About this talk

(source: TED)

Co-creator of the philanthropic FEED bags, Ellen Gustafson says hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin. At TEDxEast, she launches The 30 Project — a way to change how we farm and eat in the next 30 years, and solve the global food inequalities behind both epidemics.

About Ellen Gustafson

(source: TED)

Ellen Gustafson co-founded FEED Projects in 2007, creating an immensely popular bag whose profits are donated to the UN World Food Program (WFP). As a former employee of the WFP, she supported their mission to provide school lunches in developing countries so that children could receive both the nutrition and education they need. FEED has also created special bags and a new fund to address the crisis in Haiti, helping the children they once fed at school to rebuild their schools. 

At TEDxEast in May 2010, Gustafson launched The 30 Project — an effort to address the world’s hunger and obesity problems as a holistic global food issue. In her new venture, she hopes to stimulate a movement that will change our food and agricultural systems over the next 30 years so that healthy, balanced meals are available to all. Before her efforts to fix the world’s food issues, Gustafson’s primary concern was international security. She wrote and edited pieces on international terrorism for ABC and was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Source: Medical News Today

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will devote $1.5 billion over the next five years to maternal and child health,family planning and nutritionprograms in developing nations with high maternal and infant death rates, theNew York Times reports.

Melinda Gates, who announced the planned spending at an international women’s health conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday, said the money will be used to train health workers, develop improvedantibiotics to treat infections in newborns and find better ways to treat hemorrhage in mothers.
Gates noted the example of Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest nations, which has started to lower its child and maternal mortality rates. She said pregnancy and childbirth in developing nations often “end in tragedy,” but many deaths could be prevented at a “stunningly” low cost (Grady, New York Times, 6/8).

Gates also said the problem is not caused by a lack of medical knowledge but because “we haven’t tried hard enough.” She added, “Policymakers in both rich and poor countries have treated women and children, quite frankly, as if they matter less than men. They have squandered opportunities to improve the health of women and babies” (Burns, AP/CBS News, 6/7).

The Gates Foundation, which has assets totaling roughly $35.2 billion, already has spent $10 billion on global health projects, including $1.8 billion for maternal, newborn and child health efforts. The foundation’s primary focus to date has been vaccines and infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS (New York Times, 6/8).

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also spoke at Monday’s conference to promote a joint action plan intended to improve women’s and children’s health. He called on business leaders, lawmakers and health experts to submit ideas and proposals before the action plan is finalized in the next few months (AP/CBS News, 6/7).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women’s Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women’s Health Policy Report is a free service of theNational Partnership for Women & Families.

African farmers are needing to change their farming techniques “in an effort to increase food security…”

Original Article

(source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

The report “warns that ‘ineffective farming techniques and wasteful post-harvest practices’ have left sub-Saharan Africa as the region most likely to miss the [Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)] on poverty and hunger,” the U.N. News Centre writes. Africa needs a “green revolution” that helps the continent utilize innovative farming technologies. “The report notes that Africa’s smallholder farmers can benefit from new technologies such as low-cost drip irrigation and plastic water tanks to store runoff, as opposed to modern irrigation systems which can increase crop yields but are designed more for larger farms,” the news service notes (5/19)

Supplemental Article from the World Bank: Tackling Weaknesses in Agricultural Statistics in Africa: the LSMS-ISA Project

Original Post

(source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

The Foundation has issued a new policy brief examining issues facing the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative that ultimately will shape its direction and effectiveness. An archived webcast of a Kaiser forum where senior U.S. officials and other experts discussed the initiative is now available online.

The administration’s global health initiative is a six-year $63 billion proposed effort that builds on existing disease-specific initiatives to combat HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, while increasing attention to other areas, including maternal and child health, family planning and reproductive health, nutrition, neglected tropical diseases, and the strengthening of underlying health systems.

Public Health News Center

(source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)

Tom Kirsch, MD, MPH, an emergency physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital and co-director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Refugee and Disaster Response is leading the first of two Johns Hopkins Disaster Teams to Haiti. He has served in a number of other disasters, including the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina.

The team will be stationed at University Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where they will provide health care for those affected by the earthquake.

Dr. Kirsch will send updates from Haiti, which you can follow here or on the CRDR Facebook page.