A drug that combines four different medicines and could halve deaths from heart attacks and strokes around the globe will enter human trials soon.
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/ 30 September 2008
The use of Ritalin and similar drugs is extensive and, some argue, employed indiscriminately for children diagnosed with ADHD.
Signs that work on preventing the spread of HIV is bearing fruit were highlighted recently by UNAids’s two-yearly report on the state of the epidemic.
A drive to tackle the tide of multi-drug- resistant tuberculosis spreading around the world was announced by the World Health Organisation last week.
A third of cancers are caused by diet and lack of exercise and could be prevented, states a report that urges people to stay slim and abstain from too much fast food, red meat and preserved meat, such as ham and bacon, and alcohol. The report from the World Cancer Research Fund is the most authoritative overview of the role that food, drink, obesity and exercise play in causing cancer.
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/ 18 December 2007
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, set at the turn of the century, made up the most aspirational development programme ever devised. But a progress report published recently by Unicef says that even though more babies are surviving, more children are in school and fewer families live in poverty, urgent action is needed if the goals are to be met by the target date of 2015.
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/ 5 November 2007
Multinational drug companies are targeting doctors in developing countries with dinners and lavish gifts, such as air conditioners, washing machines and down payments on cars, as incentives to prescribe their drugs, a new report revealed this week. The report from Consumers International says that self-regulation by the multinational drug giants has failed.
A key figure in the World Bank, said to have links to the Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei, was accused this week of undermining its commitment to the health of women by ordering the deletion of goals, targets and policies relating to family planning. uan Jose Daboub, the bank’s managing director, ordered staff to remove all references to family planning from its country assistance programme document for Madagascar.
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/ 20 November 2006
Poor people are needlessly dying because drug companies and the governments of rich countries are blocking the developing world from obtaining affordable medicines, according to an Oxfam report released recently. Five years to the day after the Doha declaration — a groundÂÂbreaking deal to give poor countries access to cheap drugs — was signed at the World Trade Organisation, Oxfam says things are worse.
A family live in a corrugated iron shack with no sanitation, among thousands of other brightly painted corrugated iron shacks in Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town. Ten people, five of them children, share three dark rooms and nobody earns any money. They are among the poorest people on the planet.