(Press-News.org) As the deadline for the millennium development goals approaches, experts writing in The BMJ this week take stock of the successes, failures, and oversights, and look ahead to the next phase - the sustainable development goals.
The millennium development goals are eight aspirational targets set by the United Nations (UN) in New York in September 2000, explain Dr Mark Beattie and colleagues.
The progress made towards some of the goals has been remarkable, they write. For example, child mortality has effectively halved worldwide, from 90 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 46 in 2013, equivalent to 17,000 fewer children dying each day. Furthermore, HIV prevention and treatment is now a reality and there have been huge improvements in education.
In other areas, however, few inroads have been made, they say. For instance, newborn death rates remain stubbornly static, while gender empowerment, and undernutrition lag behind for complex, interconnected reasons.
Some argue that the goals have been over ambitious and that substantial changes would have occurred anyway, although a recent economic analysis estimated that 13.6 million extra children's lives have been saved since 2001.
But with shortfalls in so many areas, the UN has developed 17 new sustainable developmental goals to replace the millennium development goals in late 2015 with ambitious targets for 2030. These include the abolition of unnecessary neonatal deaths and ending AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases.
The three targets of greatest importance remain women's education and empowerment, poverty, and warfare.
"As the new era dawns of the sustainable development goals, there remains much unfinished business, including persistent and substantial variations between countries and regions," write the authors. "Despite this, there are reasons for optimism - the progress made in Rwanda in only 20 years after the genocide shows what can be achieved with political and social will," they conclude.
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WASHINGTON -- Law should be viewed as a major determinant of health and safety and can be utilized as a powerful and innovative tool to address pressing global health concerns, says a newly formed, high-level commission announced today by the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in partnership with The Lancet.
In their "Comment" published online in The Lancet, the Commission's co-chairs Lawrence O. Gostin and John T. Monahan, along with the Commission's project coordinator, Mary C. DeBartolo, and Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief ...
Alcohol and drug misuse are responsible for around a third of all deaths in former male prisoners and half in female ex-prisoners, a new study of almost 48000 ex-prisoners published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal has found. Moreover, the research shows that a substantial proportion of these deaths are from preventable causes, including accidents and suicide (42% in men and 70% in women).
Several studies have reported high death rates after release from prison, but few have looked at potential risk factors for these high rates. Led by Seena Fazel, Professor of Forensic ...
The good relationship between humans and dogs was certainly influenced by domestication. For long, it was assumed that humans preferred particularly tolerant animals for breeding. Thus, cooperative and less aggressive dogs could develop. Recently, however, it was suggested that these qualities were not only specific for human-dog interactions, but characterize also dog-dog interactions. Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute investigated in their study if dogs are in fact less aggressive and more tolerant towards their conspecifics ...
A team of French clinicians has diagnosed the first case of rabies in that country since 2003. Only 20 cases of human rabies had been diagnosed in France between 1970 and 2003. Moreover, the patient was unaware of having been bitten. So it is not surprising that that diagnosis was not suggested until day 12 post admission to the intensive care unit. The case report appeared April 8 in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
"Rabies is nowadays extremely rare in the developed world," said Christian Brun-Buisson, head ...
DALLAS, April 21, 2014 -- Among black heart failure patients, moderate depression may increase the risk of heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Heart Failure.
Comparing outcomes of 747 blacks to 1,420 whites with heart failure using a patient-reported scale of depressive symptoms, researchers found:
Even moderate depressive symptoms may raise the risk of black heart failure patients being hospitalized or dying.
Blacks with levels of depressive symptoms even below the levels ...
(MEMPHIS, Tenn. - April 21, 2015) Researchers have identified a protein that offers a new focus for developing targeted therapies to tame the severe inflammation associated with multiple sclerosis (MS), colitis and other autoimmune disorders. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists led the study which appears today in the scientific journal Immunity.
Investigators showed that the protein NLRP12 works in T cells to limit production of chemical messengers or cytokines that fuel inflammation. T cells are specialized white blood cells produced to eliminate specific ...
The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released an updated proposal that will establish an international quality standard for photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing. The document is intended for immediate use by PV manufacturers when producing modules on an industrial scale so they can increase investor, utility, and consumer confidence in PV system performance.
"Our recent research on 50,000 systems found that, during the time period we studied, just 0.1% of all PV systems were affected by damaged or underperforming modules and less than ...
A recent randomized trial that looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation found that delivering universal donor plasma to massively hemorrhaging patients can be accomplished consistently and rapidly and without excessive wastage in high volume trauma centers. The plasma is given in addition to red blood cell transfusions to optimize treatment.
The 2013 guidelines recommend that universal donor products be immediately available on arrival of severely injured patients, ...
Researchers have unraveled the elusive process by which small, highly vascular clusters of sensory cells in the carotid arteries "taste the blood," as a 1926 essay put it--the initial step in regulating blood-oxygen levels.
In the April 21 issue of the journal Science Signaling, a University of Chicago-based research team describes the precise mechanism that cells in the carotid bodies use to detect oxygen levels in the blood as it flows toward the brain. The cells translate that taste test into signals, sent through the carotid sinus nerve, a branch of the glossopharyngeal ...
MADISON - Scientists today demonstrated the potential for softwoods to process more easily into pulp and paper if engineered to incorporate a key feature of hardwoods. The finding, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could improve the economics of the pulp, paper and biofuels industries and reduce those industries' environmental impact.
"What we've shown is that it's possible to pair some of the most economically desirable traits of each wood type," says John Ralph, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center's (GLBRC) plants leader ...
