The Rohingya Report

This weekend I was talking to a good friend who works on the Hill, and she asked me if I’d heard about Physicians for Human Rights’ “Rohingya Report,” published in March 2010.  The report, Stateless and Starving, documents the atrocities committed by the Bangladeshi government against Burmese Rohingya refugees. It was written by Richard Sollom, Director of Research and Investigations for PHR and Parveen Pamar, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s, in collaboration with the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Of course, humanitarian workers and organizations such as MSF have been on the ground in Bangladesh long before PHR released its report, but Stateless and Starving has generated steam in the U.S. and brought to light some of the shock and horror: the “dire conditions” listed in the executive summary include acute malnutrition, forced internment, arbitrary arrest, and Bangladeshi hate propaganda and violence against the refugees.

Vitamin A not the panacea it seemed?

Today’s NYTimes covered a study whose surprising results were recently published in The Lancet. It was conducted in Ghana, and seems to contradict a lot of good data on the positive results of Vitamin A supplementation: lower incidence of measles and diarrhea and, ultimately, reduced maternal and childhood mortality.

Writing in a Lancet commentary, Anthony Costello and David Osrin of the global health institute of University College London noted that the new study recruited an “astonishing” number of women — nearly 208,000 in more than 1,000 villages or family compounds. Half got a weekly low dose of vitamin A, and half got a placebo. Few in either group died, but the vitamin also did not reduce hospitalization for childbirth complications. Nor did it reduce stillbirths or deaths of newborns. Recent trials in Bangladesh and Indonesia had similar results.”

At this point, Vitamin A supplementation has practically become a truism in global health practice. What might be the consequences of this study, along with the trials in Bangladesh and Indonesia?

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/health/04glob.html