The World Health Organization’s Emergency Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic and Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus both agree: the event continues to constitute a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). The UN health agency agreed on Monday that ending the state of international public health emergency over the coronavirus would be premature even […] Continue reading ->
The first three weeks of 2023 were encouraging for the African continent’s fight against COVID-19. With cases down 97% year-on-year since the same period in 2022, hospitalizations for severe illness and deaths from the virus decreased significantly, the World Health Organization’s African Regional Office said. “For the first time since COVID-19 shook our lives, January […] Continue reading ->
While the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergency committee on COVID-19 will decide this week whether the virus still constitutes a global health emergency, the body’s Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is “very concerned” about the pandemic. “While I will not pre-empt the advice of the emergency committee, I remain very concerned by the situation in […] Continue reading ->
The new Brazilian government under President Lula da Silva intends to propose that the World Health Organization (WHO) addresses the health of indigenous people systematically, including by training indigenous health workers. Santiago Alcazar, the former head of WHO in Brazil, told a discussion convened by the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2) on Monday that Brazil […] Continue reading ->
Although some experts predict that the past weekend’s celebrations of China’s lunar new year will hasten the spread of COVID-19 to rural parts of the country, one of the country’s top scientists has disputed this. Wu Zunyou, China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention’s chief epidemiologist, downplayed the risk on the Chinese social media platform, […] Continue reading ->
Across disciplines and sectors, experts say it will take treating health care as ‘ecosystems’ and a greater focus on access and equity to achieve solutions to critical health challenges of tomorrow and beyond. DAVOS, Switzerland – In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, huge inequities in access to health care have been exposed that demand […] Continue reading ->
Hybrid immunity from a combination of being vaccinated and previously infected with COVID-19 offers better protection against hospitalisation and severe infection than immunity simply from a previous infection, according to a new study in The Lancet. People with hybrid immunity were 97.4% less likely to be hospitalised or suffer severe infection at 12 months, whereas those […] Continue reading ->