Chasing Heroin

Philadelphia reduced chronic homelessness by coordinating outreach through a centralized office and providing immediate access to housing and services such as counseling and drug rehabilitation. San Francisco is studying the model.

One-pill-a-day generic AIDS drugs for poor countries are hard to make because each ingredient is patented by a different pharmaceutical company. The Patent Pool provides a way for companies to donate their intellectual property safely.

While critics argue that Naloxone isn't safe for over-the-counter use, some cities have found success distributing Naloxone to community members to help save lives of addicts who overdose. Naloxone can be administered to help those overdosing survive and jump-start the withdrawal process.

In the developing world, intestinal worms stunt physical and mental growth, drain energy, and can inhibit school work for children. Deworm the World is a global campaign that lobbied the Delhi government to regularly distribute deworming pills to school children. The benefits decrease student absenteeism and increase cost-saving measures.

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

Once-a-day generic AIDS drugs for poor countries are hard to make because each ingredient is patented by a different pharmaceutical company. The Patent Pool provides a way for companies to donate their intellectual property safely.

In San Francisco, 23 percent of homeless people return to the street after transitional housing programs. A New York program gives the mentally ill and homeless individual apartments alongside average New Yorkers and has had an 84 percent retention rate.

One in five seniors reports cutting back on basics like food or heat to afford prescription drugs - for many, cutting back on medicine led to faster health declines, increased hospitalizations and premature death. Sirum, a new nonprofit, was designed to make it easy for institutions to donate medicines with the assurance that they would be safely transported and dispensed to people who needed them.

American humanitarian aid and programs by the United Nations have proved beneficial to equip Middle Eastern refugees with resources for self-settlement outside of camps. The self-settlement model has empowered refugees to become more productive members of society when they return home.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.