Arab World fails to Poverty Alleviation Targets

Doha: The Arab region has not made significant progress in reducing poverty and lags behind other regions in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a UN official here said.
Tarik Al Alami, officer in charge at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, said the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the achievement of universal primary education and the promotion of gender equality and women empowerment represent still major challenges in some of the region's least developed countries. "The Arab region as a whole has not made significant progress in reducing income poverty," he said addressing a UN conference on Financing Development to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, which concluded in Doha on Monday evening

Source:http://gulfnews.com

Povert and Diseases

It is a widely accepted fact that vaccines are among the safest and most cost-effective ways available to prevent disease and improve the overall level of health in a population. That fact balances on two uncertain variables: Has science found a vaccine effective against a given disease? If so, can that vaccine be delivered to an entire vulnerable population?
Global poverty might be significantly reduced if the answers to those two questions were “yes” when it comes to a certain class of ancient diseases. Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) disproportionately affect people of the poorest nations, while they are almost unheard of in the industrialized world. But there is a growing recognition that an invigorated effort to prevent these diseases and their resulting disability and dysfunction could have an enormous impact on improving the quality of life and alleviating poverty in many nations.
Source:http:// america.gov/st/scitech-english