Remarks by Secretary Clinton: July 2012 - World Population Day

World Population Day

Press Statement

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State

Washington, DC

July 11, 2012

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This year as we mark World Population Day, leaders from around the globe are meeting in London for the Family Planning Summit hosted by the Government of the United Kingdom and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are working to find new ways to support the rights of women and young people to decide whether, when, and how many children to have.

Reproductive rights are among the most basic of human rights. But too often, in too many places, these rights are denied. Millions of women and young people in developing countries don't have access to information to plan their family. They don't have health services and modern methods of contraception. This is not only a violation of their right to decide the number, timing, and spacing of their children, it's also a question of equity as women everywhere should have the same ability to determine this fundamental part of their lives.
Voluntary family planning programs represent more than just an investment in health and human rights. Family planning is one of the most successful development interventions and one of the strongest and most cost-effective investments available. It reduces poverty, and it allows governments to invest in infrastructure, schooling, and healthcare. For over 40 years the U.S. government, through the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been committed to supporting effective and sustainable family planning programs. During this current fiscal year the U.S. contributed over $640 million through USAID for bilateral family planning and reproductive health programs, and $35 million to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the largest multilateral provider of life-saving family planning and reproductive health information and services. The partnership between the U.S. government and UNFPA is critical to advancing sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights for women, men, adolescents and youth around the world.
We must continue to build on this solid foundation and advance solidarity within the international community for the right of women and young people to make decisions about their own bodies. Our efforts are critical to improving the status of women and upholding these basic human rights around the world.

PRN: 2012/1137

World Asthma Day 2012 - NIH statement

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

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For Immediate Release
Monday, April 30, 2012

Contact:
NIAID Office of Communications
301-402-1663

NHLBI Office of Communications
301-496-4236

NIEHS Office of Communications
919-541-0073

NICHD Office of Communications
301-496-5133

NIH statement on World Asthma Day 2012 - May 1, 2012

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
Susan B. Shurin, M.D., Acting Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute,
Linda S. Birnbaum, Ph.D., Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,
Alan E. Guttmacher, M.D., Director, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

On World Asthma Day 2012, we at the National Institutes of Health stand with the Global Initiative for Asthma to renew our dedication to improving the quality of life for the millions of people living with asthma.
Asthma affects more than 230 million people worldwide, including more than 25 million people in the United States. There is no way to prevent, or to cure, asthma. Existing treatments focus on preventing or controlling disease symptoms, such as wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath and coughing. Despite these efforts, each year more than half of children and one-third of adults with asthma in the United States miss school or work because of the disease, approximately 17 million people require medical attention because of an asthma episode, and more than 3,000 asthma-related deaths occur.
Four NIH institutes — the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI); the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS); and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) — support basic and clinical research to understand the causes of asthma and the factors that contribute to its progression. Although each institute has a different focus, we all work together to help develop effective prevention and treatment strategies for the disease.
In March 2012, NIH, together with the Merck Childhood Asthma Network Inc., and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a report that for the first time promotes standardization across asthma clinical studies. Asthma Outcomes in Clinical Research: Report of the Asthma Outcomes Workshop establishes common measures and data-collection methods to enable researchers to compare their results more efficiently. This standardization promises to enhance asthma clinical research and lead to improvements in the quality of asthma care.
In August 2011, NIH held a workshop, The Early Life Origins of Asthma: Strategies for Primary Prevention. Asthma typically begins early in childhood, and the goal of the workshop was to identify specific factors that may predict a person’s risk of developing asthma during the first 1,000 days of life. Such factors include environmental exposures, genetics and events that occur in pregnancy and early infancy. Workshop attendees concluded that understanding the early risk factors for asthma may provide an opportunity to prevent asthma before it begins.
NIH remains committed to working with individuals, families and health care professionals to reduce the worldwide burden of asthma. We commend our investigators who continue to make significant progress in asthma research, and we thank the people who have participated in NIH-sponsored asthma clinical studies, as well as to the nongovernmental organizations that provide support for those affected by this disease. We all share the hope that further research will uncover the causes of asthma so that the disease can one day be effectively prevented.
NIAID supports studies of the immune system's role in the development of asthma and evaluates new approaches to treat and prevent the disease. NHLBI funds a broad asthma research portfolio — including studies on risk factors, mechanisms that influence disease severity, and identifying novel therapies — and the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program, which translates research into clinical practice to improve asthma control and quality of life. NIEHS supports research to understand how exposures to environmental agents trigger asthma, and how we can better prevent, diagnose and treat such exposures. NICHD conducts and supports research on all stages of human development, including research directed to those early life stages when chronic diseases such as asthma might be prevented.
NIAID conducts and supports research — at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide — to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site at http://www.niaid.nih.gov.
Part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) plans, conducts, and supports research related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart, blood vessel, lung, and blood diseases; and sleep disorders. The Institute also administers national health education campaigns on women and heart disease, healthy weight for children, and other topics. NHLBI press releases and other materials are available online at http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov.
The NIEHS supports research to understand the effects of the environment on human health and is part of NIH. For more information on environmental health topics, visit http://www.niehs.nih.gov. Subscribe to one or more of the NIEHS news lists (http://www.niehs.nih.gov/news/releases/newslist/index.cfm) to stay current on NIEHS news, press releases, grant opportunities, training, events, and publications.
About the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD): The NICHD sponsors research on development, before and after birth; maternal, child, and family health; reproductive biology and population issues; and medical rehabilitation. For more information, visit the Institute’s Web site at http://www.nichd.nih.gov. NICHD support was provided through the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act program, which seeks to improve pediatric therapeutics through preclinical and clinical drug trials that lead to drug labeling changes.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.

NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health

World IP Day theme 2012 is" visionary innovators" - World Intellectual Property Day

Message from Director General Francis Gurry

World Intellectual Property Day - April 26, 2012

World Intellectual Property Day is an opportunity to celebrate the contribution that intellectual property makes to innovation and cultural creation – and the immense good that these two social phenomena bring to the world.
It is an opportunity to create greater understanding about the role of intellectual property as a balancing mechanism between the competing interests which surround innovation and cultural creation: the interests of the individual creator and those of society; the interests of the producer and those of the consumer; the interest in encouraging innovation and creation, and the interest in sharing the benefits that derive from them.
This year the theme of World IP Day is visionary innovators – people whose innovations transform our lives. Their impact is enormous. They can, at times, change the way society operates.

Take the Chinese innovator, Cai Lun. He laid the foundations for the manufacturing of paper - a technology that transformed everything, because it enabled the recording of knowledge. Then there was the invention of moveable type. This was taken up in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg with his invention of the printing press, which in turn enabled the dissemination and democratization of knowledge. In our own lifetimes we have witnessed the migration of content to digital format, and the great distributional power for creative works that has been brought about by the Internet and the development of the World Wide Web – for whom we have to thank, among others, Tim Berners Lee.

Behind many extraordinary innovations there are extraordinary human stories. At a time when there were few female scientists, Marie Curie Sklodowska had to struggle to establish herself as a scientist in her own right as opposed to the wife of a scientist. She also struggled as an immigrant working in another community. Her desire to understand led to the fundamental discoveries for which she was awarded two Nobel prizes in two separate disciplines - in physics and in chemistry - the only person ever to have achieved this.
In the arts, innovation revolves around new ways of seeing things. A visionary artist or a composer or a writer is able to show us a different way, a new way of looking at the world. Bob Dylan, for example: he captured what was in the air and transformed several genres of music, essentially bending the genres of folk and rock music. Or consider architects – like Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster - who are transforming urban landscapes, and beautifying our existence in new ways, while at the same time taking into account the need to preserve the environment.

We are dependent upon innovation to move forward. Without innovation we would remain in the same condition as a human species that we are in now. Yet inventions or innovations - in the health field for example – are of relatively little value to society unless they can be used and shared. This is the great policy dilemma. On the one hand, the cost of innovation in modern medicine is enormous. On the other hand, the need for compassion, and the need for sharing useful innovations, is also enormous.

I believe we should look upon intellectual property as an empowering mechanism to address these challenges.
But we have to get the balances right, and that is why it is so important to talk about intellectual property. On this World Intellectual Property Day I would encourage young people in particular to join in the discussion, because intellectual property is, by definition, about change, about the new. It is about achieving the transformations that we want to achieve in society.