi coverage to residents.

After 30 years of HIV disease it is more important to deal with the costs of the medicines and how to sustain access to it, rather than treatment outcomes, according to an HIV specialist.

Addressing the first Southern African HIV Clinicians Society conference today, Professor Brian Guzzard, an expert advisor to the UK government on HIV and head of one of Europe’s largest clinical units, started his talk recalling his visit to South Africa shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela. “The then government told me that HIV will never be a problem in South Africa,” Guzzard told the packed auditorium.

The UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halting and reversing the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic by 2015 has been achieved, and the world is on track to meet the target of reducing global TB prevalence by 50 percent by 2015. But the progress has been irregular, with Africa and Europe lagging behind the rest of the world, according to the new Global Tuberculosis report by the UN World Health Organization (WHO).

Global health experts came together to discuss the European Union’s role in supporting low- and middle-income countries to reach universal health coverage at the European Development Days (EDDs) conference. The topic for the two-day conference taking place in Brussels from 16-17 October is “Inclusive and Sustainable Growth for Human Development”.

A high-level panel, entitled "Building a Social Contract for Health", discussed what African countries could do to achieve universal health coverage, and how the EU and other developmental partners could support them.

Scientists have found an alarming number of cases of the lung disease tuberculosis in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America that are resistant to up to four powerful antibiotic drugs.

In a large international study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, researchers found rates of both multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were higher than previously thought and were threatening global efforts to curb the spread of the disease.

The partners leading efforts to control measles announce a new global strategy aimed at reducing measles deaths and congenital rubella syndrome to zero.

The announcement comes with the publication of new data using a state-of-the-art methodology showing that accelerated efforts to reduce measles deaths have resulted in a 74% reduction in global measles mortality, from an estimated 535 300 deaths in 2000 to 139 300 in 2010.

With donor spending from the U.S. and Europe slowing or declining, there is an urgent need for new global health resources and champions. With this in mind, international organizations have started looking to the BRICS as potential donors and health innovators. GHSi’s report explores the expanding influence of the BRICS on global health and development through their foreign assistance programs and innovative, home-grown products and services.

Rural hospitals in South Africa are facing a serious doctor shortage in 2012 as a result of delays in registering foreign qualified doctors and the failure to place community service doctors in underserved hospitals.

Many of the foreign qualified doctors who provide essential medical care in remote and rural parts of South Africa are from the Developed World (United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand) and their training and experience is considered equivalent to that of South African trained doctors so they can be registered here without passing extra examinations.

Remarks by Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, delivered at a colloquium hosted by Yale University’s Global Health Leadership Institute and the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, CT, on November 28, 2011.

On the Gutting of the Global Fund