A new clinical trial for an AIDS vaccine will take place in Africa and the United States. The program, announced this week, is a collaboration between the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which will lead the trial, biopharmaceutical company Crucell (Leiden, Netherlands), Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the Ragon Institute, an organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS research. Read more »

If you’re not familiar with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they are a set of eight targets defined and committed to by the member states of the United Nations in 2000 to reduce extreme poverty worldwide. The idea is to achieve the goals (specific measureable indicators are set for each) by the year 2015. The goals cover issues such as reducing hunger and developing global partnerships, but several of them address health issues, including the Goals 4 and 5, which focus on promoting child and maternal health (e.g., reducing under age-5 mortality and increasing access to reproductive care), and Goal 6,which focuses on combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

In light of the changing global public health landscape, I think the UN should consider revising the MDGs before 2015, or at least devising a new set of health-based goals when the time comes. Read more »

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) recently announced a new program designed to fight the growing problem of substandard and counterfeit drugs in developing countries. Read more »

One of the International Criminal Police Organization’s (Interpol) six priority crime research areas is drugs and criminal organizations. As reported in the New York Times on July 20, the organization is working with an informal group of researchers and government officials in Africa, Asia, and the US to track counterfeit drugs that claim to treat malaria, a disease that takes nearly 1 million lives a year. Read more »

A new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that West Africa has “increasingly become the target of a range of counterfeit medications, including antibiotics, antiretroviral drugs and medicines to fight malaria and tuberculosis.”

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