This editorial reviews progress and setbacks in Africa's main public health programmes, especially AIDS, malaria and vaccination, then looks at cross cutting issues like health care financing and advocacy
The supposed indications for urine therapy, ancient or contemporary, are too numerous to recite. There is, it seems, virtually nothing urine won’t cure. Modern proponents use pseudoscience to explain the benefits of the various, mostly exaggerated, components of urine. Some hint at a conspiracy by the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry to keep the knowledge of the many fantastic healing properties of cheaply available urine a secret. There is no money to be made from urine, well, unless one was to write a book about its many virtues. But, seriously, what do we really know?
Five out of 6 WHO regions have set time-limited goals to move from regional measles mortality reduction to the regional elimination of indigenous transmission. Despite the abundance of research, there are a number of unanswered questions as we move towards a goal of measles elimination, many of which will be critical to achieving the elimination goal. We present here a list of research priorities from a programmatic and operational perspective
Joseph Becker, Landry Tsague, Peter Twyman, Ruben Sahabo 04 September 2009
Testing is the gateway to HIV care and support services, and efforts to broaden treatment must include a proactive and inclusive approach to testing. Provider Initiated Testing and Counseling (PITC) for HIV utilizes the opportunity afforded by the clinical encounter for the care provider to make a clinical recommendation that the patient have a voluntary HIV test. It is hoped that by broadening testing by such strategies as PITC more patients may be identified and linked to treatment and support. However, there exist multiple challenges and questions regarding the provision of routine HIV testing and counseling in clinical facilities. In order to support further PITC efforts and scale up of current testing programs, a research agenda that addresses the ethical, social and operational components of PITC programming in health facilities, is critically needed to further guide its expansion.
Charles Shey Wiysonge, Zainab Waggie, Linda Rhoda, Gregory Hussey 14 April 2009
Effective communication should be an essential component of the EPI in Africa, because it could mobilise resources for national immunisation programmes, encourage wide participation and ownership of immunisation services among all stakeholders in each African country, and lead to positive changes in knowledge and attitudes towards immunisation in Africa.
Raoul Kamadjeu, David Mukanga, Landry Tsague 11 November 2008
In October 2008, AFANET and the Pan African Medical Journal signed a memorandum of understanding establishing the terms for future involvement of AFENET in open access publishing through the Pamj.
Although antiretroviral drugs have a crucial role to play in prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission through breastfeeding, we still have much to learn about how best to use these drugs taking into account the social and biological context of maternal and child health in the many disadvantaged sub-Saharan African settings where the HIV epidemic predominates
I believe, like others, that adopting a philosophy of friends-helping-friends and intellectual solidarity will help promotes a commitment to research to equity in health development in Africa.
