The INFO Project Blog

Recently, generous funding slotted towards the prevention and treatment of HIV have stolen some of the thunder once belonging to global family planning programs. The budget and quantity of often vertically-organized programs (for example, a program offering HIV voluntary counseling and testing with no information on family planning), have left many reproductive health advocates scrambling to demonstrate to decision makers how essential, not to mention cost effective, family planning is.

In the words of Dr. Robert Blum, who teaches in the Population, Family and Reproductive Health department of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

HIV has sucked not only all of the air out of the conversation, but also all the money…

Luckily, reproductive health advocates are mobilizing. The Global Exchange Network for Reproductive Health (GEN) is organizing a virtual discussion forum, “Using Leadership to Reposition Reproductive Health on the Public Health Agenda.” Funded by USAID, the forum will take place June 9-13 on the GEN Web site, in three languages (English, Spanish and French). Read the rest of this entry »

Join colleagues around the world in an online discussion forum from April 23 - May 2, 2008. Health professionals will share their experiences with female condoms in diverse service delivery settings. This forum will be an opportunity to review the latest guidance on female condoms featured in Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers and exchange information and experiences with colleagues who are working to provide high-quality family planning services.

Register for free

The discussion will be guided by the interest of the participants. Topics will include integration of female condoms into family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs, opportunities for male involvement, strategies for encouraging commitment and participation of governments, donor agencies and civil society in female condom programming, as well as practical guidance related to female condom use and counseling. Read the rest of this entry »

The odds that you’ve ever performed an emergency search on cat scratch fever are probably very slim. But that’s exactly how a research librarian from Texas helped to save a young boy’s life. Elizabeth Cohen, “Empowered Patient” columnist from CNN Medical News, cites this example in her excellent review of consumer health information retrieval, Tips for Savvy Medical Web Surfing. Read the rest of this entry »

Anna Kushnir, a researcher at Harvard investigating STIs who I met at Science Blogging 2008, writes for the JoVE blog–that’s the Journal of Visualized Experiments, a much buzzed about site where you can watch scientists at work. She asked us how we use video now, and how we could use video in the future, to advance our project. So I emailed around these queries to INFO staffers, and got some interesting responses. This is what we talk about when we talk about video.

Also on the video tip… 

On Tuesday, Heather Sanders and I journeyed to the UN Foundation  at 1800 Massachussets Ave (a certified Green Building) to shoot an interview with Purnima Mane, the deputy executive director of UNFPA. We’ll post her interview up here shortly–she gives an amazing pitch for reinvesting in family planning–but the visit also gave us a great opportunity to see what the UN Foundation is doing with video these days. Not only do the have a podcast room (where we taped) but they are feeding at least one YouTube channel and building myriad other dynamic projects like Nothing But Nets, a malaria relief campaign that’s tapped NBA players and Sports Illustrated writers to fight a disease that infects more than 500 million people each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Public health librarians couldn’t survive without Google. In a few seconds, we can paste in a title and immediately find the article, or match up an NGO with its projects, or find the address of almost any organization. By making fact retrieval so easy, Google has freed librarians to focus on their real jobs, retrieving and organizing information and helping to create knowledge.

Read the rest of this entry »