IRC International Rescue Committee [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.rescue.org/press-release-index

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The IRC responds to deadly cholera outbreak in Dadaab refugee camp
Posted by The IRC on December 23, 2015
Since November, hundreds of people including children have been infected with cholera, a highly contagious disease. With the onset of the rainy season, the IRC is concerned the epidemic could continue to spread, making already poor living conditions even worse.

ICRC [to 2 January 2016]
https://www.icrc.org/en/whats-new

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Winners of the 2015 Young Humanitarian Writers Competition
Nine people have been selected as the winners of the 2015 Young Humanitarian Writers Competition, organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and The National Press Club Malaysia in cooperation with the Malaysian Red Crescent Society…
30-12-2015 | News release

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Syria: Over 450 people including injured evacuated from hard to reach and besieged towns
Joint Press Release. The United Nations in Syria, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross on the evacuation of injured people and relatives in Syria’s Idleb and Rif Damascus governorates.
28-12-2015 | News release

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Saudi Arabia: ICRC president calls for increased dialogue and cooperation
Kuwait (ICRC) – Today the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Peter Maurer, concluded his visit to Riyadh, where he met with the Supervisor-General of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre, the president of the Saudi Red Crescent and the Saudi foreign minister.

In his meeting with Dr Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Rabiah, supervisor-general of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre, Mr Maurer underlined the “need to take a neutral and independent approach to providing aid in order to be able reach people in need and protect and assist them.” They also discussed a possible partnership aimed at finding more effective ways of distributing aid impartially and, ultimately, alleviating the suffering of people in Yemen affected by the conflict…
21-12-2015 | News release

Islamic Relief [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.islamic-relief.org/category/news/

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January 2, 2016
Winter support will be given to families who were affected by the Afghanistan and Pakistan earthquake on October 26, 2015.
In Pakistan, in the northern districts of Chitral and Shangla, Islamic Relief has this month launched a two-month intense project to distribute winter items to around 1,500 earthquake-affected people. In Afghanstan, a one-month project in remote areas of Badakhshan, Takhar, Jalalabad and Kunar is expected to reach 1,400 people…

In Pakistan, Islamic Relief is already responding to the earthquake, providing immediate relief through distribution of tents, kitchen sets, sheets, and mats. The new winter project means each family will be provided with plastic floor mats, a cotton mattress, polyester pillows and pillow covers, polyester quilts, a children’s blanket and jumpers, adult-sized shawls, a stove and chimney, solar lamp, socks and hat.

The items will be bought from a local market, further supporting the local economy.

In Afghanistan, Islamic Relief will be working in remote areas of Badakhshan, Takhar, Jalalabad and Kunar, in the eastern and north-eastern part of the country. Experts there will be providing food, shelter, non-food items such as hygiene kits, and heating materials such as charcoal and firewood. We are already distributing food, blankets and plastic sheets to some 4,000 people.

MSF/Médecins Sans Frontières [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news-stories/press/press-releases

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Press Releases
Italy: MSF Ends Activities in Pozzallo Reception Center
December 30, 2015
Authorities unwilling to address inadequate conditions including overcrowding and lack of protection for vulnerable people.

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Field news
DRC: Measles Epidemic in Decline, but Risk of Further Outbreaks Remains
December 28, 2015
A measles epidemic has been raging since the beginning of 2015 in the region of Katanga in southeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to the Ministry of Public Health, as of November 20, 2015, a total of 39,619 cases—resulting in 474 deaths—had been officially reported in Katanga.

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Field news
In Syria, MSF Delivers Winter Kits to Displaced Families in Aleppo
December 23, 2015
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams have managed to deliver urgently needed aid to thousands of people in the Syrian city of Aleppo, which is now going through its fifth winter of civil war. In partnership with the Aleppo City Local Council, 5,200 kits, including essential winter and hygiene items for displaced families, were handed out in the first weeks of December.

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Field news
Niger: Getting Children to Grow Healthily
December 23, 2015
In 2005, an innovative strategy that moved the treatment of severe acute malnutrition out of hospitals was widely expanded for the first time in Niger, and a record number of children were able to receive care. Ten years later, a public health approach to preventing child mortality has been launched, combining the fight against malnutrition with the prevention of other deadly childhood diseases.

Mercy Corps [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.mercycorps.org/press-room/releases

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Unhindered Humanitarian Access in Syria is Critical to Peace Process
Syria, December 22, 2015
Welcomes security council resolution as first step in “long journey” toward peace

Washington, DC – The global humanitarian organization Mercy Corps applauds Friday’s passage of United Nations Security Council resolution 2254 that supports international efforts to seek a political solution to end the war in Syria within the next 18 months. We hope this Security Council measure will be a first step toward ending a humanitarian catastrophe affecting more than 12 million innocent men, women and children. We also recognize that this UN resolution – while an important milestone – is only a first step in what will likely be a long journey toward achieving a lasting peace…

OXFAM [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases

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Weather and war to put humanitarian system under unprecedented strain in 2016
30 December 2015
The effects of a super El Niño are set to put the world’s humanitarian system under an unprecedented level of strain in 2016 as it already struggles to cope with the fallout from conflicts in Syria, South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere. The El Niño weather system could leave tens of millions of people facing hunger, water shortages and disease next year if early action isn’t taken to prepare vulnerable people from its effects.

Save The Children [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.6150563/k.D0E9/Newsroom.htm

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As Number of Child Refugees Reaches One Quarter Million This Year, Save the Children Calls for Europe to Do More
December 22, 2015

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Save the Children is Helping Improve Education for Children in Bhutan, Haiti Thanks to Money Raised by Red Nose Day
December 21, 2015

Tostan [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.tostan.org/latest-news

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December 30, 2015
Promoting Human Rights and Gender Equality: 189 Communities in Tambacounda and the Next Generation at the Helm
Who is responsible for promoting gender equality and human rights in a community or a region? Building on the bold actions of their parents, and 25 years of grassroots social change, new youth leaders are emerging in rural Africa to carry this mantle.

On December 6th, 189 villages of the Goudiry and Bakel departments in the Tambacounda region of Senegal joined more than 7,000 other communities across Africa with a public declaration to promote human rights and gender equality by ending female genital cutting, child marriage and domestic violence. Hundreds of people from Pulaar, Mandinke and Soninke communities attended. This important decision was made after 55 communities received Tostan’s human rights-based educational program, the Community Empowerment Program (CEP). As a part of their process of spreading human rights education, people of all ages from the 55 communities reached out to many of their neighbors; sharing what they had learned and encouraging dialogue…

CHS International Alliance [to 2 January 2016]
http://chsalliance.org/news-events/news

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23/12/2015
The CHS Alliance in 2015 – a year of change
2015 was a busy and exciting time for the CHS Alliance which came into being on 9 June 2015 at its Constitutive General Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. Over the past six months, the Alliance team has supported members and the wider humanitarian and development sector in applying the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) and broader aspects of quality, accountability and people management.

Center for Global Development [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.cgdev.org/page/press-center
Selected Press Releases, Blog Posts, Publications

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The Role of Industrial Policy as a Development Tool: New Evidence from the Globalization of Trade-and-Investment
12/22/15
Theodore Moran
Emerging market countries that manage to diversify and upgrade their production and export base grow more rapidly and enjoy greater welfare gains than those that do not. Foreign direct investment in manufacturing is concentrated in middle- and upper-skilled activities — not lowest-skilled operations — and thus offers many opportunities for structural transformation of the host economy. But the challenge of using FDI to diversify and upgrade the local production and export base is fraught with market failures and tricky obstacles. Contemporary debates about industrial policy as a development tool focus on how best to overcome these market failures and other difficulties.

ODI [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.odi.org/media

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Sustaining public sector capability in developing countries
Bibliography and literature reviews | December 2015 | Helen Tilley; Sierd Hadley; Cathal Long; Jeremy Clarke
We explore why sustained improvements in capability have been elusive, which donor-supported interventions have worked well, and why, across 34 cases.

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What does ‘adaptive programming’ mean in the health sector?
Briefing papers | December 2015 | Olivia Tulloch
How the health sector can learn from adaptive development programming. An exploration of quality improvement, systems thinking and political economy analysis in health.

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Basic enough budgets: what should you do when you can’t do everything?
Research reports and studies | December 2015 | Bryn Welham, Sierd Hadley
This paper explores what it takes for to undertake elementary economic and financial management – in other words, deliver a basic budget – to ensure it’s on the path to rapid economic and social development.

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Beyond the toolkit: supporting peace processes in Asia
Research reports and studies | December 2015 | Lisa Denney and Patrick Barron
Applying insights from the ‘thinking and working politically’ agenda to support peace processes in Asia, and beyond.

Ford Foundation [to 2 January 2016]
http://www.fordfoundation.org/?filter=News
The New Yorker
January 4, 2016 Issue
Profiles
What Money Can Buy – Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality.
By Larissa MacFarquhar
The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it. Some try to raise money, but that can be depressing and futile. Others try to make money, but it’s hard to make enough. There is a third, more reliable way to overcome this obstacle, however, and that is to give away money that has already been made by somebody else, and has already been allocated to world-changing purposes. This is the way of the grant-makers of the Ford Foundation…

BMC Health Services Research
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmchealthservres/content
(Accessed 2 January 2016)

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Research Article
The effect of trends in health and longevity on health services use by older adults
The effect of population aging on future health services use depends on the relationship between longevity gains and health. Whether further gains in life expectancy will be paired by improvements in health is…
Bram Wouterse, Martijn Huisman, Bert R. Meijboom, Dorly J.H. Deeg and Johan J. Polder
BMC Health Services Research 2015 15:574
Published on: 24 December 2015
Abstract
Background
The effect of population aging on future health services use depends on the relationship between longevity gains and health. Whether further gains in life expectancy will be paired by improvements in health is uncertain. We therefore analyze the effect of population ageing on health services use under different health scenarios. We focus on the possibly diverging trends between different dimensions of health and their effect on health services use.
Methods
Using longitudinal data on health and health services use, a latent Markov model has been estimated that includes different dimensions of health. We use this model to perform a simulation study and analyze the health dynamics that drive the effect of population aging. We simulate three health scenarios on the relationship between longevity and health (expansion of morbidity, compression of morbidity, and the dynamic equilibrium scenario). We use the scenarios to predict costs of health services use in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2050.
Results
Hospital use is predicted to decline after 2040, whereas long-term care will continue to rise up to 2050. Considerable differences in expenditure growth rates between scenarios with the same life expectancy but different trends in health are found. Compression of morbidity generally leads to the lowest growth. The effect of additional life expectancy gains within the same health scenario is relatively small for hospital care, but considerable for long-term care.
Conclusions
By comparing different health scenarios resulting in the same life expectancy, we show that health improvements do contain costs when they decrease morbidity but not mortality. This suggests that investing in healthy aging can contribute to containing health expenditure growth.

BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcpregnancychildbirth/content
(Accessed 2 January 2016)

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Research article
Priorities and strategies for improving disabled women’s access to maternity services when they are affected by domestic abuse: a multi-method study using concept maps
Domestic abuse is a significant public health issue. It occurs more frequently among disabled women than those without a disability and evidence suggests that a great deal of domestic abuse begins or worsens…
Caroline Bradbury-Jones, Jenna P. Breckenridge, John Devaney, Fiona Duncan, Thilo Kroll, Anne Lazenbatt and Julie Taylor
BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2015 15:350
Published on: 28 December 2015

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Research article
Factors associated with compliance with the recommended frequency of postnatal care services in three rural districts of Tanzania
High neonatal mortality persists in Tanzania. Rates of decline are slow, in part because postnatal care (PNC) services for addressing this problem remain severely underutilized. This study assesses factors ass…
Almamy M. Kanté, Christine E. Chung, Anna M. Larsen, Amon Exavery, Kassimu Tani and James F. Phillips
BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 2015 15:341
Published on: 21 December 2015

BMC Public Health
http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles
(Accessed 2 January 2016)

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Research article
Maternal depression and malnutrition in children in southwest Uganda: a case control study
Malnutrition remains one of the most significant child health problems in developing countries with an estimated 53 % of child deaths per year attributed to being underweight.
Scholastic Ashaba, Godfrey Zari Rukundo, Florence Beinempaka, Moses Ntaro and John C. LeBlanc
BMC Public Health 2015 15:1303
Published on: 28 December 2015
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Study protocol
ASPIRE: A multi-site community-based participatory research project to increase understanding of the dynamics of violence against immigrant and refugee women in Australia
One in three women around the world are or have been subjected to violence. This includes in Australia, where violence against women is an urgent public health and human rights issue.
Cathy Vaughan, Adele Murdolo, Linda Murray, Erin Davis, Jasmin Chen, Karen Block, Regina Quiazon and Deb Warr
BMC Public Health 2015 15:1283
Published on: 23 December 2015

BMC Research Notes
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/content
(Accessed 2 January 2016)

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Research article
What facilitates the delivery of dignified care to older people? A survey of health care professionals
Deborah Kinnear, Christina Victor and Veronika Williams
BMC Research Notes 2015 8:826
Published on: 28 December 2015

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Research article
Experiences of “endless” caregiving of impaired elderly at home by family caregivers: a qualitative study
Kazue Sakakibara, Mai Kabayama and Mikiko Ito
BMC Research Notes 2015 8:827
Published on: 28 December 2015

Conflict and Health
http://www.conflictandhealth.com/
[Accessed 2 January 2016]

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Letter to Editor
Neonatal outcomes of Syrian refugees delivered in a tertiary hospital in Ankara, Turkey
Büyüktiryaki M, Canpolat FE, Alyamaç Dizdar E, Okur N and Kadıoğlu Şimşek G
Conflict and Health 2015, 9:38 (21 December 2015)

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation
http://www.resource-allocation.com/
(Accessed 2 January 2016)

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Research
Efficiency of private and public primary health facilities accredited by the National Health Insurance Authority in Ghana
Robert Kaba Alhassan, Edward Nketiah-Amponsah, James Akazili, Nicole Spieker, Daniel Kojo Arhinful and Tobias F Rinke de Wit
Published on: 26 December 2015

Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016
http://informahealthcare.com/toc/idt/current

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Research Paper
Exploring the use of tablets (iPads) with children and young adults with disabilities in Trinidad
Brittney Wiley, Deb Cameron, Sonia Gulati & Alison Hogg
pages 32-37
Abstract
Purpose: This study was conducted to review data gathered during a pilot project which trialed the use of a tablet computer, the iPad. Methods: Students from a segregated special education school and pre-vocational centre, with a wide range of intellectual and physical disabilities, were previously observed participating in 5–10-min introductory learning sessions with the iPad. This study reviewed quantitative and qualitative data collected during these sessions which included data regarding students’ level of engagement and overall ability to learn how to operate the iPad and its applications. Results: Results were positive for level of engagement and ease of use with cause and effect applications. For lower functioning students or students not previously exposed to tablet technology, scores were lower but overall remained high based on the 5-point scaling used in this study. Conclusion: Regular use of tablet technology in the classroom with applications appropriate to the level of ability of the student has the potential to enhance engagement in learning as well as maximise independence in the classroom.

Infectious Diseases of Poverty
http://www.idpjournal.com/content
[Accessed 2 January 2016]

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Editorial
Nobel prize for the artemisinin and ivermectin discoveries: a great boost towards elimination of the global infectious diseases of poverty
Ernest Tambo, Emad Khater, Jun-Hu Chen, Robert Bergquist, Xiao-Nong Zhou Infectious Diseases of Poverty 2015, 4:58 (28 December 2015)
Abstract
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) made a marked transformation for neglected and vulnerable communities in the developing countries from the start, but infectious diseases of poverty (IDoPs) continue to inflict a disproportionate global public health burden with associated consequences, thereby contributing to the vicious cycle of poverty and inequity. However, the effectiveness and large-scale coverage of artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) have revolutionized malaria treatment just as the control of lymphatic filariasis (LF) and onchocerciasis have benefitted from harnessing the broad-spectrum effect of avermectin-based derivatives. The paradigm shift in therapeutic approach, effected by these two drugs and their impact on community-based interventions of parasitic diseases plaguing the endemic low- and middle-income countries (LIMCs), led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015. However, the story would not be complete without mentioning praziquantel. The huge contribution of this drug in modernizing the control of schistosomiasis and also some intestinal helminth infections had already shifted the focus from control to potential elimination of this disease. Together, these new drugs have provided humankind with powerful new tools for the alleviation of infectious diseases that humans have lived with since time immemorial. These drugs all have broad-spectrum effects, yet they are very safe and can even be packaged together in various combinations. The strong effect on so many of the great infectious scourges in the developing countries has not only had a remarkable influence on many endemic diseases, but also contributed to improving the cost structure of healthcare. Significant benefits include improved quality of preventive and curative medicine, promotion of community-based interventions, universal health coverage and the fostering of global partnerships. The laudable progress and benefits achieved are indispensable in championing, strengthening and moving forward elimination of the IDoPs. However, there is an urgent need for further innovative, contextual and integrated approaches along with the advent of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), replacing the MDGs in ensuring global health security, well-being and economic prosperity for all.