Supporting 100 million tobacco users to quit, increasing exclusive breastfeeding for babies under six months to 48% globally, and helping 63 countries to build climate-resilient health systems are some of the recent successes of the World Health Organization (WHO), said Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Addressing the opening of the WHO’s executive board (EB) […] Continue reading ->
An influential sub-committee of the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Executive Board (EB) has greenlighted a proposal by the cash-strapped global body’s Secretariat to seek additional funds via a replenishment fund, that would be filled by voluntary donations from both member states and philanthropies recruited at high-profile events. In its report published on Monday just as […] Continue reading ->
In the past year alone, women’s use of contraception in 82 low- and lower-middle-income countries has averted more than 141 million unintended pregnancies, 29 million unsafe abortions and almost 150,000 maternal deaths. This is according to the global family planning partnership, FP2030, which released its 2022 Measurement Report on Wednesday. Today, 371 million women of […] Continue reading ->
While the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergency committee on COVID-19 will decide this week whether the virus still constitutes a global health emergency, the body’s Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is “very concerned” about the pandemic. “While I will not pre-empt the advice of the emergency committee, I remain very concerned by the situation in […] Continue reading ->
The new Brazilian government under President Lula da Silva intends to propose that the World Health Organization (WHO) addresses the health of indigenous people systematically, including by training indigenous health workers. Santiago Alcazar, the former head of WHO in Brazil, told a discussion convened by the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2) on Monday that Brazil […] Continue reading ->
Although some experts predict that the past weekend’s celebrations of China’s lunar new year will hasten the spread of COVID-19 to rural parts of the country, one of the country’s top scientists has disputed this. Wu Zunyou, China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention’s chief epidemiologist, downplayed the risk on the Chinese social media platform, […] Continue reading ->
Proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR) focus on improving accountability and compliance, according to Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Speaking at the start of last week’s meeting of the IHR review committee, Tedros said that he expected a report from the committee, which is considering the amendments, by […] Continue reading ->
The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), […] Continue reading ->