Two companies announced Monday that they have received the first approval to test a Zika vaccine on humans. While the approval from the Food and Drug Administration is early in the long process of approving a vaccine for widespread use, it is a step forward in finding a vaccine for the virus, which has become a global health emergency.
Tag: global health
Can You Imagine a World Without Condoms for Safe Sex?
Currently, women who want to both avoid an unplanned pregnancy and prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have no choices other than the male or female condom. But there are new forms of female-focused methods in development that combine contraception with the prevention of STIs – including HIV – and they’re called Multipurpose Prevention Technologies (MPTs). Public health leaders expect that they will change the face of women’s global health.
Is China Running Out of Sperm?
Infertility is a growing problem in China. In southern Guangdong province, 14 percent of the population, which numbered 104 million in 2010, cannot conceive — and the fact that the province has only one sperm bank doesn’t help. Couples generally have to wait at least a year to have their names called. The sperm shortage has even prompted a desperate plea from a government official, according to one Chinese-language news site, asking college students to donate. ”Donating your sperm is healthy,” said Luo Wenzhi, the head of Guangdong’s family planning commission, in an interview. “It won’t hurt you nor kill you.” Read full article.
Women in Asia Largely Ignorant, Fatalistic, about Fertility
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Women in Asia are largely ignorant about fertility problems and tend to blame their failure to conceive on “God’s will” and bad luck, a survey has found.
The survey, which covered 1,000 women in 10 countries who had been trying to conceive for at least six months, found that 62 percent of them did not suspect they may have a fertility problem.
They were even less likely to point the finger at their husbands, with 80 percent of them not suspecting that their partners may have a problem with fertility.
Infertility is defined by the World Health Organisation as the inability to conceive after a year of regular, unprotected sex. But only 43 percent of the women surveyed knew that. Read full article.
Conflict Trauma In Kashmir Leads to Infertility, Miscarriage
Ishrat Hussain says she locked herself in her room when she learned she could not conceive.
Two years after her wedding and still not pregnant, the 26-year-old visited a gynecologist, who diagnosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that can cause women to stop ovulating, gain unusual weight, develop irregular periods or skin problems and grow abnormal facial and body hair.
Hussain struggles to describe how people ridiculed her in her community in Kashmir, where infertility is taboo.
“An infertile woman is generally viewed as incomplete with a notion of having a curse bestowed for some misdeed,” she says tearfully.
Dr. Ashraf Ganaie, an endocrinologist at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, says plenty of other women share Hussain’s problem amid the decades-old conflict and related uncertainties of life in the Kashmir Valley, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan.
He says an unpublished study that he supervised attributed 90 percent of infertility cases in the valley to polycystic ovary syndrome and related diseases, 5 percent to premature ovarian failure and another 5 percent to other stressors in life.
“In the last few years, we have received more than 150 women who suffer from premature ovarian failure,” he says.
Clinical psychologist Iram Nazir says that stress can negatively affect women’s hormonal levels. Read full article.