Children and adolescents diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) will benefit from a set of new guidelines that aim to shorten the treatment plan, expand preventative care, and introduce better diagnostic testing and treatments. The World Health Organisation (WHO) today released a new set of ‘game-changer’ guidelines where children and adolescents with non-severe forms of drug-susceptible TB […] Continue reading ->
Mental health practitioners worldwide are warning of a massive wave of pandemic-related mental health issues that many countries are ill-equipped to address. On Monday, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Europe office and the government of Greece launched a new European programme to strengthen and improve the quality of mental health services for children and adolescents. […] Continue reading ->
Malawi is launching a mass vaccination campaign against wild poliovirus type 1, which is to extend to 23 million children across five southern African countries, WHO said on Friday. The campaign, to kick off Sunday, follows Malawi’s declaration of a polio outbreak on 17 February – three months after the first polio virus case in […] Continue reading ->
UN Environment has joined a three-way alliance with the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Animal Health Organization (OIE), and WHO to advance “One-Health” solutions to both ecosystem degradation and pandemic threats, leaders of the four agencies said on Friday. The statement followed a meeting this week of the Tripartite FAO, WHO and OIE partnership […] Continue reading ->
In honour of World Oral Health Day, 20 March, three leading voices from the World Dental Federation highlight the unexpected linkages between the health of your mouth and that of the planet. It will come as a surprise to most people that the healthcare sector has a significant environmental impact. Healthcare systems are responsible for […] Continue reading ->
From patients lying in the parking lots of hospitals, in the back seats of cars suffocating as their family members searched frantically for oxygen in India during its second wave of COVID last year, to the inability to receive emergency care amidst constant bombing and shelling in current war-torn Ukraine, global health experts and leaders […] Continue reading ->
A Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announcement Thursday that it has signed agreements with 35 companies to manufacture generic versions of Pfizer’s life-saving COVID-19 Paxlovid treatment for distribution in 95 low- and middle-income countries came fire almost immediately from medicines access groups as too little, too late. The MPP-brokered sublicences follow on from an agreement between […] Continue reading ->
A month after a fourth dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines was administered to hundreds of people in an Israeli clinical trial, authors of the new study on the extra booster say it provides “little protection, if any, from infection by COVID-19 among vaccinated young and healthy individuals in comparison to those vaccinated with […] Continue reading ->
Attacks on health facilities appear to be part of a deliberate war strategy in Ukraine and other recent conflicts, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) health emergencies programme. The WHO has verified 43 attacks on Ukrainian health facilities since Russia’s invasion on 24 February – and it expects further attacks as […] Continue reading ->
The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Director-Genera, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has “warmly welcomed” the breakthrough reached this week over a waiver on intellectual property for the production of COVID-19 vaccines. “This is a major step forward and this compromise is the result of many long and difficult hours of negotiations. But we are not there yet. […] Continue reading ->