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(Burness Communications) In the midst of a drought-induced food crisis affecting millions in the Horn of Africa, an innovative insurance program for poor livestock keepers is making its first payouts today, providing compensation for some 650 insured herders in northern Kenya's vast Marsabit District who have lost up to a third of their animals.

(Burness Communications) A broad panel of leaders representing health care, academic medicine, and physician education today called for sweeping reforms in the content and format of US graduate medical education to ensure that physicians are trained more effectively and efficiently to meet public needs.

(Burness Communications) A group of 26 of the nation's leaders in medicine, health care, patient safety, and research today called for sweeping changes in the design, supervision and financing of US hospital residency care programs to protect patients from serious, preventable medical errors, and end dangerously long work hours for physicians in training.

(Burness Communications) The PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative announced today that it has entered into a collaboration with Dutch biopharmaceutical company Crucell N.V. and GlaxoSmithKline.

This collaboration is aimed at developing a 2nd-generation vaccine against malaria -- a deadly disease that kills close to 800,000 people annually, most of them young children under age five in Africa.

(Burness Communications) A new program that provides grants to bioscientists working to improve food production and environmental management in eastern Africa was launched today at the Nairobi headquarters of the International Livestock Research Institute.

(Burness Communications) As agricultural leaders across the globe look for ways to increase investments in agriculture to boost world food production, experts in African livestock farming are meeting in Addis Ababa this week to deliberate on ways to get commercialized farm production, access to markets, innovations, gender issues and pro-poor policies right for Africa's millions of small-scale livestock farmers and herders.

(Burness Communications) Over 700 prominent agriculture researchers, policy makers and development experts from around the world along with the President of Burkina Faso and ministers of Agriculture, Science and Foreign Affairs from several African and European countries are gathering July 19-24 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, for the 5th African Agriculture Science week and General Assembly of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.

(Burness Communications) The Forest Trust announced today that a Chinese factory has for the first time produced plywood whose origins have been verified as 100 percent legal, the result of the nonprofit TFT's partnership with a United Kingdom wood products company and the willing cooperation of a Chinese plywood maker, a group of Chinese poplar farmers, and a Malaysian timber producer and forest concession owner.

(Burness Communications) The Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, today announced more than $1 million in grants to six projects that will conduct health impact assessments at the state and local levels.

(Burness Communications) The Forest Trust (TFT) announced today that Swiss consumer goods company Nestlé has agreed to a plan that will rid its products of palm oil purchased from suppliers whose activities are destroying vulnerable tropical forests in the developing world.