Margaret Chan

globalisation of unhealthy lifestyles.

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Sauli Ninistö, President of Finland, opened the conference stressing that health is important for achieving other goals, but also has value in its own right. He spoke of Finland’s huge improvements in health since the 1940s achieved through investing the fruits of economic development in social and health infrastructure.

Congratulations to Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, for her powerful opening speech saying corporate interests on health pose a daunting challenge for health. She noted health is shaped by the “globalisation of unhealthy lifestyles,” leading to an epidemic of NCDs which is blowing out health budgets—e.g. diabetes consumes 15% of health budgets. Previously, progress has meant diseases vanished, whereas now NCDs are flourishing along with urbanisation and economic growth.

Chan said public health has been used to fighting Big Tobacco, but now also have to fight “Big Alcohol,” “Big Food,” and “Big Soda.”  She cast industry involvement in policy making as dangerous and leading to distortions. She pointed to the many tactics industry uses to water down public health measures. These include: civil society “front groups;” promising that self-regulation will be effective; industry funded research, which confuses the evidence; positioning government action to promote health as curbs on individual liberty. Her speech defined the problem well. Solutions are needed now!

On the opening panel, Alireza Marandi talked of Iran’s success in designing an effective primary healthcare system, which included reform of medical education. The Secretary of the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Jaana Husu-Kallio, called for the “borders between professions” to be demolished in the interests of health and noted the need for a whole of government approach to food policy covering food security, production, safety, and nutrition. Tarja Halonen, former President of Finland, said education and health are “the tools of wellbeing.” There was much discussion about how the lessons from the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control can be applied to other areas and agreement that legal instruments should be more widely used to protect public health.

The afternoon’s panel on political will for Health in All Polocies (HiAP) disappointingly has gave few clues about how to create the will. The best suggestion was from Abdellatif Mekki, minister of health of Tunisia, who suggested that ministers of health should be vice presidents to give them more power, which they can then use against, for example, trade ministers who promote unhealthy industries like sugar.

I ended the day in a session on agriculture policy, food, and health. Bibi Giyose, from the African Union, reminded us that women make up more than 75% of food producers in Africa.  Priorities for nutritional sensitive agriculture are female empowerment, ensuring product diversity, and that processing sees food retaining its nutritional value. Yet we heard that global food chains dominate, rather than local food for local consumption, and that free trade agreements encourage unhealthy food supply. Fast food and supermarkets have increased massively. How do we change our food supply away from ultra processed food? Eating it seems to be killing people around the world!

Source: BMJ

 

 

WHO urges information sharing over novel coronavirus.

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged countries with possible cases of novel coronavirus to share information.

The move comes after Saudi Arabia said the development of diagnostic tests had been delayed by patent rights on the NCoV virus by commercial laboratories.

Twenty-two deaths and 44 cases have been reported worldwide since 2012, the WHO says.

NCoV is from the same family of viruses as the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars).

An outbreak of Sars in 2003 killed about 770 people. However, NCoV and Sars are distinct from each other, the WHO says.

The virus first emerged in Saudi Arabia, which is where most cases have since arisen.

Saudi Deputy Health Minister Ziad Memish raised his concerns at the World Health Assembly in Geneva.

“We are still struggling with diagnostics and the reason is that the virus was patented by scientists and is not allowed to be used for investigations by other scientists,” he said.

“I think strongly that the delay in the development of … diagnostic procedures is related to the patenting of the virus.”

‘Uncertainty’

WHO chief Margaret Chan expressed dismay at the information.

“Why would your scientists send specimens out to other laboratories on [sic] a bilateral manner and allow other people to take intellectual property rights on a new disease?” she asked.

“Any new disease is full of uncertainty.”

She is urging the WHO’s 194 member states to only share “viruses and specimens with WHO collaborating centres… not in a bilateral manner.”

She added: “I will follow it up. I will look at the legal implications together with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. No IP (intellectual property) should stand in the way of you, the countries of the world, to protect your people.”

WHO’s assistant director-general for health security, Dr Keiji Fukuda, said his agency had also been “struggling with diagnostics” because of property rights concerns and ill-defined international rules for sharing such materials, AP news agency reported.

Cases of novel coronavirus have been detected in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, the UK and France.

Twenty-two of the 44 cases reported worldwide have been in Saudi Arabia, WHO says.

Out of the 22 deaths, 10 of them have been in the kingdom, it adds.

Source: BBC

e�Tr 8(� �� noticing the movement of the bars when observing the smallest image – but they were slower at detecting movement in the larger images.

 

Michael Melnick of the University of Rochester, who was part of the research team said the results were very clear.

“From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse.

The authors explain that in most scenarios, background movement is less important than small moving objects in the foreground, for example driving a car, walking down a hall or moving your eyes across the room.

People with higher IQs appear to be able to concentrate better

As a person’s IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion and concentrate on the foreground.

In an initial study on 12 people, there was a 64% correlation between motion suppression and IQ scores. In this larger study on 53 people, a 71% correlation was found.

In contrast, previous research on the link between intelligence and reaction times, colour discrimination and sensitivity to pitch found only a 20-40% correlation.

But the ability to ignore background movements is not the only indicator of intelligence.

“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain,” says Duje Tadin, who also worked on the study.

“But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent.

“We know from prior research which parts of the brain are involved in visual suppression of background motion.

“This new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing, what’s different about the neurochemistry, what’s different about the neurotransmitters of people with different IQs.”

Source: BBC