At The Europe Foundation, we work to build hope in some of the world's most impoverished and forgotten communities. Our health programs prevent the suffering of millions of people around the world from diseases often ignored by others. Many of the most severe afflictions are entirely preventable. Yet people living in developing nations die or are disabled because they do not have access to the services they need to treat their illness or avoid infection entirely. Every day our experts show people how they can take steps to transform their own lives.
Europe Foundation's commitment to improving global health includes confronting global health challenges through improving the quality, availability, and use of essential health services. The Europe Foundation's objective is to improve global health, including child, maternal, and reproductive health, and reduce abortion and disease, especially HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.
AREAS OF HEALTH
Environmental Health
Europe Foundation aims to provide global leadership in the development, implementation, and promotion of new and improved interventions to reduce illness and death in children caused by environmental factors.
Environmental factors often play a role in death and disease among young children, especially the leading infectious diseases that affect children – acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malaria. Acute lower respiratory infections, mainly pneumonia, are the leading cause of death among children under age 5 and are closely associated with exposure to indoor smoke from cooking with biomass fuels. Diarrhea, another leading killer of children that accounts for 15 to 18 percent of child deaths annually, is largely caused by unsafe water, inadequate sanitation, and poor hygiene. Malaria, which is responsible for up to 2.5 million annual deaths, mostly among young children, has environmental dimensions as well.
In its environmental health programs, Europe Foundation aims to provide global leadership in developing, implementing, and promoting up-to-date interventions to prevent illness and death associated with environmental factors. About 1.6 million children under age 5 died last year from diarrheal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation in developing countries, and millions more were put at significant risk of exposure to water-borne infections, such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Household-level or point-of-use (POU) chlorination is one approach that has been tested on a national scale and has a demonstrated public health impact on diarrhea at a low cost, allowing for wide coverage.
Family Planning
Saving Lives, Protecting Health
Enabling couples to determine whether, when, and how often to have children is vital to safe motherhood and healthy families. Voluntary family planning has profound health, economic, and social benefits for families and communities:
- Protecting the health of women by reducing high-risk pregnancies
- Protecting the health of children by allowing sufficient time between pregnancies
- Fighting HIV/AIDS through providing information, counseling, and access to male and female condoms
- Reducingabortions
- Supporting women's rights and opportunities for education, employment, and full participation in society
- Protecting the environment by stabilizing population growth
Family Planning Strategy
Europe Foundationadvances and supports voluntary family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. To achieve this objective:
Exercises global leadership in policy, advocacy and services
Generates, organizes and disseminates knowledge
Provides support to the field for implementing effective programs
Health Systems
Europe Foundation's health systems strengthening program provides support to ensure that developing country health systems are effective, efficient, and equitable. A health system strengthening is a continuous process of implementing changes in policies and management arrangements within the health sector.
The Foundation Support in Health Systems Strengthening
Europe Foundation's health systems strengthening program provides support to ensure that developing country health systems are effective, efficient, and equitable. Working health systems are vital to ensure widespread use of effective health measures.
Fundamentally, a working health system improves health. It delivers the right volume and distribution of services using good provider-client interactions. It operates at the community, local, and national levels. A working health system uses effective organizations and processes. It engages households, governments, the private sector, donors, and global initiatives. It reaches priority groups, including the poor, women, children, urban and rural residents, and the acutely and chronically ill. It responds to people’s needs, protects them from risk, and operates efficiently. It combats priority health issues such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and maternal, child, and reproductive health. It works fairly, responsively, and effectively, and offers choice. It employs appropriate incentives and is characterized by strong political will and a viable vision.
Health systems strengthening is a continuous process of implementing changes in policies and management arrangements within the health sector. This process, whether guided by individual governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or donor agencies, is under way in many countries as their populations’ needs change and grow.
HIV/AIDS
Right now, there are 33.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. More than 90% live in developing countries, where access to treatment is much more limited than in the developed world.
Why HIV/AIDS?
Every day, 6,000 people under the age of 25 are newly infected with HIV/AIDS. Every hour, 40 children die of AIDS.
In the developing world, more teachers die every year of AIDS than can be trained to take their place. And more than half of hospital beds in some Sub-Saharan African countries are frequently occupied with AIDS patients, crowding out care for others. Virtually all social and economic goals in the developing world will be undermined if AIDS treatment is not made available to the more than six million people who are currently struggling to survive without it.
A Global Pandemic
Today, there are:
- 33 million adults and children living with HIV/AIDS
- 2.5 million new infections in 2007
- 2.1 million deaths due to HIV/AIDS in 2007, including 330,000 children
While numbers cannot express the devastation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, they help paint a picture of the grim impact the disease is having across the world. Since 2002, AIDS has been the leading cause of death worldwide among people ages 15-59. Women comprise half of those living with HIV/AIDS, and mother-to-child transmission accounts for more than 90% of all HIV infections in infants and children. Sub- Saharan Africa is the most affected region in the world, with 22.5 million people living with HIV. South and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and East Asia also continue to be hard hit by the pandemic.
Thanks to the joint efforts of NGOs, donors and governments, progress is being made. For example, success in reducing the cost of lifesaving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs has helped to ensure that by the end of 2007 approximately four million people living with HIV are receiving treatment, a 46% increase over the number of people on treatment one year earlier.
Still, only 31% of people in need of ARV treatment in low- and middle-income countries currently have access to it, and 33% of HIV-positive pregnant women have access to the treatment they need to prevent transmission of the disease to their newborn children.
Our Approach
Europe foundation applies a unique business-oriented approach to changing the market for medicines and diagnostics and supporting developing countries to scale up HIV/AIDS care and treatment programs through three main programs:
- Access Programs: Europe foundation's Access Programs work with generic pharmaceutical companies and other suppliers to reduce the cost of lifesaving antiretroviral medicines, testing and diagnostic equipment, malaria treatment, and nutrition. An estimated six million people living with HIV/AIDS are in immediate need of treatment they are not currently receiving. Yet, the high cost of these medications has historically prevented many developing countries from being able to purchase and distribute them, jeopardizing the health of entire populations.
- Major Programs: Europe foundation's major programs specialize in specific areas of need, including pediatric treatment, increasing access to care and treatment in rural areas, strengthening countries' human resource capacity for health, and preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS from mother to child,
- In-Country Programs: To ensure that governments can aggressively expand access to HIV/AIDS care and treatment ,Europe foundation assists national governments and their ministries of health to develop sound health care policies around HIV/AIDS, strengthen management capacity, and implement cost-effective and comprehensive national responses to this epidemic.
In order to ensure that governments can aggressively and sustainably expand access to care and treatment for HIV/AIDS, Europe foundation assists country governments and their Ministries of Health to develop sound health care policies, strengthen management capacity, and develop cost-effective, practical systems. Europe foundation's role varies by country, ranging from the provision of targeted technical assistance to building better-functioning health systems and assisting in the crafting of national policies and practices. Europe foundation is building better-functioning health systems in partnership with 22 national governments in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Why Malaria?
Malaria affects an estimated 300-500 million people worldwide each year, resulting in 1.5-2.7 million deaths yearly, the majority of whom are children. In addition to the disease's direct impact on individuals and their families, malaria has been shown to have a significant impact on the economic growth of affected populations, costing Africa an estimated $12 billion in lost GDP growth every year.
Malaria is the single greatest killer of African children, claiming the lives of roughly 1 million young children every year and hindering the development of many who survive. Despite a surge in funding and attention from the global community in recent years, the majority of African families are not benefitting from the tools necessary to stop malaria, such as bed nets and effective medicines, because of a lack of access or efficient use.
Europe foundation's Approach
Unlike some diseases, malaria can be cured quickly and fully with over-the-counter medicine and without a doctor's visit. Over the last 20 years, however, the malaria parasite has grown resistant to many of the leading treatments sold at local drug shops. Effective alternatives, known as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), are now available as an alternative to the ineffective medicine, but remain too expensive for many patients to afford; costing $10 - for one treatment of medicine that can treat the disease - in communities where most people make less than $2 per day.
Infectious Diseases
The Initiative focuses on prevention, treatment, and control of new and re-emerging infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, while building surveillance capacity and addressing antimicrobial resistance.
Reducing the Threat of Infectious Diseases
The initiative focuses on preventing diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, while simultaneously strengthening the treatment and control programs that exist in the health care system and focusing on cross-cutting issues of building surveillance capacity and addressing antimicrobial resistance.
This initiative builds on The Europe Foundation's long-standing efforts to address acute respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, vaccine-preventable diseases (including polio), and malaria in children.
Europe Foundation's infectious disease initiative targets a number of key priority areas:
Development and implementation of strategies and interventions to understand, contain, and respond to the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance
Sustainable reduction in incidence of tuberculosis among key populations in selected countries
Sustainable reduction of deaths due to malaria and incidence of other infectious diseases of major public health importance among key populations in selected countries
Treatment, control, and in some cases, elimination of the seven neglected tropical diseases that can be targeted by providing safe and effective drug treatments to individuals in affected communities.
Improvement in the capacity of selected countries to obtain and use good quality data for surveillance and effective response to infectious diseases
Maternal and Child Health
Europe Foundation is committed to improving the health and well-being of children and families. Immunization, polio eradication, nutrition, diarrhea and pneumonia care, and maternal and neonatal health are fundamental components of The Europe Foundation's maternal and child health program.
Building a Brighter Future
Europe Foundation is committed to improving the health and well-being of children and families in the developing world. The Europe Foundation assistance is also instrumental in other areas of child and maternal health, such as the fight against HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases.
A mother’s health profoundly affects the health and well-being of her children. While maternal mortality remains unacceptably high throughout the developing world, a number of The Europe Foundation -assisted countries have achieved significant reductions in maternal deaths from pregnancy-related causes. Europe Foundation's approach to improving maternal health and the health of newborn children includes community involvement, evidence-based interventions (interventions that, after rigorous testing, have documented proof of their effectiveness), and compassionate high-quality services. Key interventions such as iron supplementation, malaria treatment, safe and clean delivery, and treatment of obstetric and newborn complications are improving the health outcomes for mothers and infants around the world.
Nutrition
Malnutrition remains the world’s most serious health problem and the single biggest contributor to child mortality. More than one-half of the 9.7 million child deaths worldwide each year are linked to the effects of under nutrition. Undernourished children are more likely to die than their well-nourished counterparts.
Under nutrition weakens the immune response, which increases the frequency, severity, duration, and mortality of common childhood illness like diarrhea, measles, and pneumonia. The physical and cognitive effects of under nutrition in the first two years of life are irreversible, leading to impaired educational performance in childhood and reduced economic productivity in adulthood. The nutritional status of a pregnant woman is a deciding factor in maternal and neonatal survival.
Nearly one-third of children in the developing world are chronically malnourished, and 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. Vitamin A deficiency affects millions of children, impairing their immune systems and causing blindness, early morbidity, and mortality. Iron deficiency is the primary cause of anemia, which is responsible for 22 percent of maternal deaths and 24 percent of perinatal deaths. Improving and maintaining good nutritional status is an integral part of increasing maternal and child survival and reducing poverty.
Malnutrition alone kills, but it also exacerbates the burden of infectious diseases. Under nutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies, increases susceptibility to malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS, and other infectious diseases and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality from these diseases. Thus, improving nutrition interventions is vital to the success of infectious disease programs.
Europe Foundation expands evidence-based approaches to nutrition and supports innovative new approaches that will increase access and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable populations. The Europe Foundation’s strategic approach focuses on preventing malnutrition through a comprehensive package of maternal, infant, and young child nutrition programs; combating micronutrient deficiencies by targeted supplementation to vulnerable groups and food fortification; managing moderate or severe malnutrition through community-based programs; providing nutritional care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS; and improving nutritional outcomes in food security programs.