More than one in three adults in WHO’s European Region aged 30-79 has hypertension, or high blood pressure – and a key factor is excess consumption of salt, according to a new WHO report published this week. The report “Action on Salt and Hypertension,” calls on governments to take “mandatory” measures to reduce the public’s […] Continue reading ->
The latest draft of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) pandemic agreement, which was sent out to member states on Wednesday (15 May), shows just how far the talks still have to go. Health Policy Watch obtained a copy of the draft agreement, which we are sharing on our paywall-free site: READ: Latest Pandemic Agreement Draft, […] Continue reading ->
In a ground-breaking move, global leaders on Tuesday made an unprecedented financial pledge to tackle the dirty cooking fuels crisis, which silently claims millions of lives across Africa. The Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, chaired jointly by the leaders of Tanzania and Norway, alongside the African Development Bank, secured financial commitments from governments, development […] Continue reading ->
Heatwaves across Asia this April that sent temperatures soaring above 40℃ were made hotter and more likely by human-induced climate change, according to an analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group. The group has done more than 70 studies on a range of extreme weather events […] Continue reading ->
It’s one of the world’s oldest health technologies with recorded use by the Greeks and Romans – and modern eye glasses appearing on the noses of Venetian monks and scholars as early as the 13th century. And yet only about 36% of the estimated 1.25 billion people who need corrective eyewear for common distance vision […] Continue reading ->
Researchers have developed a new all-in-one vaccine aimed at priming the body to respond to a range of different strains of coronaviruses, including the ones not yet known. The researchers from Cambridge, MIT and CalTech published their findings recently in Nature Nanotechnology. Their vaccine was successfully tested on mice and will likely enter human clinical trials […] Continue reading ->
A $3-million “educational” deal between tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) and Medscape, a medical education provider for healthcare professionals, has been abandoned after the BMJ and The Examination exposed it last month. The deal involved a PMI grant to Medscape to fund continuing medical education (CME) accredited courses on smoking cessation for doctors and […] Continue reading ->
Ghana outlawed alcohol promotion by celebrities back in 2015, but a music promoter is challenging government in court to fight for his ‘right’ to advertise various brands. Predatory commercial exploitation that encourages harmful activities has been identified by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the two main crises threatening the health […] Continue reading ->
More than 4.5 billion people lack access to essential health services, while globally 60 million lives are lost due to failures of health care systems, translating into a 15% loss of global GDP. Yet the consequences in terms of poor health and economies are preventable through increased investments in nurses who deliver upwards of 80% […] Continue reading ->
Despite the huge human and economic cost of COVID-19, over two years of negotiations and substantial diplomatic pressure, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) failed to reach consensus on a pandemic agreement by Friday (10 May), the last scheduled day of negotiations before the upcoming 77th World Health Assembly (WHA). But the […] Continue reading ->