Dutch study of new contraceptive halted after many pregnancies, several ectopic cases
A clinical study into a new contraceptive pill has been stopped early after an unexpectedly high number of participants became pregnant.
"CONTRACEPTIVE" · 총 8건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 76,532건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 3,712건(4.9%)·중립 70,997건(92.8%)·부정 1,823건(2.4%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 13.4(중도 균형)입니다.
A clinical study into a new contraceptive pill has been stopped early after an unexpectedly high number of participants became pregnant.
According to her, the state’s family planning initiatives deliberately engage men, traditional rulers, religious leaders and other key community stakeholders to address misconceptions and improve acceptance of contraceptive services. The post Lagos tackling contraceptive barriers through community engagement, awareness campaigns — Official appeared first on Premium Times Nigeria.
The BBC presenter has a horrific illness which leaves her and so many other women in a lifelong hell with no cure in sight. Barnett is at the absolute end of her tether … can she change millions of lives? Endometriosis is like someone taking a drill to your organs. The pain resembles a tsunami in every one of your cells – or the movement of tectonic plates inside your body. Years spent contending with the condition is “not life”. Endometriosis may not literally kill you, but suffering from it can feel like a living death. In Emma Barnett: Fighting Endometriosis, the Today presenter provides all these unflinching insights and many more into the condition, which involves cells resembling those that line the uterus growing elsewhere in the body. There is no cure, the only available treatment is hormones (predominantly the contraceptive pill), to mask symptoms, or surgery – including a total hysterectomy, although that won’t necessarily provide relief on a permanent basis. Endometriosis is extremely painful and little understood. It’s also incredibly common: one in 10 women of reproductive age in the UK have it. Continue reading...
Measles in the US, a cholera outbreak in the DRC, TB patient registration drops in Cambodia, Kenya, and Mozambique and closer to home, HIV outbreaks in children have all been linked to what doctors have warned are cuts to programmes and disastrous policy changes. Global funding has shrunk for healthcare across countries that need it the most which is why experts in Pakistan are really getting worried. The effects are immediately clear on the ground. In the busy streets of Lyari, Karachi, Amna Sualeh once navigated confidently through her community as a health worker with the Greenstar Social Marketing’s Sitara Baji (star sister) programme. Women trusted her to provide affordable intrauterine devices (IUDs), counselling on how to space out their children, and basic reproductive health services. “Before, with donor support, we could perform IUD insertions for just Rs500,” she says. “Now it costs up to Rs10,000 in private clinics. Many simply can’t afford it anymore.” Her clients, mostly working-class mothers, have begun skipping visits or turning to unsafe alternatives. As Pakistan’s macroeconomic crisis stretches out, many women have stopped coming altogether as their incomes have shrunk. This refrain is repeated across the provinces as overseas development assistance, once an indispensable backbone of the country’s public health system, contracts sharply. While not a principal focus of the global conversation on the impact of the Great Aid Recession, Pakistan enters the second quarter of the 21st century with its health system already stretched thin. It spends just 0.9 per cent of its GDP on public health, far below the WHO’s 5pc benchmark for universal health coverage. Life expectancy is 67.3 years, which is four years below the South Asian average, and conversely, infant and maternal mortality remain stubbornly high at 50.1 deaths per 1,000 live births and 155 deaths per 100,000 live births, respectively, more than double the rates of neighbours such as Bangladesh and Nepal. These outcomes reflect chronic underinvestment, rigid budgetary structures, and a system that has long relied on overseas technical and financial assistance for crucial health functions that domestic resources have not historically covered. For years, overseas development assistance, including both on-budget funds that flowed through government budgets and off-budget funds directed to NGOs, helped bridge key gaps in the system. While it comprised only a small proportion (around 1pc) of public health spending, much of this assistance was for crucial system functions that have historically been underserved in government budgets and policy. This is particularly true for funding from Global Health Initiatives (GHIs), specialised international financing mechanisms that support priority health programmes around the world, through organisations such as the Global Fund for TB, AIDS and Malaria and Gavi. In Pakistan, this support included the less visible aspects of health, such as supply chain logistics, cold chain management and storage, commodity procurement, monitoring support, and technical capacity building across key programmes like mother and child health, family planning, immunisation, HIV-AIDS, malaria and TB. As laid out in a recent report by think tank Tabadlab, the unprecedented global aid retrenchment crisis that has enveloped the world since 2025 has hit many of these programmes hard. USAID’s suspension led to the closure of over 60 UNFPA-run health facilities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, directly disrupting care for 1.7 million people and halting HIV-AIDS programmes in Sindh that were providing life-saving medications to patients. Screengrab from Tabadlab research paper on aid cuts. This was followed by reductions in financial commitments in Pakistan from multilateral GHI donors such as Gavi and The Global Fund, as finances were redistributed across regions and priorities. Drawdowns in Gavi affected vaccination programmes caused layoffs of over 200 vaccinators in Lahore alone. A $27.2 million Global Fund reduction halved TB support in multiple provinces, cut diagnostic kit financing by 75pc, and placed treatment for over 42,000 HIV-positive patients at risk. Across the board, these cuts are eroding important nodes of the health system for which ODA had earlier provided the systemic architecture and connective tissue. Preventative healthcare’s invisible erosion Preventative health programmes—long under-prioritised in domestic health budgets and rarely accorded priority by local politicians and policymakers who tend to focus resources on visible infrastructure—have been disproportionately impacted. Organisations like the Global Fund helped develop monitoring and surveillance systems and trained thousands of frontline workers to prevent and monitor the spread of communicable diseases. Over the past year, many of these programs have been terminated. Dr Ilyas Gondal, former director general of health in Punjab, oversaw the administration of these programmes firsthand. “Preventative healthcare has not been given its due importance here,” he observes. “Donors filled critical gaps in programmes such as the Expanded Programme for Immunisation (EPI), AIDS, Hepatitis and TB through support for training, outreach, health awareness, literature, and logistics. Now, most of that work has stopped across all of these programmes.” Dr Gondal fears that progress on coverage for vaccine-preventable diseases could be reversed if no arrangements are made for alternative financing. Ejaz Mahmood, a community health worker at Indus Hospital in Faisalabad, worked with the Global Fund-supported Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) programme, which trained 10,000 frontline workers in standard operating procedures for infection prevention across the country and developed IPC committees following the Covid-19 pandemic. He describes how most of those IPC committees have now become non-functional, and critical infection prevention training has been abandoned. “No one is there to train health workers anymore. We are already seeing needle-stick injuries rising, with over 111 such cases in Faisalabad this year, along with rising cases of HIV-AIDS and Hepatitis B.” Screengrab from Tabadlab research paper on ODA cuts on Pakistan’s health system. Some of the fallout of such crucial programmes being abandoned may already be contributing to disease outbreaks. Over the past year, Pakistan has witnessed one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region, with a 200pc rise in infections between 2010 and 2024. Recent media investigations in Punjab and Sindh uncovered multiple HIV outbreaks originating from health facilities that disproportionately affected children, with the reuse of syringes, non-screening of blood samples, and other unsafe medical and waste management practices identified as the causes. As donors that were crucial in enabling preventative interventions and programmes draw down support, the risk of such outbreaks is likely to increase, unless the funding and institutional structures for these programmes are sustained or replaced with domestic capacity and resources. Tuberculosis detection and treatment in jeopardy Pakistan ranks fifth globally in TB burden, with nearly 650,000 cases and 70,000 deaths annually; over half of cases go undetected. Provincial TB control programmes have long depended on donors for the bulk of programme funding. While provincial governments contribute brick-and-mortar infrastructure for these projects, organisations like The Global Fund financed everything from service delivery to detection and surveillance to commodity stocks. Dr Sher Afghan, director of the TB Control Programme in Balochistan, is direct about the scale of the crisis: “We currently face an 80pc funding gap.” The cuts resulted in a 50pc reduction in programme human resources. “We have had to halve monitoring and surveillance staff, postpone prevalence surveys, and capacity building programmes that were training 800 workers a year.” In resource-strapped provinces with unique geographical access challenges like Balochistan, this has made TB detection increasingly difficult. Programme administrators like Dr Afghan are concerned about the increased risk of undetected transmission. “Every TB-positive patient who is not treated spreads the disease to 12 people on average. Thus, every undiagnosed case means potentially 13 undiagnosed cases.” The Global Fund cut has also triggered a 50pc reduction in district-level monitoring and community interventions staff in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, alongside a 75pc cut in diagnostic testing kits and the elimination of capacity-building. Utilisation of USAID in Pakistan’s healthcare system Life and healthcare programmes; primary healthcare in erstwhile FATA and frontier regions; childhood and neonatal support; malaria control. Screengrab from PIDE research paper on foreign aid, donors and consultants. Babar Shigri, former programme management specialist with USAID Pakistan, observed the impact of donor withdrawal firsthand. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh, USAID supported TB programmes with contact tracing, pharmaceutical products, community mobilisation and management information systems that improved detection rates. “It’s not about funding alone,” he says. “When USAID left, work slowed down overall as one of the main actors driving and coordinating advocacy was gone.” In Balochistan, Dr Sher Afghan is cautiously optimistic that the government will step up to the challenge and is working on creating budgetary space for the programme. But with the sudden shock to a system long dependent on donor-led systems, there is a risk of systemic collapse to the programme unless there is rapid action to create fiscal and institutional mechanisms for transitional planning. Family planning being priced out of access Family planning programmes have been among the hardest hit. Through off-budget ODA, donors like USAID supported access by underwriting everything from supply chains to capacity building for large non-governmental family planning providers such as Greenstar Social Marketing and Rahnuma FPAP. When funding evaporated, the effects were immediate. Dr Syed Azizur Rab, CEO of Greenstar Social Marketing Pakistan, describes a donor-supported network that enabled underserved rural and working-class communities to access contraceptives and SRH services nationwide. “Donor support covered functions ranging from commodity subsidies, training, and logistics to community outreach and monitoring,” he explains. With that support gone, clinics have had to raise fees to cover costs and scaled back services. Screengrab from PIDE research paper on foreign aid, donors and consultants. Access to contraceptives, particularly long-acting ones like IUCDs and implants has been severely affected. According to Dr Rab, due to a lack of domestic production and rising costs of imports, “without donor subsidies, implants and IUCDs in private are simply commercially non-viable.” This effect has been compounded by increased taxes on contraceptives by the government as a revenue measure, further pricing them out of reach amid a prolonged inflationary crisis. Greenstar-affiliated clinicians such as Amna Sualeh now watch clients weigh the increased cost of an IUCD against tighter household budgets. Many are now forgoing modern contraceptive methods altogether and having unintended pregnancies as a result. In Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Noreen Nasir, a lady health visitor and midwife with over two decades of experience, worked for years as a family planning provider with USAID’s now-terminated Building Healthier Families programme. The project supported training and diagnostics, IUCDs, injections and implants for women in working-class neighbourhoods. “We used to be able to provide these commodities and services at a very minimal cost because of donor support,” she says. “Now we have to charge for them and face frequent shortages of implants and injections. At times, I pay for delivery kits out of my own pocket because the client can’t afford them and the delivery would be riskier otherwise.” As a result of the loss of support, she says, increasing numbers of women are turning to unqualified providers and stocks of key family planning products have fallen short. According to Noreen, the loss of access to affordable natal and post-natal care is also affecting infant nutrition, with reduced breastfeeding rates and rising underweight deliveries in the community she serves. Rahnuma FPAP, one of the country’s largest reproductive health networks, has closed dozens of centres. District Programme Manager Farrukh Bashir is pessimistic in his assessment: “When the funding stopped, all project beneficiaries lost access, and we had to close all donor-supported clinics. In facilities where we used to have three doctors, we now have just one. Doctor-client ratios have worsened across the board, and thousands of women from working-class communities have lost reliable sexual and reproductive health care.” Mother and child health fragile gains at risk The cuts have also severely impacted mother and child health programs and services in a country that has long had some of the worst maternal, neonatal and child health outcomes in Asia. Donor financing for these programmes was critical in reducing maternal mortality across the country (from 276 per 100,000 births in 2006 to 155 by 2024). ODA for it was particularly important for remote and marginalised regions of provinces such as Balochistan, where access to facility-based maternal and child healthcare is limited amid resource and geographical access challenges. Community health worker Shazia Ahmad worked with the EU-ECHO project, which helped upgrade basic health units and hospitals in underserved districts, and provided delivery kits, folic acid, nutrition advice, breastfeeding support and health awareness sessions. “The project was very well received in the communities, and we registered over 100,000 women. We were conducting health screenings for mothers and children while also providing nutrition supplements in districts with the highest malnutrition rates in the country.” Screengrab from PIDE research paper on foreign aid, donors and consultants. But with the termination of the project, medicines and services have been halved, and more layoffs are planned. Shazia worries about reversing the substantive gains they had made in rural communities in Balochistan. “The project was very popular with communities, and we were already seeing genuine behavioural change. Now all that work is at risk, and we are unable to follow up on the healthcare needs we had identified.” In a Rahnuma clinic in a working-class neighbourhood in Faisalabad, Punjab, Dr Amna Ehsan once operated under a “no refusal” policy with low charges for marginalised women. Donor funds allowed subsidised medicines and gynaecological OPD services. Now services are being privatised, and fees are rising. “We had very low charges and could provide low-cost medicines which were affordable for the marginalised communities we work in,” she says. Patient volumes, faced with increased fees for services and medicines, have slowed to a trickle. Systemic vulnerabilities and the transition challenge These individual stories of the struggles of health workers and administrators in the face of ODA cuts illustrate the broader structural problems documented in recent analyses of Pakistan’s health system and financing. As is clear, the impact is not just fiscal but functional. ODA, particularly off-budget flows through Global Health Initiatives, were critical for crucial health system functions that public budgets cover only partially or not at all. Bilateral cuts such as the USAID suspension have produced “cliff-edge” disruptions—abrupt programme discontinuities without transitional periods or buffers. Multilateral financing reductions have eroded the infrastructure of vertical disease programmes, including for commodities, diagnostics, surveillance and field operations. Commodity supply chains are particularly vulnerable. Donors handled pooled procurement that secured steep discounts on vaccines, TB drugs and diagnostics. As things stand, domestic systems lack the fiscal flexibility, technical capacity and regulatory agility to absorb these functions quickly. Further, technical assistance withdrawal is eroding surveillance, monitoring, data systems and planning capacity. The result is not total collapse or catastrophe but precise ruptures: stockouts, shortages, laid-off outreach workers, broken referral chains and rising exposure to out-of-pocket costs that can push families deeper into poverty and raise the underappreciated risk of disease outbreaks. While the risks are very real, the current moment also presents an opportunity for the kind of structural change that Pakistan’s health system has long needed. However, the government’s response must move beyond emergency and ad-hoc plugging of gaps and outbreak controls towards transition planning. If governments demonstrate adequate initiative and come together to coordinate, assess and fill these financing gaps, we can secure and build on the fragile health gains of recent years. At Greenstar, Dr Azizur Rab sees this moment as a reform opportunity that could build on what already exists: “The federal and provincial governments will have to look at the models already created with donor money and scale them up. However, this requires government ownership and political will.” If Pakistan seizes the crisis as a catalyst for functional transition—from donor dependence to resilience and sustainability—it can build a fully domestically financed health system capable of protecting the most vulnerable while also preventing outbreaks and creating effective local referral systems and commodity supply chains. The choice, and the cost of inaction, will be measured in lives and in the hard-won public health gains now hanging in the balance.
Countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda Source: United Nations Population Fund Please refer to the attached file. As of 26 May 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had reported 1,077 suspected cases of Ebola and 238 deaths, with transmission heavily concentrated in the Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu provinces. Uganda has reported five cases, including one death, all linked to imported cases from the DRC. The outbreak is complicated by acute insecurity, armed conflict, and massive internal displacement, which severely restricts response efforts. A critical concern is the absence of widely-licensed vaccines or specific therapeutics for this strain. Cross-border transmission risks are high, with 10 other African countries at elevated risk. UNFPA is participating in United Nations Country Team preparedness efforts across all 10 high-risk African countries and is working to ensure the continuity of critical sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services despite major supply chain challenges, including for personal protective equipment (PPE) specifically tailored for delivery procedures. Furthermore, UNFPA is addressing the threat to safe clinical pathways for the clinical management of rape and comprehensive gender-based violence (GBV) care; the risk of sexual transmission from survivors of rape necessitates the urgent integration of private, stigma-free counselling; contraceptive provision; and condom distribution. UNFPA advocated for the central integration of maternal health and GBV service continuity into the US $340 million Regional Response Plan. While international donors have pledged 70 per cent of the overarching regional fund, immediate operational funding gaps remain critical.
Country: World Source: International Rescue Committee Please refer to the attached file. Which humanitarian interventions deliver the most impact per dollar? The International Rescue Committee has identified, through years of rigorous research, a set of high-impact interventions that deliver outsized results for every dollar invested. Download the two-pager for the evidence behind each, or read on for a summary. Humanitarian needs have reached record levels while available funding shrinks. Seventeen countries at the intersection of extreme poverty, conflict and climate vulnerability are home to 70% of people in humanitarian need, yet receive a fraction of the funding required. Every dollar must work harder. The two-pager addresses the following questions, drawing on evidence across health and survival, women's empowerment, education, and cash and resilience: How can we reach children with vaccines in conflict zones at low cost? Through the IRC's REACH program with Gavi, mobile teams and pop-up clinics have delivered over 24 million doses, with delivery costs falling to ~$2 per dose at scale. What is the most cost-effective way to treat acute malnutrition? A simplified malnutrition treatment protocol matches standard care outcomes at one-fifth less cost, enabling treatment for more children with the same resources. How can health systems prevent maternal deaths in low-resource settings? Community-based distribution of misoprostol cuts postpartum hemorrhage risk by 80%, extending coverage to communities that facility-based care cannot reach. What is the return on investment for infection prevention in crisis settings? Effective prevention and control halves infection-related deaths and saves over $16 in treatment costs for every $1 invested. How cost-effective is reproductive health programming in humanitarian contexts? Every $1 spent on contraceptive services saves $2.50 in health care costs, while self-injection innovations and community health workers extend access to women in crisis settings. Can humanitarian programming reduce intimate partner violence cost-effectively? An integrated IRC approach in the DRC achieved a 77% reduction in intimate partner violence at 27% lower cost than stand-alone programs. Is remote early learning a cost-effective response to disrupted schooling? The IRC's Remote Early Learning Program delivers a year's worth of preschool gains in 11 weeks via WhatsApp, at 20% lower cost than in-person preschool. How does cash compare to in-kind aid in cost-efficiency? Cash transfers reach 18% more people and generate $2 in local economic activity for every $1 transferred, by removing supply chain costs and giving families direct purchasing choice. Can anticipatory action reduce humanitarian costs before disasters hit? Pre-shock cash and early warning systems help families preserve assets and meet basic needs, reducing the cost burden of post-crisis response. The IRC's anticipatory action model now operates in five countries. As the gap between humanitarian need and available funding widens, these highest-return investments offer the clearest path to reaching more people with fewer resources.
Country: World Source: United Nations Population Fund Brazzaville/New York 26 May 2026 – UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, today signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with the African Development Bank (AfDB) to position maternal health and demographic resilience as central pillars of Africa's economic transformation. The agreement, signed on the margins of the African Development Bank annual meeting, frames investment in maternal health not only as a health issue but also as an investment in economic growth, productivity, resilience and human capital development, to enable countries across the continent to harness their demographic dividend. Africa has made huge progress in reducing maternal mortality, but ongoing challenges remain, linked to structural obstacles, unequal access to quality health services, and financing gaps. "Immense opportunity is within Africa's grasp if we make strategic investments in women and young people. Economic progress for Africa is only possible if we prioritize women's health and address one of the continent's most pressing development challenges: preventable maternal deaths," said Diene Keita, Executive Director of UNFPA. "This renewed partnership reflects our shared commitment to put maternal health and human capital development at the heart of Africa's economic transformation agenda." As part of the partnership, UNFPA and the African Development Bank will explore innovative financing and implementation mechanisms to help countries unlock investment in women and young people as drivers of Africa’s growth. Priorities include investments to modernize the health workforce through digital training; strengthening local procurement systems; upgrading climate-resilient health infrastructure; and supporting the digitization of health information systems, among others. Since 1992, UNFPA and the AfDB have worked together to advance health systems and data-driven development across Africa. Just a few of the many achievements from this collaboration include: Modernization of population data in the Government of Côte d’Ivoire’s most recent census, enabling projections on fertility, mortality, migration and other key areas. Improved access to Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care services across 11 health districts of Cameroon, bringing antenatal care coverage to 90% in targeted areas and bringing the modern contraceptive prevalence rate to far above the national average. Awareness raising and behaviour change activities linking water, sanitation and hygiene with reproductive health and gender across eight rural regions of Madagascar. Integrating gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and protection considerations into climate adaptation planning across 10 countries of East and Southern Africa. UNFPA will work with the AfDB to ensure that demographic transition roadmaps sit at the heart of national financing strategies, ensuring that investments in health and rights are recognized as smart investments for Africa's future. Media contacts Siaka Traore Traore@unfpa.org; media@unfpa.org WhatsApp number: +226 74132323 Mathias Teumeni Noune teumeninoune@unfpa.org Whatsapp number: +242 052050616 About UNFPA UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is the sexual and reproductive health agency of the UN, working to uphold the rights and choices of women, girls and young people across more than 150 countries and territories. It reaches millions of women, girls and young people with essential health services, protection from violence, and with vital information about their bodies and rights. It also helps governments plan for changing population needs so people can thrive today and in the future, regardless of fertility trends.
Changes in how healthcare is managed have had a meaningful effect on what contraceptive options are available to women.