AIDS fighting spirit flagging, will miss 2015 targets: charity












WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The world has lost momentum in the fight against the AIDS epidemic, with millions of new people infected last year, the ONE foundation said in a report given on Tuesday.


The conclusion contrasts with a UN report last week, which found that an end to AIDS was in sight due to better access to drugs.












But ONE says “the beginning of the end of the AIDS” remains out of reach, as the number of people newly infected each year still exceeds those who get treated for the first time.


Global leaders last year committed to the “beginning of the end of AIDS” by 2015.


Progress over the past decade has cut the death toll for the disease, mainly due to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes AIDS, the United Nations said in its annual report last week.


But while access to treatment has improved, in 2011 there were 2.5 million new cases of HIV. That is more than double the target of having only 1.1 million people newly infected each year, said ONE, a charity co-founded by Irish rock star Bono, that is dedicated to fighting poverty and preventable disease.


There were 34 million people living with AIDS at the end of last year.


At current rates, the world will not reach targets to reverse the spread of AIDS until 2022, seven years behind schedule, according to ONE.


“We recognize the world has done wonders in (fighting AIDS) in the last 10 years. But 2015 is around the corner,” said Michael Elliott, ONE’s chief executive.


“Here’s a moment to put your pedal to the metal and go for it.”


Much of the gap is due to funding cuts in major donor countries. The UN estimates there is about a $ 6 billion AIDS funding gap each year. Countries also have not coordinated a global strategy to tackle the AIDS epidemic, such as targeting treatment to groups at highest risk.


The ONE report examined funding for AIDS from the Group of Seven major developed countries, as well as the political leadership and strategy.


The United States has taken the lead in funding and tackling AIDS. President Barack Obama last year set a new target for AIDS treatments, and called on other nations to also boost their commitments.


The United Kingdom and France are not far behind, but Germany and Canada are lagging relative to their peers. And Japan and Italy are in the last two places, mainly due to Japan’s earthquake in 2011 and Italy’s economic woes.


Elliott said fiscal issues should not stop countries from donating to fight AIDS, since development aid is such a small portion of most countries’ budgets — an argument ONE has made consistently during the global recession.


“You have to be an unfeeling idiot, which we’re not, to fail to recognize that the last few years have been tough economic times for people in many places all over the world,” he said.


“(And) Italy may have fiscal problems. But it’s not going to solve its fiscal problems on the back of development assistance.”


But with major donors embroiled in austerity programs, low and middle-income countries have stepped up, and now provide more than half of the financing for AIDS, ONE said.


In the future, emerging economies like Brazil and China should take the lead on AIDS programs, ONE said.


“It’s very important that people recognize this is a global fight,” Elliott said. “It’s not a fight that should be carried on the backs of the very generous American and British taxpayer.


The report, which comes ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, will be posted online at www.one.org/policy.


(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)


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King warns euro risk has grown















Sir Mervyn King: “Mark Carney was the outstanding candidate”



The risk posed by the eurozone has grown, the departing Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King has warned.


The governor said problems in the eurozone, as well as the US and Asia, lay behind the Bank’s recent pessimism about UK growth prospects in 2013-14.


Speaking to MPs, he defended the Bank’s decision to pass interest earned on the UK gilts it owned back to the Treasury.


He also said the Bank would be in “very good hands” with his recently announced successor as governor, Mark Carney.


Mr Carney was named by Chancellor George Osborne on Monday as his surprise choice for the new Bank of England head.


Currently the governor of the Canadian central bank, Mr Carney will serve for five years and will hold new regulatory powers over banks.


The UK should take pride, Sir Mervyn said, in not only that it could search the world for the best candidate, but that the country was able to produce a “truly outstanding shortlist” from among its own citizens.


‘Slow and protracted’


In evidence to the Treasury Committee, the Bank governor said that Mr Carney – under whom the Bank will be taking on new responsibilities to oversee the health of the country’s banks – faced a difficult task.


“There is a great deal of adjustment to be made in the financial sector, a great deal of adjustment to be made in the economy as a whole,” he said.


“It may be unreasonable to expect anything other than a slow and protracted recovery absent a further fall in the real exchange rate.”


The Bank of England and most City economists say that UK banks must increase their reserves against potential future losses and work their way through problem loans, while the UK economy needs to boost its exports and investment.


The string of difficulties still faced by the UK explained why the Bank chose earlier this month to downgrade the chances of the country experiencing a significant rebound in growth over the coming two years.


“It would take a rather unusual combination of circumstances to see growth of 4% or above in 2013 or 2014,” Sir Mervyn said, adding that the recovery would be much more protracted than has typically been the case after previous recessions.


He confirmed that the Bank’s decision earlier this month to downgrade its forecasts was due to a change of heart amongst the Monetary Policy Committee, rather than any recent economic developments.


“I think there are times where you debate something and you finally decide: ‘Well look, our judgment really has to change now’,” he said.


Global economy doubts


The governor said that the biggest drag on the UK came from the weakness of the global economy.


Continue reading the main story

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Mr Osborne wants to give a bit of shake to the Bank of England’s culture”



End Quote



Despite recent positive indications from China and from the US housing market highlighted in the Bank’s latest inflation report, the governor expressed doubts.


“I think the staff probably take a more upbeat view on the prospects of the Chinese economy than I would be inclined to,” he said.


He also divulged that private conversations with US colleagues led him to doubt the sustainability of the US recovery.


But he expressed his strongest concerns about the eurozone, claiming that – despite a lull in market anxiety over the euro’s future – the situation on the continent has become worse over the past year.


“The longer the problem goes on, the bigger the adjustment will need to be,” he said, pointing to the continued build-up in debt as southern European governments struggle to regain competitiveness and get their budgets under control.


The governor said that, while the UK economy continued its own adjustment process, the Bank’s ability to stimulate recovery would be limited, although he foresaw that further quantitative easing – purchases by the Bank of government debt – may be warranted.


However, he noted that one of his successor’s most difficult tasks may be to decide when to start raising interest rates or reversing quantitative easing.


“There’s a very difficult policy judgment to be made down the road, first as to when we start tightening monetary policy, and then how rapidly we tighten monetary policy,” he said.


Public accounts


The governor was also questioned by MPs about the Bank’s decision this month to hand back to the Treasury the surplus income that it earns on government debts it holds as a result of its quantitative easing policy.


He admitted that the timing of the announcement could have been handled better – particularly because the Bank’s private knowledge of the agreement had influenced its decision at a committee meeting a few days before the announcement to hold fire on further quantitative easing.


However, he said that the decision did not affect monetary policy or the Bank of England’s independence, although he was concerned it could create the appearance that the Bank was acting under the Treasury’s influence.


The move would not have any meaningful impact on taxpayers, Sir Mervyn said, and all it would achieve was a change in the way that the government reports its borrowing.


“This is about presentation of public accounts, and I do not want to dissuade you from looking into that and raising it with the Treasury, but it is a matter for the Treasury,” he said.


“They are entitled to publish their accounts in the way that they want. And you’re entitled to challenge them about whether those accounts are misleading or not.”


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Rugby-England add flyhalf Burns to squad for All Blacks’ test












LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) – England called up uncapped Gloucester flyhalf Freddie Burns on Tuesday to their squad for Saturday’s test against New Zealand in place of the injured Toby Flood.


Flood sustained ligament damage to a big toe during the 16-15 loss to South Africa at Twickenham last Saturday.












Owen Farrell, whose last start was in the first test in South Africa this year, is set to replace Flood in the starting XV against the world champions.


Lock Courtney Lawes, who missed England’s first three tests of the November series because of a knee injury, has also been included in the 23-man squad. Two other locks, Mouritz Botha and Tom Palmer, have been omitted.


After beating Fiji in their opening match, England have lost to Australia and the Springboks and now face a daunting match against the All Blacks who are unbeaten in 20 tests since the start of their victorious World Cup campaign last year.


“For those in Saturday’s squad the message is clear – last week we went toe to toe with the second best team in the world and felt we should have won,” England head coach Stuart Lancaster said in a statement.


“Now we have a chance to take on the number one side in front of a passionate Twickenham crowd, who have been fantastic throughout the Internationals, and it is a challenge we will meet head on.” (Reporting by John Mehaffey; Editing by Ken Ferris)


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ChannelAdvisor says eBay sales up 57 percent early on Cyber Monday












(Reuters) – ChannelAdvisor said client sales on eBay Inc‘s online marketplace jumped 57 percent from a year before early on Cyber Monday.


The sales growth rate was five times higher than during the same period last year, said ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more on websites including Amazon.com Inc and eBay.com.












Client sales on Amazon.com were up 52 percent during the first part of Cyber Monday, ChannelAdvisor also reported.


(Reporting By Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


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U.S. kids getting recommended amount of sleep: study












NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Children in the U.S. appear to be getting as much shut-eye as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends, according to a new study.


“We can’t say this is the amount that they should be sleeping,” said Jessica Williams, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles.












“All we could really do is compare our estimated norms with what is recommended, and it seems like it falls pretty well in line with the recommendations,” she told Reuters Health.


Williams and her colleagues point out in their study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, that there has been concern that U.S. kids are getting too little sleep.


Insufficient sleep has been tied to all sorts of issues in kids and teens, from behavior problems to heart health risks (see Reuters Health reports of October 2, 2012 and October 16, 2012).


But there isn’t a lot of hard evidence on how much shut-eye children typically get, Williams said, so the group set out to get an estimate of average sleep duration from birth to age 18.


The researchers gathered data from a nationwide survey that has tracked families for decades.


For this study, they focused on parents’ reports of their children’s sleep, beginning in 1997.


At the time, 2,832 children were included. In 2002 and 2007 the families were surveyed again and there were 2,520 and 1,424 children included, respectively.


Dr. Maurice Ohayon, director of the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center in Palo Alto, California, said one of the big strengths of the study is that it tracked changes in sleep among the same children as they aged.


“We have an evolution of the sleep during the childhood,” said Ohayon, who was not involved in the study. “That is the unique thing.”


Williams’s team found that until their second birthday, babies in the study slept an average of 12 to 14 hours during each 24-hour period.


By age four that had dropped to about 11 hours of sleep and by age 10, to 10 hours. By age 16, kids were getting an average of about nine hours of sleep per night.


The findings suggest most kids’ sleep habits are in step with government guidelines.


According to the CDC, toddlers should be getting 12 to 14 hours of sleep. Preschoolers should get 11 to 13 hours of sleep, and adolescents age 10 to 17 should get 8.5 to 9.5 hours.


The researchers didn’t find any differences in the amount of sleep between boys and girls, and only a slight gap between white and Hispanic kids.


Hispanic children tended to sleep 19 minutes longer than white children after age nine, but Williams said that difference is too small to matter for individual kids.


Parent reports of how much sleep their kids get are not perfectly accurate, and they often can’t describe the quality of sleep, such as whether kids wake up in the night. Williams said it’s still possible individual children aren’t sleeping enough, because the study could only measure reports of sleep duration, and not sleep quality.


Tracking sleep in a laboratory is more precise, but would cost too much for a study this size, said Ohayon.


He told Reuters Health the study still offers a good sense of how much sleep children typically get, which is valuable in helping to gauge whether a child has a sleep disorder.


“What we are hoping to do with these norms is give some sort of reference to be used by clinicians and parents to see if children fall far from average,” said Williams.


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/KEGTVv Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, online November 26, 2012.


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Feds charge Intrade with illegally allowing bets












WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. regulators on Monday sued Intrade, the online prediction market that gained popularity as an informal oddsmaker for the presidential election, saying it illegally let customers bet on future economic data, the price of gold and even acts of war.


The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a complaint in federal court that Intrade and its operator solicited customers to trade investment contracts that technically are options. Options must be traded on approved, regulated exchanges.












“Today’s action should make it clear that we will intervene in the ‘prediction’ markets, wherever they may be based, when their U.S. activities violate” laws and rules enforced by the agency, CFTC enforcement director David Meister said in a statement.


By requiring that options be traded on approved exchanges, Meister said, regulators can “police market activity and protect market integrity.”


Intrade did not respond to an emailed request for comment.


It was unclear whether regulators believe that all trades on Intrade by U.S. investors are illegal. The CFTC said it would not comment further because the matter was in litigation.


Intrade is known for facilitating bets on award shows, weather and other high-profile events. The prices at which customers are willing to make those bets are cited as informal odds. TEN also used to allow betting on sports through other sites that it operated.


For example, on Monday the site gave “Argo” a 28.5 percent chance of winning the Oscar for best picture and assigned a 19 percent chance that the United States or Israel would launch an airstrike against Iran by June 30.


The CFTC oversees markets for futures and options, investments that allow people to bet on the future prices of commodities like grain and oil. Those contracts help farms, airlines and other businesses to protect themselves against unexpected price swings.


In the complaint, the CFTC alleged that Intrade, based in Ireland, had illegally solicited everyday U.S. investors to use the website between September 2007 and June 25 of this year.


Intrade and its operator, Trade Exchange Network Ltd., falsely claimed in annual reports that the contracts were not being sold to ordinary U.S. customers, the CFTC said. Regulators want the companies to pay fines and return profits that were obtained illegally. They want the site and its operators barred from any future activities related to options trading.


Intrade users reported on Twitter that the site already blocks them from trading contracts related to the prices of oil and gold.


One of them, Joe Schilling, posted an image of an email he said was sent by Intrade in 2009, stating that crude oil and gold contracts were unavailable to U.S. users “due to a regulatory request” from the CFTC.


TEN settled similar charges of soliciting U.S. investors in 2005. In an order filed with that settlement, the CFTC said that U.S. customers accounted for up to 40 percent of Intrade’s total customer base. TEN paid $ 150,000 and agreed to halt further violations.


Under the settlement, TEN agreed to use pop-up windows to tell U.S. customers which bets were not available to them. It said it would cooperate in any future investigations.


Monday’s complaint includes charges that TEN violated that earlier settlement. The company used Intrade to offer illegal options including on the future prices of gold, changes in the unemployment rate and a measure of U.S. economic output, the complaint said. It said TEN failed to provide the pop-up notices mandated in the 2005 order.


___


Daniel Wagner can be reached at www.twitter.com/wagnerreports.


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Dog days in Cuba: from shih tzus to schnauzers












HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban capital has played host to political summits and art festivals, ballet tributes and international baseball competitions. Now dog lovers are getting their chance to take center stage.


Hundreds of people from all over Cuba and several other countries came to a scruffy field near Revolution Plaza this past week to preen and fuss over the shih tzus, beagles, schnauzers and cocker spaniels that are the annual Fall Canine Expo’s star attractions. There were even about a dozen bichon habaneros, a mid-sized dog bred on the island since the 17th century.












As dog lovers talked shop, the merely curious strolled the field, checking out the more than 50 breeds on display while carefully dodging the prodigious output of so many dogs.


The four-day competition, which ended Sunday, included competitions in several breeding categories, and judges were flown in from Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.


“This is a small, poor country, but Cubans love dogs,” said Miguel Calvo, the president of Cuba’s dog federation, which organized the show. “We make a great effort to breed purebred animals of quality.”


Winners don’t receive any trophy or prize money, but that doesn’t mean the competition is any less fierce.


Anabel Perez, owner of a cocker spaniel named Lisamineli after the U.S. actress, spent more than half an hour coifing the dog’s hair in preparation for the competition, while the owner of a shih tzu named Tiguer meticulously brushed his coat nearby.


“I’m a hairdresser for humans,” explained Tiguer’s owner, Miguel Lopez. “So it’s easy for me. I like shih tzus because they are a lot of work to keep well groomed.”


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Saudi telco regulator suspends Mobily prepaid sim sales












(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia‘s No.2 telecom operator Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily) has been suspended from selling pre-paid sim cards by the industry regulator, the firm said in a statement to the kingdom’s bourse on Sunday.


Mobily’s sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, sim cards will remain halted until the company “fully meets the prepaid service provisioning requirements,” the telco said in the statement.












These requirements include a September order from regulator, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC). This states all pre-paid sim users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and that this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the sim card was bought, according to a statement on the CITC website.


This measure is designed to ensure customer account details are kept up to date, the CITC said.


Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC’s decision would be “insignificant”, claiming data, corporate and postpaid revenues would meet its main growth drivers.


The firm, which competes with Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi, reported a 23 percent rise in third-quarter profit in October, beating forecasts.


Prepaid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.


Customers on monthly, or postpaid, contracts are also less likely to switch provider, but the bulk of customers remain on pre-paid accounts.


Mobily shares were trading down 1.4 percent at 0820 GMT on the Saudi bourse.


(Reporting by Matt Smith; Editing by Dinesh Nair)


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Detecting Cancer…With a Cellphone?












Smartphone technology is often seen as much of nuisance as it is a convenience, but having that kind of communicative power at our fingertips has a surprising advantage; it’s serving as a bridge, bringing  healthcare to third world countries that had previously been too remote and too costly to reach.


The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is spearheading one use of smartphone technology in a way that’s surprisingly simple, but could end up saving thousands of women’s lives.












Armed with screening kits, treatment tools and cellphones, teams of non-physician medical workers will visit remote locations in rural Tanzania to screen women for cervical cancer. Instead of the swab method used in the typical Pap smear, workers will use their cellphones to photograph a patient’s cervix, text the image to a physician and then receive back a diagnosis and treatment recommendation.


But can it really be that simple? Dr. Karen Yeates of Queen’s University, who is the lead investigator of the project, told CNN, “That’s the beauty of it — for early grade cancers, those will be able to be treated right in the field, right in the rural area.”


According to the World Health Organization (WHO), rates of cervical cancer in Africa are up to ten times those in developed countries, and among those diagnosed, about 50,000 women die from it annually.


Though cervical cancer has very low mortality rates in developed countries like the U.S., that’s generally due to regular screenings which catch the disease in its earliest and most treatable incarnations. However, in countries like Tanzania, women in remote villages obviously don’t have access to those types of preventative measures. Subsequently, the WHO estimates that by the time most African women are diagnosed with the disease, they’ve already advanced into its latest fatal stages. But regular screenings could put a stop to that. 


In addition to addressing reproductive healthcare, cellphones are as of late becoming facilitators of cardiac care in developing countries as well. Earlier this year, high school student Catherine Wong discovered how to turn her cellphone into a portable ECG machine, bringing heart monitoring capabilities to the most remote locations with results that could be beamed to doctors no matter how far away.


The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is gaining some notoriety because it’s recently become one of the 68 finalists in Canada’s Grand Challenges, a fund awarded to medical innovators who’ve invented new systems or products to bring healthcare to the poorest parts of the world. As a finalist, the Kilimanjaro Project has been granted $ 100,000, allowing it to begin its initial trials.


So much of good healthcare rests on the early detection of illness and now that geography and cost aren’t the impediments they once were, patients in developing countries have real opportunities to survive illnesses once believed to be fatal. 


Do you expect that “mobile healthcare” may eventually become the standard method of care in countries like the U.S. as well? Let us know what you think about it in the Comments.


Related Stories on TakePart:


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• Cardiac Arrest? An iPhone App Might Save Your Life



A Bay Area native, Andri Antoniades previously worked as a fashion industry journalist and medical writer.  In addition to reporting the weekend news on TakePart, she volunteers as a web editor for locally-based nonprofits and works as a freelance feature writer for TimeOutLA.com. Email Andri | @andritweets | TakePart.com


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Apple seeks to add more products to Samsung patent lawsuit












(Reuters) – Apple Inc has asked a federal court to add six more products to its patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics Co, including the Samsung Galaxy Note II, in the latest in move in an ongoing legal war between the two companies.


The case is one of two patent infringement lawsuits pending in the U.S. District Court in San Jose by Apple against Samsung. An earlier lawsuit by Apple that related to different patents resulted in a $ 1.05 billion jury verdict against Samsung on August 24.












Apple is also seeking to add the Samsung Galaxy S III, running the new Android “Jelly Bean” operating system, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wifi, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, the Samsung Rugby Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S III Mini, to its lawsuit, according to a court filing on Friday.


“Apple has acted quickly and diligently to determine that these newly-released products do infringe many of the same claims already asserted by Apple,” the company said in the filing.


Samsung representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


Apple filed the second lawsuit in February, alleging that various Samsung smartphone and tablet products including the Galaxy Nexus infringed eight of its patents.


Samsung denied infringement and filed a cross-complaint alleging that Apple’s iPhone and iPad infringed eight of its patents.


A U.S. judge on November 15 allowed Samsung to pursue claims the iPhone5 also infringes its patents.


The case is Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al, No. 12-cv-00630.


(Reporting By John McCrank; Editing by Theodore d’Afflisio)


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