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 ->
The deadliest and longest Ebola outbreak in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has finally ended, the Health Minister Longondo Eteni jubilantly announced on Thursday. The outbreak, concentrated in Ituri and North Kivu provinces in the northeastern DRC, infected 3470 people, and caused 2287 deaths. The end of the nearly two-year long […] 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 ->
Africa must tackle both the climate and coronavirus crises at the same time, according to a new paper published by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), joining other regional agencies such as the European Commission and the World Health Organization in calling for a “green recovery” from COVID-19. The paper, Climate Change and Development […] 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 ->
The World Health Organization has reported a record increase in global coronavirus cases on Sunday, with the total rising by 183,020 in a 24-hour period. The number of new daily COVID-19 cases has risen each day for the last three days, and more than 9 million people have contracted the virus around the world. It […] Continue reading ->
19 June 2020 (Ibadan, Nigeria) – We are at war with COVID-19, a war we must win to survive, said Dr John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control, on Friday at a workshop on “Home-Grown Solutions to the COVID-19 Health Crisis,” hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. Since the continent’s first confirmed […] Continue reading ->
As the world hit a sober new milestone of reporting more than 150,000 new COVID-19 cases in one day, another slow burning crisis has also reached new heights. There are now nearly 80 million refugees around the world, making more than 1% of the world’s population forcibly displaced by the end of 2019, according to […] Continue reading ->