The INFO Project Blog

Experimenting with the Clusty.com search features (it searches blogs, wikipedia, and images as well as the Web) I stumbled upon an NPR broadcast on pending PEPFAR legislation in Congress.

A global health aid package worth tens of billions of dollars is being debated in the House of Representatives this week. Among the items under consideration is whether to integrate money for family planning into AIDS prevention efforts.

NPR’s Brenda Wilson reports that the proposal to integrate reproductive health services such as family planning into HIV prevention efforts is sometimes controversial with faith-based aid organizations such as the Catholic Relief Services.

Studies have shown that integrating these kind of services with HIV prevention and treatment takes careful strategy and execution. Intregration can save money and it can save lives, for example, by averting missed opportunities to counsel women about family planning.

The INFO Project culls the latest resources on integrating sexual and reproductive health services with HIV and puts everything online here. Stay tuned for the quarterly newsletter, with the latest on male circumcision, female-controlled FP methods such as microbicides, and other hot topics.

An exciting and promising discovery was announced at Microbicides 2008 in New Delhi, India.  According to a six-month study of 200 women in India and the United States a vaginal microbicde gel containing the antiretroviral agent tenofovir is safe for HIV-negative women to use every day.

The study was performed by researchers at the Microbicides Trial Network and was designed to see if there were differences in adherence rates between women who use the product every day and women who use the product only prior to engaging in sexual intercourse.  The study also was designed to test if sex act-dependent and daily use were equally safe.  Researchers found women’s adherence to either regime similar and found both approaches equally safe.  The compliance rate was 83 percent among women in the daily use group, and 80 percent among women instructed to use the gel within two hours of having sex.   Read the rest of this entry »

Until recently, the topic of population was not frequently associated with addressing climate change. Now, thanks to collaborative efforts from experts in both fields, the world is beginning to recognize that reducing unmet need for contraception not only helps women to prevent unintended pregnancies, it can also can have a positive impact on the environment.

On February 20, fellow INFO staffer Vanessa Mitchell and I attended the panel discussion, “Population and Climate Change: Relationships, Research, and Responses” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This event featured Brian O’Neill, scientist at the Institute for the Study of Society and the Environment, and Joseph Speidel, adjunct professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at UCSF. (Dr. Speidel has a long history with INFO. He played a key role in creating the INFO Project’s precursor, the Population Information Program, and is a faithful reviewer of Population Reports. He also serves on INFO’s Editorial Advisory Committee.) The discussion marked the launch of a year-long meeting series sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program on population-health-environment issues.

Dr. O’Neill’s talk focused on the correlation between population size and emissions, noting that aging and urbanization may significantly affect the outlook for future emissions. He also points out that long-term climate change goals may be less costly if we are not facing a population boom. 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 »