Hours after the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed, causing widespread floods, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that cholera and other waterborne diseases posed a risk, while the humanitarian agency CARE warned of landmine explosions. The Kakhovka dam is located on river Dnipro in the city of Nova Kakhovka, in the Kherson region of […] Continue reading ->
Member states have been given nine days to comment on the ‘Zero draft of the Political Declaration on Pandemic Preparedness and Response, due to be adopted at the United Nations (UN) High-Level Meeting (HLM) on 20 September – with insiders describing the draft as “underwhelming”. The HLM is essential for boosting waning political commitment to […] Continue reading ->
New York City is choking on smoke from hundreds of wildfires ravaging Canadian forests. The sun rose ominously over the city on Tuesday morning, a fiery red orb obscured by the poisonous fog — as if the sky was sending a message: the climate crisis is in code red. This eerie reminder of the need […] Continue reading ->
China will report around 11 million COVID-19 cases per week in June in its second major outbreak, data research firm Airfinity predicts. The current outbreak is caused by the XBB variant of the virus. This outbreak will be much smaller than the numbers reported during the first wave in late 2022, immediately after the country […] Continue reading ->
The high cost of energy and negligible progress in rolling out electricity in sub-Saharan Africa since 2010 are some of the factors behind why 2.3 billion people are still reliant on cooking fuels like coal and firewood that harm their health. Meanwhile, the transition to renewable energy has been too slow – and there has […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) is establishing a global digital health certification network based on the European Union’s COVID-19 certificate to “facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from ongoing and future health threats, including pandemics”, the body announced on Monday. The EU’s digital COVID-19 certificate (DCC), which recorded vaccinations, tests and recovery, […] Continue reading ->
A zero-draft of a global, legally binding instrument on plastic pollution will be released before the next meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) in November. This follows last week’s second INC meeting in Paris attended by delegates from 169 Member States and over 900 observers from NGOs. “I am encouraged by progress at INC-2 […] Continue reading ->
A new collaboration called the “Global Health Policy Lab” (GHPL) aims to develop digital tools that strengthen the available global capacity to identify, benchmark, disseminate and assess the impact of relevant health laws and policies within the field of global health. The lab, a partnership between the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab and the Charité […] Continue reading ->
Electronic cigarettes are a trap to recruit children, not part of harm reduction, said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) at the global body’s weekly media conference. “When the tobacco industry introduced electronic cigarettes and vaping, one narrative they really tried to sell is that this is part of […] Continue reading ->
Tanzania declared the end of its Marburg Virus Disease outbreak on Friday, two months after the outbreak was first detected in the north-western Kagera region. Nine cases (eight confirmed and one probable) and six deaths were recorded in the outbreak, which was declared on 21 March after laboratory analysis confirmed that the cause of deaths […] Continue reading ->