a Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA
b China Medical Board, Cambridge, MA, USA
c Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan
d George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA
e Independent member of House of Lords, London, UK
f James P Grant School of Public Health, Dhaka, Bangladesh
g US Institute of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA
h School of Public Health Universidad Peruana Cayetano, Heredia, Lima, Peru
i Peking University Health Science Centre, Beijing, China
j National Health Laboratory Service, Johannesburg, South Africa
k School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
l University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
m The Rockefeller Foundation, New York, NY, USA
n Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India
o The Sage Colleges, Troy, MI, USA
p Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA
q Makarere University School of Public Health, Kampala, Uganda
r Centre for Research on Population and Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Available online at: http://bit.ly/edUAoJ

Except from the report:

The first UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health underscored the present problem with medical education: “[T]here is no chance of operationalizing the right to health without the active engagement of many health professionals. Here, however, is a very major problem. To be blunt, most health professionals whom the Special Rapporteur meets have not even heard of the right to health. If they have heard of it, they usually have no idea what it means, either conceptually or operationally…. [I]f further progress is to be made towards the operationalization of the right to health, many more health professionals must begin to appreciate the human rights dimensions of their work.” He further argues that a rights-based approach to health can be an invaluable asset for professionals to devise more equitable policies and programmes, to promote
important health issues on national and international agendas, to mobilise more funds, and to promote
respect for the dignity of those who they serve.
* Hunt P. Report on progress and obstacles to the health and human rights movement (A/HRC/4/28). Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2007. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/health/right/issues.htm

BBC News

The European Commission has announced a ban on the use of Bisphenol-A (BPA) in plastic baby bottles.

The commission cited fears that the compound could affect development and immune response in young children.

The EU ban will come into effect during 2011.

There has been concern over the use of BPA for some time, with six US manufacturers removing it in 2009 from bottles they sold in the US, although not other markets.

The chemical is widely used in making hard, clear plastic and is commonly found in food and drink containers.

A European Commission spokesman said the proposal had been approved after being presented to a committee of national government experts on Thursday – months earlier than scheduled – and approved.

The European parliament had called for the ban in June.

Areas of uncertainty
John Dalli, Commissioner in charge of Health and Consumer Policy, said the ban was good news for European parents.

“There were areas of uncertainty, deriving from new studies, which showed that BPA might have an effect on development, immune response and tumour promotion,” Mr Dalli said in a statement.

EU states will outlaw the manufacture of polycarbonate feeding bottles containing the compound from March 2011, and ban their import and sale from June 2011, the Commission said.

The National Childbirth Trust is a British charity which has campaigned for the ban.

Its chief executive Belinda Phipps told the BBC: “When you put liquids into a bottle – particularly hot liquids or liquids containing fatty liquids – it leaches out of the plastic. And particularly as the bottle gets older and it gets more scratched, more and more leaches out and into the liquid.”

Ms Phipps said that when a baby drinks from a bottle which contains BPA, the baby absorbs the leached chemical into its fat.

“It’s a chemical that mimics estrogens, but not in a good way,” she said. “It interferes with estrogens getting into the receptors, and it can have some very unpleasant effects – and animal studies have shown significant effects.”

Canada was the first country to declare bisphenol-A toxic in October, after it was concluded that the chemical might have harmful effects on humans, as well as the environment and “its biological diversity”.

The Canadian decision was strongly opposed by the chemical industry.

“Environment Canada’s announcement is contrary to the weight of worldwide scientific evidence, unwarranted and will unnecessarily confuse and alarm the public,” Steven G Hentges from the American Chemistry Council told the New York Times in response to the decision.

BBC News

The first global study into the effects of passive smoking has found it causes 600,000 deaths every year.

One-third of those killed are children, often exposed to smoke at home, the World Health Organization (WHO) found.

The study, in 192 countries, found that passive smoking is particularly dangerous for children, said to be at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome, pneumonia and asthma.

Passive smoking causes heart disease, respiratory illness and lung cancer.

“This helps us understand the real toll of tobacco,” said Armando Peruga, of the WHO’s Tobacco-Free Initiative, who led the study.

‘Deadly combination’

The global health body said it was particularly concerned about the 165,000 children who die of smoke-related respiratory infections, mostly in South East Asia and in Africa.

It said that this group was more exposed to passive smoking than any other group, principally in their own homes.

“The mix of infectious diseases and second-hand smoke is a deadly combination,” Mr Peruga said.

As well as being at increased risk of a series of respiratory conditions, the lungs of children who breathe in passive smoke may also develop more slowly than children who grow up in smoke-free homes.

Worldwide, 40% of children, 33% of non-smoking men and 35% non-smoking women were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, researchers found.

This exposure was estimated to have caused 379,000 deaths from heart disease, 165,000 from lower respiratory infections, 36,900 from asthma and 21,400 from lung cancer.

According to the study, the highest numbers of people exposed to second-hand smoke are in Europe and Asia and the lowest rates of exposure were in the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa.

The research also revealed that passive smoking had a large impact on women, killing about 281,000 worldwide. This is due to the fact that in many parts of the world, the study suggests, women are at least 50% more likely to be exposed to second-hand smoke than men.

Although child abuse has been firmly tied to other mental health problems — including depression, anxiety and suicide — the link to psychotic illnesses has long been a subject of debate.

The new study shows sexual assaults more than doubled the odds that a child would develop schizophrenia as an adult — from less than 1 in 100 (0.7 percent) in the general population to nearly 2 in 100 (1.9 percent) among the abuse victims.

The risk was higher still if the assault involved penetration or multiple perpetrators, or took place in the early teenage years.

Nearly one in five adults who had been raped by more than one person between ages 13 and 15 developed schizophrenia or another psychotic illness, Margaret Cutajar, of Monash University in Victoria, and colleagues found.

In their report, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, they say the new results cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the abuse and the later psychoses, but at the very least they may help point to a group of people who would benefit from professional help.

The researchers linked three decades’ worth of data from police and medical examinations to a mental health register in the Australian state of Victoria.

Then they compared the rates of psychotic illnesses between people who’d been abused before age 16 and a control group of people drawn from voting records.

That design makes the study stand out, because the intersection between mental health problems and childhood abuse is a difficult area to investigate, said Mark Shevlin, a professor of psychology at the University of Ulster in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

“Many of the studies to date have relied on retrospective recall of traumatic experiences,” said Shevlin, who was not involved in the new research. And recall, he added, is not always trustworthy.

He stressed the findings don’t necessarily mean the abuse triggers later psychosis directly, because it may reflect other risk factors such as poverty or a difficult family situation.

Still, he said, children who experience sexual assaults, especially by a family member, may become anxious and withdrawn and perceive the world as a threatening place.

“These things could maybe explain things like paranoid beliefs,” said Shevlin. “Environmental factors are obviously very important in the development of serious health problems.”

Craig Steel, an expert in psychological trauma at Reading University in the UK, said the new paper made a strong case for going beyond drugs when treating people with schizophrenia.

Although both US and UK government guidelines recommend using cognitive behavioral therapy in addition to medication, he said, psychiatrists tend not to focus on patients’ personal histories.

“At the very least the study adds weight to the fact that, as clinicians when we are confronted with people with schizophrenia, trauma assessment should be a routine part of our practice,” Steel told Reuters Health.

And kids aren’t the only ones to get psychological scars from sexual assaults, although they may be particularly vulnerable.

In a recent study of Danish women, for instance, Shevlin found those who attended rape centers were many times as likely to receive a diagnosis of psychosis later on.

“It appears this association is evident in adults as well, although most of the work has been done in children,” he said.

SOURCE: link.reuters.com/hak53q Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1, 2010.

Disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, civil war, and other sudden large-scale calamities often trigger health crises and can result in responses that compromise and even devalue the fulfillment of human rights. For this issue, we invite submissions that explore the human rights and health aspects of disaster relief preparation, management, and outcomes. Essays are particularly invited that: explore disparities between implementation in the field and academic literature; offer insights into the traditional definitions of vulnerable groups within the context of humanitarian operations; suggest critical analyses of disaster response from a health rights-based participatory or accountability perspective; consider ethics in crisis response; or examine the increasing role of risk reduction as it relates to both public health and human rights practice.  What voices are missing from the field in human rights analyses of disaster? What new models of practice might improve the right to health for all affected by both disaster and response?

Deadline:  October 31, 2010. (Late submissions will be considered; See below)

Intent to submit:  Authors with a scholarly manuscript now in preparation, relevant to the issue, who may find it necessary to submit later than the October 31 deadline are strongly urged to send an “intent to submit” email (or related query) to hhrjournal@hsph.harvard.edu by October 31, 2010.  Please include an abstract of your paper and the anticipated date for your final submission. Statements of intent do not ensure publication; all manuscripts selected for consideration will be subject to editorial and independent peer review.

For more details, visit http://www.hhrjournal.org.

Editorial Office

Health and Human Rights: An International Journal

François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights

Harvard School of Public Health

FXB Building, 7th Floor

651 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA  02115  USA

hhrjournal@hsph.harvard.edu

http://hhrjournal.org

You can read the report here: SR Education Report-Human Right to Sexual Education

You can explore right to education indicators at http://www.right-to-education.org/node/1063

http://www.gfmer.ch/SRH-Course-2010/adolescent-sexual-reproductive-health/Adolescent-health-modules.htm

The Quarterly, by focusing on recent cases and housing legislation, provides important information about national and international legal developments related to housing and ESC rights.

This edition of the Quarterly opens with an article about a ground-breaking decision of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights dealing with human rights abuses in Darfur.

The case, Centre on Housing Rights and Eviction (COHRE) v. Sudan, was the first time an African human rights mechanism enforced an African human rights instrument in the context of Darfur. The decision also advanced jurisprudence on the right to adequate housing, the right to water and sanitation, the right to economic, social and cultural development, and the question of remedies for human rights violations.

Following this article is a case note on the recent periodic review of Israel under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in which the UN Human Rights Committee expanded on its housing rights jurisprudence and opined for the first time on violations of the Covenant in the context of denial of access to water and sanitation.

Finally, the case of Dokiæ v. Bosnia and Herzegovina is covered, which deals with a housing restitution claim before the European Court of Human Rights in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Court found a violation of Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

COHRE welcomes any comments, submissions of case notes and articles, and information on new cases and relevant events and publications.

Please feel free to contact us at: quarterly@cohre.org
http://www.cohre.org/news/press-releases/release-of-new-housing-and-esc-rights-quarterly

The National Institutes of Health study of 22 boys aged 14 to 17 found that showing dozens of violent clips appeared to blunt brain responses.

Dr Jordan Grafman said it might make aggression feel more “acceptable”.

However, a UK expert said the reasons behind violence were too complex to be explained by laboratory research.

The effect of violent imagery on young people has been debated from the early days of television, and, more recently, that debate has expanded to include video games.

Various studies have suggested that exposure appears to have an effect on the way that the brain processes emotional responses, yet it is unclear whether this can have a direct impact on behaviour.

The US study, published in the journal Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience (http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/), involved 60 violent scenes from videos being collated, mostly involving street brawling and fist fights.

The violence was ranked “low”, “mild” or “moderate”, and there were no “extreme” scenes.

The response of the boys as they watched the clips was measured in a number of ways.

They were asked to rate whether they thought each clip was more or less aggressive than the one which preceded it, and were brain scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which shows in real time which areas of the brain are active.

In addition, electrodes attached to the fingers detected increasing sweat – a sign of an emotional response.

The longer the boys watched videos, particularly the mild or moderate ones, the less they responded to the violence within them.

In particular, an area of the brain known as the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, thought to be involved in emotional processing, showed less activity to each clip as time went on.

‘Social problem’
Dr Grafman said: “Exposure to the most violent videos inhibits emotional reactions to similar aggressive videos over time and implies that normal adolescents will feel fewer emotions over time as they are exposed to similar videos.”

He said that this could actually produce more violent reactions from the teenager.

“The implications of this include the idea that continued exposure to violent videos will make an adolescent less sensitive to violence, more accepting of violence, and more likely to commit aggressive acts since the emotional component associated with aggression is reduced and normally acts as a brake on aggressive behaviour.”

However, another academic said it was almost impossible to explain violence in these terms.

Professor David Buckingham, the director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, said that violence was a “social problem” with many contributing factors, not simply a matter of looking at how the brain worked.

“The suggestion is that, over a period of time, people can develop a kind of tolerance to these images – but another word for that is just boredom.

“This debate has been going on since before we were all born. In the 19th Century people were panicking about the effect of ‘Penny Dreadfuls’.

“If we are truly interested in violence and aggression, rather than blaming the media for everything wrong in the world, we need to look at what motivates it in real life.”