Last week, stakeholders gathered in Bangkok for the first-ever Regional Congress on Self-Care in the Asia-Pacific to discuss the importance of interventions and policies within the region. Throughout the proceedings, it was gratifying to see how increasing awareness and support for self-care is resonating regionally – as well as at national and global levels. WHO […] Continue reading ->
A UN High Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) pledged to reduce by 10% deaths from drug resistant bacteria over the next six years in a new declaration on the “silent, slow-motion pandemic” that could kill some 39 million more people by 2050. Thursday’s milestone statement, the first on the topic since 2016, also pledges […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization and UNICEF have appealed for ‘humanitarian pauses’ in the grinding Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip in August and September to facilitate a massive polio booster campaign – as three suspected polio cases were being investigated by a Jordanian laboratory. The appeal came as the entire region see-saws between the possibility […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) aims to begin a major polio booster vaccination campaign in Gaza next week with the dispatch of over 1.2 million vaccines to the war-torn Palestinian enclave – against a backdrop of spiralling regional tensions.   WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned again on Wednesday that the presence of polio virus […] Continue reading ->
Hurricane Beryl, which has destroyed homes and infrastructure in large parts of the eastern Caribbean, is the first first-ever Category 4 hurricane recorded in the region in June – and a portend of devastating changes in weather patterns. It also underscores the need for urgent international assistance to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to strengthen […] Continue reading ->
Fourteen months into its devastating civil war, one-half of Sudan’s 25.6 million population faces levels of food security ranked as “crisis,” emergency, or “catastrophic,” according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis.  The IPC analysis of Gaza also found that a “high and sustained risk” of famine persists across the entire occupied […] Continue reading ->