The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on how human health and ‘planetary health’ are inextricably linked – through deforestation, urbanization and climate change, all of which increase future disease risks. This year’s Geneva Health Forum explores these and other critical global health challenges, as well as emerging solutions,  just ahead of the World Health Assembly.    […] Continue reading ->
Speaking in her car from an undisclosed location somewhere in war-torn Ukraine, Yana Teerleva, head of TB in the country’s Ministry of Health, lamented the destruction that she is witnessing every day in hospitals and clinics – including the shelling of three huge dispensaries where the country had stockpiled sufficient TB medications for the remainder […] 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 ->
Two years after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on 11 March 2022, the developed world’s long-time fixation on the SARS-CoV2 virus, which has killed 6 million people, has suddenly shifted away from health to the war in Ukraine and sharply rising geopolitical tensions.  Meanwhile high-income countries have dropped […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) has managed to get the 36 metric  tonnes of medical supplies it flew into Poland late last week into the western Ukrainian town of Lviv, some 80 km from the Polish border.  More WHO team members arrived today to expand the team already on the ground in #Ukraine.While travelling from […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization said it had released $3.5 million to support delivery of urgent medical supplies to the people of Ukraine, after Russia invaded the country on three fronts simultaneously early Thursday morning. Meanwhile, WHO’s European Regional Office called for an end to hostilities saying: “any further escalation could result in a humanitarian catastrophe […] Continue reading ->
The United States will support Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a second term as head of the World Health Organization – a move that is largely symbolic insofar as Tedros is running unopposed in the elections, scheduled for the 75th World Health Assembly, 22-28 May.  Although over a dozen countries in Europe and elsewhere lined […] Continue reading ->
In the wake of the chaotic, and often failed, global response to the COVID pandemic, the United States is not waiting for an elaborate international treaty or convention on future pandemics, which will take years to negotiate.  Instead, Washington wants to fast track a series of nitty-gritty, but far- reaching changes in the existing International […] Continue reading ->
ISLAMABAD – The timing couldn’t have been worse.  On the same day that Bill Gates, completed his maiden visit to Pakistan to cheer on the country’s progress towards polio eradication, WHO and Malawi health authorities announced that a small child thousands of kilometers away in Malawi had been ill with polio – infected by a […] Continue reading ->