POVERTY: United States: Single-mother families make up half of all households in poverty

Among all families, nearly one in five is headed by unmarried women, compared to one in two among poor families. One in three families headed by unmarried women is poor, compared to one in 10 of all families. One in four children lives in single-mother families, but one in two children living in such families is poor.




Family Poverty Rates, 2009







Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2010.

Tuberculosis Outbreak Investigations in the United States, 2002–2008

DOI: 10.3201/
Mitruka K, Oeltmann JE, Ijaz K, Haddad MB. Tuberculosis outbreak investigations in the United States, 2002–2008. Emerg Infect Dis. 2011 Mar; [Epub ahead of print]

Author affiliation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

To understand circumstances of tuberculosis transmission that strain public health resources, we systematically reviewed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) staff reports of US outbreaks in which CDC participated during 2002–2008 that involved >3 culture-confirmed tuberculosis cases linked by genotype and epidemiology. Twenty-seven outbreaks, representing 398 patients, were reviewed. Twenty-four of the 27 outbreaks involved primarily US-born patients; substance abuse was another predominant feature of outbreaks. Prolonged infectiousness because of provider- and patient-related factors was common. In 17 outbreaks, a drug house was a notable contributing factor. The most frequently documented intervention to control the outbreak was prioritizing contacts according to risk for infection and disease progression to ensure that the highest risk contacts were completely evaluated. US-born persons with reported substance abuse most strongly characterized the tuberculosis outbreaks in this review. Substance abuse remains one of the greatest challenges to controlling tuberculosis transmission in the United States.
http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/17/3/pdfs/10-1550.pdf

POVERTY: Cheyenne River Sioux Indians: The poorest county in the United States

Nomaan Merchant, The Associated Press  02/19/2011
ZIEBACH COUNTY, S.D. - In the barren grasslands of Ziebach County, there's almost nothing harder to find in winter than a job. This is America's poorest county, where more than 60 percent of people live at or below the poverty line.
At a time when the weak economy is squeezing communities across the nation, recently released census figures show that nowhere are the numbers as bad as here - a county with 2,500 residents, most of them Cheyenne River Sioux Indians living on a reservation.
In the coldest months of the year, when seasonal construction work disappears and the South Dakota prairie freezes, unemployment among the Sioux can hit 90 percent.
Poverty has loomed over this land for generations. Repeated attempts to create jobs have run into stubborn obstacles: the isolated location, the area's crumbling infrastructure, a poorly trained population and a tribe that struggles to work with businesses or attract investors.
Now the tribe - joined by a few entrepreneurs, a development group and a nonprofit - is renewing efforts to create jobs and encourage a downtrodden population to start its own businesses.
"Many, many people make these grand generalizations about our communities and poverty and `Why don't people just do something, and how come they can't?"' said Eileen Briggs, executive director of Tribal Ventures, a development group started by the tribe. "It's much more complicated than that."

DIFFICULT TERRAIN
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, created in 1889, consists almost entirely of agricultural land in Ziebach and neighboring Dewey County. It has no casino and no oil reserves or available natural resources.
Most towns in Ziebach County are just clusters of homes between cattle ranches. Families live in dilapidated houses or run-down trailers. Multicolored patches of siding show where repairs were made as cheaply as possible.
Families fortunate enough to have leases to tribal land can make money by raising cattle.
Opportunities are scarce for almost everyone else.
The few people who have jobs usually have to drive up to 80 miles to tribal headquarters.
The nearest major population centers are Rapid City and Bismarck, each a trip of 150 miles or more.
Basic services can be vulnerable. The tribe's primary health clinic doesn't have a CT scanner or a maternity ward. An ice storm last year knocked out power and water in places for weeks. And in winter, the gravel roads that connect much of the reservation can become impassable with snow and ice.
Almost six decades after the reservation was created, the federal government began building a dam on the Missouri River, but the project caused flooding that washed away more than 100,000 acres of Indian land. After the flooding, the small town of Eagle Butte became home to the tribal headquarters and the center of the reservation's economy.
"There are things that have happened to us over many, many generations that you just can't fix in three or four years," said Kevin Keckler, the tribe's chairman. "We were put here by the government, and we had a little piece of land and basically told to succeed here."
But prosperity never came. The county has been at or near the top of the poverty rankings for at least a decade. In 2009, the census defined poverty as a single person making less than $11,000 a year or a family of four making less than $22,000 a year.
Eagle Butte has few businesses and the handful that do exist struggle to stay afloat. The town has just one major grocery store, the Lakota Thrifty Mart, which is owned by the tribe.
There's also a Dairy Queen, a Taco John's and a handful of small caf s. There's no bowling alley or movie theater.

SUCCESS IS MIXED
A few entrepreneurs are trying to break the cycle of failure, with mixed results.
Stephanie Davidson and her husband, Gerald, started a plumbing and heating business in 2000 with a single pickup truck. Eventually, D&D Plumbing started to grow, and they hired several employees.
But the reservation economy, which was never strong, has been hit hard by the economic slump. Many customers don't have the money to pay for work upfront, and the Davidsons have struggled to get contracts in new construction, such as an $85 million federal hospital being built to replace the aging clinic.
They've laid off employees and filled empty space in their building by adding a bait shop and then a deli. Nothing has worked.
"People think you're a pillar of the community because you have a business, and that part of it is good," Stephanie Davidson said. "We don't feel that way right now because we're having such a tough time."
Nicky White Eyes, who owns a flower shop on Main Street, says there are days when she doesn't sell a single flower. Most of her business comes from families who get help from the tribe to buy flowers for a relative's funeral.
"We're getting by with nothing extra," said White Eyes, who said she hasn't taken any salary in the months since she quit another job to run the shop full-time. "But no, I have too much heart in it to let it go quite yet."
The nonprofit Four Bands Community Fund has invested in both businesses and people in Eagle Butte. The group teaches residents basic financial skills - how to open a checking account, how to save money on a budget and how to develop credit.
"You have the most complicated little world here," said Tanya Fiddler, Four Bands' executive director.

NEED FOR AID
Without a viable private sector, federal money permeates every part of life here. The federal government pays for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and the Indian Health Service, three of the reservation's largest employers. Businesses rely on the federal money that comes into the reservation.
Federal stimulus dollars are paying for the new hospital, which will create about 150 permanent jobs when it opens this year. Other federal contracts bring sporadic jobs, too.
One tribal success story is Lakota Technologies, which has attracted call-center and data-processing work and trained hundreds of young people since it started more than a decade ago. The company now employs a handful of tribal members on a State Department sub-contract, even though most of its cubicles remain empty.
But other businesses owned by the tribe have run into trouble. Last year, a buffalo meat processing company was sued by a rancher in federal court. The lawsuit accused the company, Pte Hca Ka Inc., of not delivering on contracts. A federal judge ruled against Pte Hca Ka for $1.1 million when it did not respond to the lawsuit.
Keckler, the newly elected tribal chairman and a former business owner, has pledged to try to fix the problems. He said previous officials have rejected overtures from outside investors because they feared the loss of tribal control or the risk of losing their positions.
"It's difficult for us to get people to come here and have faith in us as a government," he said. "We just had a new election, and there was discussion about, `Oh, people want to give away things.' Those are kind of the issues that we have."
Still, there are small reasons to hope.

FLOOD SETTLEMENT
Later this year, the tribe will start to receive payments from a $290 million settlement with Congress related to the farmland that was lost to the Missouri River flooding. The tribe will receive annual interest on the settlement money starting this fall. This year's payment could be as much as $75 million, according to one tribal estimate. A Department of Treasury spokeswoman says the final amount hasn't been determined yet.
That money can be used for infrastructure improvements, economic development and education.
Raymond Uses The Knife, a rancher and tribal councilman, wants the reservation to be "accessible for other companies to come in and invest their money right here."
"We have to attract business. Regardless of how much money we have, we can't set up our own businesses," he said. "We also have to realize that we're all not experts."
Meanwhile, groups like Tribal Ventures and Four Bands continue to look for ways to bring in jobs and help those who are fighting the decades-old obstacles here.
"You can have all the heart you want, but you have to have actual cash and resources," said Briggs, of Tribal Ventures. "All those things play a part in our being able to basically use our greatest asset, which is our people."

http://www.sbsun.com/business/ci_17434223

POVERTY: Five Causes of Rising Food Prices

February 16, 2011: Jacob Goldstein

  trimmer741/Flickr

Global wheat prices more than doubled in the second half of last year, according to a new report from the World Bank. The price of corn, sugar and cooking oil also soared.
Why are global food prices skyrocketing? Who is going to go hungry as a result? And what does it mean for the U.S.?
I recently put these questions to Abdolreza Abbassian, a food economist at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Here's what he told me.



 FAO

Skyrocketing Prices
Abbassian attributed the price rise to several factors — some familiar to me (and probably to you), some less familiar.
1. The rise of biofuels, like ethanol made from corn. This market, driven largely by government subsidies, has created demand that is what economists call "price inelastic" — demand stays strong even as prices rise.
2. More demand from the developing world, particularly for meat. Livestock eat grain, so increasing demand for meat means increasing demand for grain. This source of demand has also been price inelastic, Abbassian said.
3. Disappearing stockpiles.
Because of WTO rules, the U.S. and Europe have been moving away from subsidies that led to vast reserves of wheat and corn.
Subsidies still exist in the U.S. and Europe, but they've taken a different form. Governments used to buy and stockpile surplus food from farmers. Now it's more common for governments to give farmers subsidy payments without actually buying any of the food they produce, Abbassian told me.
This sounds super wonky, but it has a huge impact on the price of food.
Big stockpiles mean that the supply of food remains relatively constant, even when there are disasters like the vast fires that destroyed last summer's Russian wheat crop.
But in the absence of stockpiles, unexpected shocks like those fires in Russia last summer have a huge impact on supply. That, in turn, contributes to huge price spikes.
"What you get is a world market that is increasingly tight, without much of a buffer," Abbassian told me. "Without a buffer, you have volatility. It's as simple as that."
4. Speculation
The volatility created by declining stocks is in turn compounded by speculation — traders betting on the rise or fall of prices.
Abbassian argued that bringing more transparency to commodities futures markets might mitigate this issue.
"If we know who is buying it and what are they buying it for, that may get those who are just there to gamble to be more cautious about their positions," he said.
Who is going to go hungry?
At any given moment, there are about a billion people in the world who don't have enough food to eat. When food prices go up, more people do go hungry — but the increase isn't as dramatic as you might think.
That's partly because many of the world's poorest people simply have no money and no access to food. Many live in countries where wars and other crises make it hard to get food to people. They would be hungry even if the price of food had not spiked.
What's more, in many poor countries, the local harvest is a more important factor than the price of global commodities. And many countries in Africa have had strong harvests of staples such as white corn and cassava.
One often overlooked region likely to be hit hard by the price increases is Central Asia, Abbassian said. This recent FAO report has lots of region-by-region detail.
What does all this mean for the U.S.?
Despite the fact that the price of staples like wheat, corn and sugar have risen by more than 50 percent in recent months, the price of food in the U.S. has barely budged — food prices here rose only 1.5 percent over the past year.
That's because the price of food in the U.S. is driven largely by labor costs and other factors, rather than by the price of the ingredients.
"If you eat a loaf of bread in the West, 2 percent of the price may be the wheat-flour price," Abbassian said. "In the developing world, it's 70 percent."
What's more, Americans only spend about 10 percent of their income on food — a far lower percentage than what people in the developing world typically spend. So even when food prices do rise in the U.S., it takes a smaller bite out of the average household's budget.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/16/133744524/why-are-food-prices-going-crazy

BIOTERRORISM: Expert says US should agree to destroy smallpox virus stocks

Robert Roos News Editor Jan 11, 2011 (CIDRAP News) – Given the potential for a bitter diplomatic battle at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in May, an expert on smallpox-related policy is recommending that the United States agree to the destruction of the remaining stocks of smallpox virus—or at least be prepared to destroy all but a remnant of them.
Smallpox was eradicated in the late 1970s, but the United States and Russia, citing concern that some countries may have kept hidden caches of the virus for biological warfare purposes, have maintained stocks of the virus for research on medical countermeasures.
The WHA, the annual gathering of World Health Organization (WHO) member states, agreed in the 1990s and again in 2002 to permit retention of virus stocks for continued research, notes Jonathan Tucker, PhD, in a lengthy article in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism. The WHA is scheduled to address the issue at its May meeting, and pressure to destroy the supply is building, Tucker writes. This could lead to "a diplomatic train wreck," he adds.
"In order to avoid an international confrontation at the 2011 World Health Assembly that would be harmful to all concerned, the US should accept a firm deadline (eg, by the end of 2012) for ending the smallpox research program and destroying the WHO-authorized stocks of variola virus," states Tucker, who is Georg Zundel Professor of Science and Technology for Peace and Security at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox.
If this option won't work because of opposition from Russia or other WHO members, the United States should stand ready to negotiate a compromise calling for destruction of most of the remaining stockpile while taking steps to share the results of smallpox research among WHO members, Tucker recommends.
In his view, Russia clearly opposes destroying its variola virus stocks, but if the United States dropped its opposition to destruction, Russia would probably not stand alone against a united WHA. Many developing countries in Africa and Asia want the virus caches destroyed, he says.
Tucker writes that US preparedness for a deliberate release of smallpox virus is far better now than when the research program began in 1999, reducing the need for continued countermeasure research. The nation has enough doses of smallpox vaccine to protect the whole population and a supply of a third-generation vaccine that's considered safer than earlier versions, he notes. Also, two promising antiviral drugs, ST-246 and CMX001, "are in advanced development and could be given under an Emergency Use Authorization."
Tucker proposes three elements for a compromise on the fate of the variola stocks, if complete destruction is not an option.
First, the United States and Russia would agree to reduce the WHO-authorized stocks in their possession to fewer than 10 representative strains in each country. Though this step would leave many unsatisfied, it would be "a major step toward reconciliation," he argues.
Second, the WHA would take steps to prevent the synthesis of variola virus from scratch. This would involve reaffirming the WHO's 2008 guidelines on the handling of variola virus DNA and incorporating them into national laws and regulations.
Third, the United States and Russia would take steps to share the benefits of smallpox research among WHO member countries. That would mean providing royalty-free licenses to any countries that want to produce drugs or vaccines developed under the program, setting up a WHO-controlled stockpile of antiviral drugs for victims of a smallpox attack anywhere in the world, and increasing the two countries' contributions to the WHO's global smallpox vaccine reserve.
Tucker JB. Breaking the deadlock over the destruction of the smallpox virus stocks. (Commentary) Biosecur Bioterror 2011 (published online Jan 10) [First page]
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/bt/smallpox/news/jan1111smallpox.html

TUBERCULOSIS: Mortality Among Patients with Tuberculosis and Associations with HIV Status --- United States, 1993--2008

November 26, 2010
Worldwide, tuberculosis (TB) incidence increased from 125 cases per 100,000 population in 1990 to 142 cases per 100,000 population in 2004, primarily because of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic (1). Persons with HIV are at increased risk for TB disease, and those with TB have a high risk for death. This is documented most clearly in resource-limited settings, where limited access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and other health-care services contribute to the elevated mortality (1). The impact of HIV on patients with TB is less clear in resource-rich nations such as the United States. To understand the impact of HIV on the risk for death during TB treatment in the United States, data were analyzed for all culture-positive patients with TB from 1993 to 2008, and the proportion that died was determined and stratified by HIV test result. Mortality data were restricted to patients reported before 2007. The proportion of all patients with TB who died during TB treatment decreased from 2,445 of 13,629 (18%) in 1993 to 682 of 7,578 (9%) in 2006. Among patients with TB and HIV, 950 of 2,337 (41%) died during treatment in 1993; this proportion declined to 131 of 663 (20%) in 2006. The proportion of patients with TB and HIV who received their TB diagnosis postmortem dropped from 191 of 2,927 (7%) in 1993 to 32 of 768 (4%) in 2006; 624 of 10,468 (6%) persons with TB and unknown HIV status received their TB diagnosis postmortem in 1993, and this proportion did not decline. Further reductions in mortality can be achieved by enhanced TB/HIV program collaboration and service integration.

Since 1993, all cases of TB diagnosed in the United States have been reported to CDC and entered into the National TB Surveillance System (NTSS), a comprehensive database that contains demographic, clinical, and outcome data. All culture-confirmed cases of TB were reviewed by CDC to determine 1) the proportion of cases diagnosed postmortem and 2) the proportion of cases in persons who were alive at diagnosis and who died during TB treatment; results then were stratified by HIV status (i.e., HIV infected, HIV uninfected, or HIV status unknown). The HIV-unknown category included patients with indeterminate or unknown results as well as patients who were not offered or refused testing. Rates of HIV test reporting during 2007--2008 were stratified by selected demographic characteristics. Mortality analyses were restricted to patients reported before 2007 (to allow 2 years for treatment outcomes to be reported) and to those whose outcomes were known (excluding patients who moved, were lost to follow-up, were uncooperative with treatment, or whose outcome was missing or listed as other). Because California reports HIV test results only for patients who receive diagnoses of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and does not report the HIV status of those who test negative, all data from California were excluded.

The proportion of patients with TB who had documented HIV test results increased substantially, from 6,015 of 16,507 (36%) in 1993 to 6,234 of 7,872 (79%) in 2008 (Figure 1). The proportion of patients with TB who had a known outcome and were alive at diagnosis but died during TB treatment decreased from 2,445 of 13,629 (18%) in 1993 to 682 of 7,578 (9%) in 2006 (Figure 2). Among patients with TB and HIV, 950 of 2,337 (41%) died during treatment in 1993; this proportion declined to 299 of 1,393 (21%) in 1997 and later to 131 of 663 (20%) in 2006 (Figure 2). By contrast, the proportion of TB patients without HIV who died during treatment decreased from 213 of 2,705 (8%) in 1993 to 281 of 5,315 (5%) in 2006. For patients with unknown HIV status, 1,282 of 8,587 (15%) died in 1993, with no decrease in proportion observed over the study period (Figure 2). Among patients with HIV who received diagnoses of TB, 191 of 2,927 (7%) received their TB diagnosis postmortem in 1993, which decreased to 32 of 768 (4%) in 2006. Among culture-confirmed cases of TB that occurred in persons who were HIV uninfected, 53 of 3,080 (2%) received their TB diagnosis postmortem in 1993, a proportion that decreased to 31 of 5,762 (1%) in 2006. Of those with unknown HIV status, 624 of 10,468 (6%) received their TB diagnosis postmortem; that proportion did not decline.

Among those with known HIV status, 2,932 of 6,015 (49%) patients with TB had HIV infection in 1993 and accounted for 950 of 1,163 (82%) deaths during treatment and 191 of 244 (78%) patients who received a TB diagnosis postmortem. In 2006, 769 of 6,533 (12%) patients with reported status had HIV, but accounted for 131 of 412 (32%) and 32 of 63 (51%) of those who died during treatment and those who received a TB diagnosis postmortem, respectively.

HIV testing during 2007--2008 was lower in certain demographic groups than the overall sample, notably, 102 of 201 (51%) patients aged ≤4 years, 95 of 144 (66%) patients aged 5--14 years, 1,824 of 3,253 (56%) patients aged ≥65 years, and 2,154 of 3,056 (70%) non-Hispanic white patients had HIV test results reported (Table).

Editorial Note
This analysis demonstrates a substantial reduction in case-fatality rate among patients with TB in the United States from 1993 to 2006, a decline that occurred almost exclusively in persons with HIV and corresponded to an increase in reported HIV test results and broader availability of highly active ART. In 2008, however, 21% of patients with TB still had unknown HIV status, and this proportion was even higher in certain demographic groups. This is unacceptable given that knowledge of HIV status is essential for appropriate treatment and that current guidelines recommend HIV testing for all patients with TB in the United States (2). A larger proportion of patients with TB were tested for HIV in some countries with a much higher burden of HIV and TB than the United States and far fewer resources, such as Kenya.*
In resource-limited settings, studies have demonstrated that without concurrent treatment of HIV, up to 50% of persons with HIV who develop TB will die during the 6- to 8-month course of TB treatment, many of them in the first 2 to 3 months (3,4). When patients with TB and HIV are treated with ART and prophylactic therapy for opportunistic infections as recommended (5), the proportion of patients who die during TB treatment can be reduced to less than 10% (4).
Recent research from New York City showed acceptable TB treatment success in patients with TB and HIV only when they received ART and directly observed therapy (6), underscoring the critical importance of these two treatment modalities. In this analysis, mortality declined steeply among patients with TB and HIV after highly active ART became widely available during 1995--1996. Data such as ART use, CD4 count, and specific cause of death are not reported to NTSS, and the impact of each of these could not be directly assessed; however, highly active ART use likely was an important factor in reducing mortality and, of course, can only be provided to those whose HIV infection is known.
A substantial proportion of culture-confirmed TB diagnoses among persons with either documented HIV infection or unknown HIV status were made postmortem. Research has demonstrated that when patients with TB and HIV die from TB, it is often because diagnosis is delayed (7), and these deaths might have been prevented if TB disease had been diagnosed and treated earlier. Screening persons with HIV for TB at regular intervals in accordance with current recommendations (8) allows for earlier diagnosis and treatment of TB and has been shown to lower mortality (9).
Treatment of latent TB infection and use of ART have been shown to substantially reduce the risk for TB disease in persons with HIV (10). Increasing HIV testing of the general population will help identify those for whom early ART initiation and treatment of latent TB infection might prevent TB before it develops (10).
The findings in this report are subject to at least two limitations. First, California accounts for approximately 20% of the patients with TB in the United States, and excluding those data might affect generalizability if those patients differed from other patients with TB in key ways. Second, outcome data were missing for 10% of all patients included in this analysis, and NTSS does not document cause of death for those who died; knowledge of mortality concerning these patients is limited.
Much progress has been made in reducing mortality among patients with TB and HIV in the United States since 1993. Further reductions in mortality can be achieved by enhanced TB and HIV program collaboration and service integration, including 1) providing HIV testing to all patients with TB; 2) screening all persons with HIV for TB disease and infection regularly; and 3) providing early and appropriate TB and HIV treatment to all patients with TB and HIV.† States and local health-care organizations should analyze their own data to determine how to best target interventions aimed at increasing HIV testing. In addition, studying the specific causes of death in patients with TB and HIV would facilitate development of additional measures to decrease the risk for death.
http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Disease/mortality_tuberculosis_hiv_2611100834.html

POVERTY: Neglected Infections of Poverty in the United States

http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/nip.html
The Neglected Infections of Poverty are parasitic, bacterial and viral infections that disproportionately affect impoverished people in the United States. These infections are considered neglected because relatively little attention has been devoted to surveillance, prevention, and/or treatment of these infections.
The major Neglected Infections of Poverty identified at this time for further action include the agents that cause Chagas disease, cysticercosis, congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV), toxocariasis, toxoplasmosis, and trichomoniasis.

http://www.plosntds.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pntd.0000256

In the United States, there is a largely hidden burden of diseases caused by a group of chronic and debilitating parasitic, bacterial, and congenital infections known as the neglected infections of poverty. Like their neglected tropical disease counterparts in developing countries, the neglected infections of poverty in the US disproportionately affect impoverished and under-represented minority populations. 1The major neglected infections include the helminth infections, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, ascariasis, and cysticercosis; the intestinal protozoan infection trichomoniasis; some zoonotic bacterial infections, including leptospirosis; the vector-borne infections Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, trench fever, and dengue fever; and the congenital infections cytomegalovirus (CMV), toxoplasmosis, and syphilis. These diseases occur predominantly in people of color living in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the American South, in disadvantaged urban areas, and in the US–Mexico borderlands, as well as in certain immigrant populations and disadvantaged white populations living in Appalachia. Preliminary disease burden estimates of the neglected infections of poverty indicate that tens of thousands, or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of poor Americans harbor these chronic infections, which represent some of the greatest health disparities in the United States. Specific policy recommendations include active surveillance (including newborn screening) to ascertain accurate population-based estimates of disease burden; epidemiological studies to determine the extent of autochthonous transmission of Chagas disease and other infections; mass or targeted treatments; vector control; and research and development for new control tools including improved diagnostics and accelerated development of a vaccine to prevent congenital CMV infection and congenital toxoplasmosis.

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h5986/show

7/30/2010--Introduced.Neglected Infections of Impoverished Americans Act of 2010 - Requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to report to Congress on the epidemiology of, impact of, and appropriate funding required to address neglected diseases of poverty, including neglected parasitic diseases such as Chagas disease, cysticercosis, toxocariasis, toxoplasmosis, trichomoniasis, the soil-transmitted helminths, and other related diseases. Requires the report to provide the information necessary to guide future health policy to:
(1) accurately evaluate the current state of knowledge concerning such diseases and define gaps in such knowledge; and (2) address the threat of such diseases.

MALARIA: US Presidential Statement

Today, I am proud to release the U.S. Government six-year strategy to combat malaria (pdf) globally. By 2014, our goal is to halve malaria illnesses and deaths in 70 percent of at-risk populations, by accelerating and intensifying malaria control efforts in the high burden countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The release of the President’s Malaria Initiative whole-of-government global strategy also outlines contributions to stop the spread of multi-drug resistance in Southeast Asia and the Americas; increase emphasis on strategic integration of malaria prevention and treatment activities with programs for maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, neglected tropical diseases, and tuberculosis, through multilateral collaboration to achieve internationally-accepted goals; and intensify efforts to strengthen health systems.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/23/us-expands-anti-malaria-effort-progress-takes-hold

Global Agriculture and Food Security Program

A global economy where more than one billion people suffer from hunger is not a sustainable one," US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said in a ceremony launching the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program.Canada, Spain, South Korea and the United States, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have already pledged nearly 900 million dollars to the program, initiated as the global economic crisis leaves even more people affected by poverty and hunger."At a time of limited resources and large global challenges, this fund will leverage support from around the world to achieve lasting progress against hunger and bolster agricultural productivity and growth," Geithner said.The fund was first discussed at the G8 meeting in L'Aquila, Italy last year, where 14 wealthy nations committed to contributing some 22 billion dollars to invest in agriculture in low-income countries.It firmed up at the subsequent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where world leaders called for the World Bank and interested donor nations to set up a trust fund to help implement some of the pledges made at L'Aquila.The United States said Thursday that 67 million dollars of its initial contribution to the fund will be transferred in the coming weeks to the World Bank, which will administer the fund.
http://rawstory.com/