The INFO Project Blog

The best New Year’s greeting to reach my inbox comes from a Photoshare contributor in Kerala, India:

My Wish for You in 2008

May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet of $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. May the problems you had forget your home address! In simple words …………

May 2008 be the best year of your life!!!
—————-
Thanks & Regards

K.K.Santhosh
Chief News Photographer
Mathrubhumi Daily
Calicut , Kerala, INDIA

As this year draws to close all of us at the INFO project want to take this opportunity to wish you and your family a happy new year.  As we leap into 2008, INFO would like to take a look back at the top ten family planning and reproductive health related stories and events we shared with you the throughout 2007.  The top 10 items below all appeared in our blog this past year.  In descending order:

 10)  Successful Elements of Family Planning Forum- The INFO project held a 2 week long forum where participants from around the world debated successful elements of family planning programs. Read the rest of this entry »

Join the Johns Hopkins INFO Project  ”Send a Handbook Campaign“

World AIDS Day Thanksgiving, and the year end holidays are approaching. What better way to mark these events than to help women and men in developing countries avoid the trauma of unintended pregnancies, the spread of  HIV/AIDS, and the death of a mother or child through an unplanned birth?

Get personally involved by joining INFO’s “Send a Handbook Campaign“ designed to pass along the latest guidance about contraceptive methods to health care providers in developing countries.

• Contribute as little as $10 and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s INFO project will send a print copy of “Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers” to a health care worker in a developing region of your choice.
• Donate here. 
• Read more about our campaign.
• View the entire handbook online here: 

Many thanks for your help and have a great holiday season!

Officials with the 11th annual Global Forum for Health Research are stressing the need to increase funding for health research in developing countries, particularly to combat the growing threat posed by chronic diseases. Some 800 participants from 80 nations are attending in Beijing.

According to Xinhua General News Service, only ten percent of global health research funding is spent dealing with health problems in developing nations, while these nations comprise 90 percent of the world’s population.

The Forum’s head, Stephen Matlin, says developing countries face vastly different health threats than they did just ten years ago.

Developing countries are seeing massive growth in non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and mental illness, reports the Voice of America’s Daniel Schearf. Schearf quotes Matlin on the trend found everywhere but Africa, where malaria and TB are still major causes of death: 

“In fact, in many developing countries, including China and India, two of the most populous countries in the world, these are now the main sources of illness and death in the population”

Listen to Schearf’s report by clicking on the icon below.

Our Wednesday morning kick: this blog.

One of our writers sent this url to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks around the office. As health communicators, we focus on a lot of nitty-gritty punctuation issues, so this struck a chord.