Goodwill Message to Nigerians as we celebrate 51 by Ola'-Adaramoye Dare (E.D TBI-Ng)

Nigeria is worth celebrating despite all she's been through since her independence 51 years ago. Though we have suffered in the hand of bad leader who have robbed us off our resources, we may have suffered violence through war and terrorism yet the nation has survived. The fact that we have survive is an assurance that we have a better future which worth celebrating....

I implore every Nigerians to please keep the good faith celebrate the glorious future ahead of us not minding the bad past or the discouraging present.

However, let our celebration be a reasonable one, let's embrace peace and remember the poor, let's sing God's praise and pray for the greatness and betterment of the nation.

I look forward to an independent day anniversary where instead of march pass and gunshots, Nigerians will gather in a mega concert to praise and worship God...

Nigeria will be greater than ever before... I believe in one Nigeria.
Remember, to pray for Nigeria now and always!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

E The UN Foundation Unveils Shot@Life Campaign

The United Nations Foundation today revealed Shot@Life, a new campaign to expand access to lifesaving vaccines for children in developing countries. A national grassroots movement, Shot@Life will educate, connect, and empower Americans to champion vaccines as one of the most cost-effective ways to save children’s lives around the world.

“Building on the success of the UN Foundation’s other campaigns, we are honored to partner with leading experts in vaccine advocacy and delivery to work on the noble and urgent cause of increasing global access to immunizations,” said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the UN Foundation. “Shot@Life’s groundbreaking partnership will bring hope to millions of parents around the world that their children will have a lifetime of protection from deadly and disabling diseases.”

The Shot@Life campaign will build a grassroots constituency to advocate for and donate to expanding access to childhood vaccines in developing countries, where many children die due to the lack of lifesaving immunizations. For only $20, a child can receive lifelong protection against measles, pneumonia, diarrhea, and polio. When children are immunized, they are more likely to celebrate their fifth birthday, do well in school, and go on to be productive, healthy adults.

“Every 20 seconds, a child dies from a disease that could have been prevented by a vaccine,” said Peg Willingham, Executive Director of Shot@Life. “This campaign will work to expand access to vaccines and get them to the children who need them the most.”

Success is within reach. The Measles Initiative has vaccinated over one billion children since its inception in 2001, and has reduced deaths globally by 78 percent. The number of new cases of polio has dropped 99 percent and the world is nearly polio-free. Yet there is still more work to be done.

Each year more than 1.7 million children die of vaccine-preventable diseases, according to the World Health Organization. The two most common causes of childhood deaths are pneumonia and diarrhea. These diseases can be prevented by groundbreaking new vaccines, which, if distributed widely, have the potential to save the lives of millions more children.

Shot@Life will support the work of the United Nations and other partners to provide vaccines to children in developing countries. Together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, the GAVI Alliance, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Red Cross, Lions Clubs International, and ABC News, Shot@Life will work to save lives and improve the health of millions of children.

For more information on how to get involved and partner with the Shot@Life campaign, go to shotatlife.org or visit us on Facebook at facebook.com/shotatlifecampaign.

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About Shot@Life
Shot@Life educates, connects, and empowers Americans to champion vaccines as one of the most cost-effective ways to save the lives of children in developing countries. A national call to action for this global cause, the campaign rallies the American public, members of Congress, and civil society partners around the fact that, together, we can save a child’s life every 20 seconds by expanding access to vaccines. By encouraging Americans to learn about, advocate for, and donate vaccines, the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life campaign will decrease vaccine-preventable childhood deaths and give children a shot at a healthy life. To learn more, go to ShotAtLife.org.

About the United Nations Foundation
The United Nations Foundation, a public charity, was created in 1998 with entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner’s historic $1 billion gift to support UN causes and activities. The UN Foundation builds and implements public/private partnerships to address the world’s most pressing problems, and works to broaden support for the UN through advocacy and public outreach. Through campaigns and partnerships, the organization connects people, ideas, and resources to help the UN solve global problems. The campaigns reduce child mortality, empower women and girls, create a new energy future, secure peace and human rights, and promote technology innovation to improve health outcomes. These solutions are helping the UN advance the eight global targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For more information, visit www.unfoundation.org.

Kemi Orisakiya( Kemi Esther) presents "Makarios Concert"

All road leads to Crystal Spring Plaza, Under-G LAUTECH road, Ogbomoso on Sunday 16th October 2011 by 4.00p.m, as one of us Oluwakemi Orisakiya a,k,a Kemi Esther and friends, lead us to the presence of the most High God.

The concert theme
'Crowning Him King"(psalm 24).

The vision
"Soul Winning Through Music"

The mandate
"To lift up praise/worship so his presence will come down and so people will be saved and blessed

Its going to be another life changing experience as it promises to be an unforgetable experience. Where would rather be on this day? Please be there.....

This concert is proudly supported by:
Royal House of Grace, Trailblazer Initiatives Nigeria, NAPOC and eden-LAUTECH.

Bush, PEPFAR Reunite to Cut Cancer Deaths

Former President George W. Bush. U.S. government photo.

Whenever George W. Bush's presidential legacy is discussed, the ground-breaking global HIV initiative he created is mentioned as a high point. It made the United States a major force in the global battle against the epidemic and brought him praise across sub-Saharan Africa.

Now the former president is returning to global health, hoping to build on the success of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- which President Obama has continued-- with a push to reduce cervical and breast cancer deaths around the world.

A new public-private partnership announced Tuesday between the U.S. Department of State, the George W. Bush Institute and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, among others, will use the vast infrastructure of clinics and health workers built up by PEPFAR to extend cervical cancer treatment and breast cancer education to women in Latin America and Africa.

"Many women who seek AIDS services also face the challenge of cancer. It's not enough to save a woman from AIDS, if she is then left to die of another very preventable disease," President Bush said in a statement.

Cervical and breast cancer are two of the leading causes of cancer deaths among women. The program, called the Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon alliance, aims to cut cervical cancer deaths among those tested by 25 percent in five years. A growing recognition of the human cost of cancers in the developing world and the need for more screening and treatment played a major part in the U.N. calling a high level meeting on non-communicable disease to be held next week in New York.

Ambassador Eric Goosby, who heads PEPFAR, told the NewsHour the program began providing cervical cancer services several years ago in seven countries after observing a high level of need for intervention. HIV-positive women are far more likely to get cervical cancer than those who are HIV-negative, making the disease particularly devastating to many of the communities where PEPFAR works.

"PEPFAR has spent the last seven years setting up medical delivery systems in resource poor settings," Goosby said. "This partnership represents to us an opportunity to expand [our cervical cancer program] further into more countries and the countries we are in to scale up to new sites."

PEPFAR is committing $10 million over the next five years for the cancer initiative, in addition to $20 million already pledged for existing cervical cancer activities over the same period. The alliance projects an initial commitment total of $75 million over the next five years including private company contributions from Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and others.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure will be building the breast cancer education component of the partnership.

U.S. appropriations for global HIV funding have leveled off over the last two years, after many years of growth, so Goosby has publicly pushed finding ways for programs to work more efficiently and in coordination with other agencies doing complimentary work. Similarly, the new cancer partnership will "converge resources" from different groups doing similar work on cervical and breast cancer, he said.

Many patients who are screened and diagnosed with cervical cancer can be treated in the same visit with a liquid nitrogen procedure. More advanced cases and positive breast cancer screenings will require linking patients to longer term treatment, Goosby said.

As for the program's goals of reducing deaths from cervical cancer by 25 percent among women screened in the initiative, Goosby said, "I'm confident it will be even higher than that."

Vaccinations in 72 poorest countries could avert 6.4 million deaths

By scaling up childhood vaccinations in 72 of the world’s poorest countries, an estimated 6.4 million deaths could be averted between 2011 and 2020, with a corresponding economic value of between $151 billion and $231 billion, according to two new studies by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health investigators published in the June issue of Health Affairs.

The new studies link the health benefits from projected increases in childhood immunization rates to both short- and long-term productivity gains, and consider the value of the lives of those at risk. International donors met recently in London to pledge funding for the GAVI Alliance, an international partnership that finances vaccines for children in these countries, and which faces a shortfall of approximately $3.7 billion.

“Together, these two studies demonstrate the wider economic benefits that can be achieved by expanding vaccine access during the Decade of Vaccines. They show why foundations and governments everywhere should make investments in vaccination a top priority,” said Orin Levine, associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health and director of the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins.

Vaccines are among the most cost-effective public health interventions. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $10 billion over the next decade, known as the Decade of Vaccines (2011–2020), to increase access to childhood vaccines in the world’s poorest countries. During this period—scaling up the delivery of vaccination against pneumococcal disease, Haemophilus influenza type b, rotavirus, pertussis, measles and eventually malaria—the health benefits could be substantial, with an estimated 426 million cases of illness and 6.4 million deaths averted.

Researchers at the Bloomberg School used two approaches to forecast the potential economic value of the Decade of Vaccines.

In the first study, Meghan Stack, a research associate in International Health, and colleagues estimated the economic benefits to health systems and households. Beyond the vaccine-preventable illness and deaths that would be averted, expanding childhood immunization rates could result in $151 billion in treatment and productivity savings between 2011 and 2020. Stack’s analyses show that approximately $6.2 billion could be saved by not needing to pay for treatments when children are acutely ill; that approximately $1.2 billion in savings would be attributed to avoiding the lost productivity of parents while caring for their ill children; and that the largest savings, $145 billion, are from avoiding the productivity lost when children die young or are permanently disabled by vaccine-preventable diseases.

Vaccines against pneumonia (the pneumococcal and Hib vaccines) represent $68 billion (45 percent) of the total estimated savings in treatment costs and productivity losses, while accounting for 42 percent of the 6.4 million lives saved.

The second study in Health Affairs goes beyond direct medical costs and productivity loss to present the impact of the vaccine expansion in terms of the “value” of the lives saved.

This analysis by Sachi Ozawa, an assistant scientist in International Health, and colleagues represents the first use of the “value of statistical life” approach to estimate the value of averting deaths from vaccination in developing countries. This method, which is widely used by the U.S. government for analyses of health and environmental policies, estimates the value of saving a life by using data on how much income individuals are willing to trade in return for an increased or decreased risk of mortality. The study authors estimate the value to individuals living in high-risk countries of reducing death rates with this scaled-up vaccination program. The results put the value of the 6.4 million child deaths averted at $231 billion over 10 years.

Funding for the research was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Innovations in Maternal and Infant Health Address Chronic Problems Creatively By: Talea Miller

Women in Bangladesh. Photo by Flickr user Michael Foley.

More than 350,000 women die each year around the globe from complications of childbirth, and 3 million children die in the first month of life. In the face of such dire numbers, development experts will focus on what is working around the world to improve the situation next week during the Millennium Development Goals assessment at the U.N. General Assembly.

A new report from the U.N.'s Every Woman, Every Child Innovation Working Group, out in the Lancet Monday, looks at some of the promising and innovative projects that could help change those statistics. Learn about five interesting approaches that could be models for other countries struggling with high maternal and infant mortality:

Project: ColaLife, Zambia

Have you ever traveled to a rural part of a developing country and been astounded to find that bottles of Coke also managed to find their way there? ColaLife is piggy-backing on Coca-Cola's extensive supply chain to provide isolated communities with much-needed medical supplies.

Self-contained "aid pods" filled with supplies can fit into any unused crate space and are delivered to local contacts when beverage supplies are distributed.

The group is currently working on an anti-diarrheal kit that would carry rehydration salts, soap, water treatment tools and educational materials. Diarrheal disease is one of the leading causes of death for children under five in the developing world, but is preventable and treatable.

Project: HERproject, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam

Reaching women where they work is the strategy at HERproject (Health Enables Returns), which now operates in more than 70 factories in seven countries. The group trains female employees at factories manufacturing everything from Levis to Microsoft to teach their peers about reproductive health, nutrition, infectious disease and other health issues. The project also links women up to health services, either by improving in-factory clinics or directing women to outside government services.

Project: Cell-Life, South Africa

Pregnant women who are HIV-positive can prevent their babies from contracting the disease with medication, but only if they take it correctly. In South Africa, 40 percent of children under five still die from AIDS-related illnesses, in part because many mothers don't complete the mother-to-child prevention programs. Cell-Life developed a 10-week program of text message reminders designed to help mothers remember when to attend appointments, give medication and tell them how to safely feed their babies. A randomized trial is ongoing, but so far results suggest that mothers using the SMS program are more likely to get their babies tested for HIV.

Project: LifeSpring, India

Low-income women in India usually have two choices for maternal care and child birth: wait in long lines at overcrowded government facilities or risk breaking the bank by paying for private care. Seeking to provide a middle-ground alternative, LifeSpring developed a chain of hospitals for women who earn about between $3 to $6 a day that provides an all-inclusive maternal care package for about half or one-third what other private facilities might offer.

The facilities cut costs by using a no-frills environment, and by breaking down complex processes into different tasks, some of which can be done by less-skilled professionals.

Project: SMS for Life, Tanzania

When a grocery store is sold out of milk, it's an inconvenience for customers. When a clinic in Sub-saharan Africa runs out of malaria medication, it's a life-and-death supply issue for patients. A public-private partnership in Tanzania between several groups, including Novartis and the ministry of health, produced the SMS for Life system in an attempt to end such stock-outs. SMS messages on stock levels, along with a data system used to map distribution helped cut the proportion of health facilities reporting malaria shortages from 78 percent to 26 percent in 21 weeks.