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 ->
As many as 65 million people in over a dozen Southern and Eastern African countries from Mozambique to Ethiopia are facing unprecedented challenges with food security, extreme weather events and conflict, UN officials say. The crises disproportionately affect women, who are already in a more vulnerable situation due to their gender, said Lydia Zigomo, UN […] Continue reading ->
Most H5N1 infections spreading through US dairy cattle and other animal populations are likely going undetected despite stepped up surveillance by the US Department of Agriculture, Michael Osterholm, director of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), told Health Policy Watch on Wednesday. Osterholm spoke as a growing number of infectious experts were […] Continue reading ->
A new programme aiming at providing 1.2 million rapid cholera diagnostic tests has been launched in 14 African and Asian countries.  “Routine use of diagnostics will bolster cholera surveillance in impacted countries, and must be leveraged to better target vaccination efforts, which play a critical role in multisectoral cholera prevention and control programmes,” said Aurélia […] Continue reading ->
The number of children who died before their fifth birthday has dropped to 2.9 million in 2022, reaching a historic low, according to the latest estimates of under-5 mortality released today by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).  And since 2000, the global under-five mortality rate has declined by more […] Continue reading ->