High-level WHO official Emer Cooke has been nominated as the head of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the critical regulatory body for European health product approvals. Cooke, an Irish national with 30 years’ experience in international regulatory affairs, is currently the Director of the WHO’s Regulation and Prequalification Department since 2016. In this role, she […] Continue reading ->
Germany has pledged an unprecedented € 500 million to the World Health Organization for 2020, making this the “highest amount” ever provided by the country, said Jens Spahn, German Minister of Health at an impromptu WHO press briefing on Thursday. The German contribution, equal to about 20% of WHO’s annual budget, plugs the major funding […] Continue reading ->
24 June 2020 (Cape Town, South Africa) – From today, South Africans volunteers will join thousands of people in the UK, US and Brazil in testing a COVID-19 candidate vaccine developed by the Oxford Jenner Institute. The South African Ox1Cov-19 Vaccine VIDA-Trial will involve 2,000 people, including 50 people living with HIV, in a collaboration […] Continue reading ->
To mark Olympic Day, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched a partnership with the WHO and the UN to inspire healthy behavior around the world, announced a WHO statement on Tuesday. As COVID-19 upends daily routines and lives around the world, we need to pay attention to our own mental and physical health and help […] Continue reading ->
New digital technologies such as smartphone apps and localization data have been used to model and monitor the COVID-19 pandemic. But along with hopes that these tools will help curb the pandemic, their use by both authoritarian and democratic governments can invoke images of dystopian surveillance. These tensions and more will be discussed Wednesday at […] Continue reading ->
In the past forty years, the world has done “really well” on improving food availability. But meanwhile, diets have shifted in “very bad”, unhealthy directions. Even people who can afford nutritious food are opting for junk food instead, said Steve Godfrey, of the Geneva-based food and nutrition NGO, GAIN, at a conference on food systems […] Continue reading ->
About 1.7 billion people, or 22% of the world’s population, has at least one underlying health condition that puts them at increased risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19, according to a new modelling study published in Lancet Global Health. Based on the new assessment, about 4% of the world’s population, in total, is at […] Continue reading ->
A major clinical trial ongoing in the United Kingdom has fingered dexamethasone, a common anti-inflammatory drug used to treat arthritis and asthma, as the “first” treatment to actually reduce mortality among COVID-19 patients – by as much as one-third. The preliminary findings were announced by the trial’s principal investigators, Martin Landray and Peter Horby, both […] Continue reading ->
Dogs could be trained to discern COVID-19 in humans, reported researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Medical Detection Dogs and Durham University in a podcast last Wednesday. The study has received £500,000 from the UK government and hopes to be able to train dogs for rapid virus detection in airports […] Continue reading ->
As the COVID-19 pandemic spawns increased antibiotic use all over the world, more drug-resistant microbes are bound to bite us back , said Dr. Tedros at a WHO press conference on Monday. The repercussions on disease treatment and deaths will be severe, given that the world is running out of effective ways to treat antimicrobial […] Continue reading ->