Only a quarter of countries worldwide have a national plan to support people with dementia and their families, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ‘Global status report on the public health response to dementia’ released on Thursday. More than 55 million people globally are living with dementia and the number is estimated to increase […] Continue reading ->
Monkey Pox, Lassa Fever, Yellow Fever, Cerebrospinal Meningitis, and COVID-19 are some of the epidemics that Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu has addressed as head of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). Now, however, Ihekweazu’s repertoire of disease experience is about to expand exponentially, following his appointment as the head of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) […] Continue reading ->
The only thing that moves faster than viruses is data, experts noted at Wednesday’s launch of the World Health Organization (WHO) Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin. The aim of the hub is to work with partners to “create the tools and data needed to enable countries to prepare, detect and respond to […] Continue reading ->
As the European Union (EU) announced on Tuesday that 70% of its adults had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, it recommended reimposing restrictions on travellers from the US, Israel, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. On 8 June, the six were included on an EU Council list of “safe countries” identified for the relaxing of […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) has not listed the SARS-CoV2 C.1.2 variant discovered in South Africa as either a variant of interest or of concern, and it does not appear to be increasing in circulation. This follows an alert about the variant that was issued on Monday by the South African National Institute for Communicable […] Continue reading ->
In the midst of the tragedy and turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is gratifying to see work continuing in Africa to find new ways of fighting malaria, a very old disease that has been a formidable foe for thousands of years and still kills 400,000 people every year, most of them African children […] Continue reading ->
When Algerian service stations stopped providing leaded petrol last month, this marked the successful end to a global campaign to eliminate this “major threat to human and planetary health”. Celebrating the official end of the use of leaded petrol on Monday, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres said that when the global campaign to eliminate the […] Continue reading ->
Although the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued technical guidelines for the development of digital COVID-19 ‘vaccine certificates’, it has stressed that these should not be a prerequisite for international travel. At the release of the technical guidelines last Friday (27 August), the WHO stated that it “does not support the requirement of proof of […] Continue reading ->
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) pose a threat to more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, making them one of the biggest health problems in the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, these diseases are found “at the end of the road” in the most rural and poor communities where an estimated 600 million people are at risk […] Continue reading ->
The number of adults around the world with hypertension has almost doubled from 650 million to 1.28 billion in 30 years – and nearly half these people don’t know they have hypertension, a new study published in The Lancet has found. The study, which is the first comprehensive global analysis of trends in hypertension prevalence, […] Continue reading ->