The INFO Project Blog

Here at CCP and INFO we mostly talk about reproductive health, however several of our CCP staff are involved in global tobacco control work as part of the Bloomberg Global Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use.   Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York city has pledged $125 million to aid in global tobacco control.  The initiative focuses on tobacco control in 15 key countries where smoking rates are the highest.  The initiative has named five partner organizations to work on in-country tobacco control and awarding grants to smaller organizations.  The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one of the partner organizations, and CCP has been working with several country teams on tobacco behavior change campaigns.

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Indian Railways is considering offering fare concessions to individuals living with HIV/AIDS which would help them to travel to centers providing antiretroviral drugs.   Indian Railways already offers large concessions to individuals with other chronic diseases such as tuberculosis and heart and kidney disease.   Read the rest of this entry »

Public Radio International (PRI) recently announced a three-year $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to disseminate news on global health.

The Morning Show, a new program premiering in 2008, will partner PRI and WNYC with the BBC WOrld Service, the New York Times, and WGBH Boston to provide a platform for coverage of issues such as drug-resistant TB, staph infection, the search for HIV/AIDS vaccines, and the environment. Other programming with an increased global health focus will include PRI’s “The World.”

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Here at the Center for Communication Programs, we are looking at how health communication can alleviate the incidence of chronic disease in the developing world. Senior Program Officers Peter Roberts recently sent around a new study in The Lancet on “The burden and costs of chronic disease in low-income and middle-income countries.” According to the authors, for the estimated death rates for chronic diseases within 15 selected countries in 2005 were 54% higher for men and 86% higher for women than in high income countries. The authors conclude,

If nothing is done to reduce the risk of chronic disease, an estimated US $84 billion of economic production will be lost from heart disease, stroke and diabetes alone in… 23 countries between 2006 and 2015.

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