Two competing approaches to promote access to medicines were born during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the year 2000. Today, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, these same approaches are once more on a collision course.  On the one side is the ‘international’ COVID response, led in name by WHO, but in fact by what […] Continue reading ->
New modes of interagency collaboration triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic should be used as a model to advance more progress, post-pandemic, on important Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to health, said a group of top international agency leaders in Tuesday’s closing session of the World Health Summit. The three-day summit, which featured 310 speakers at […] Continue reading ->
Genetically modified mosquitoes could be an innovative tool to combat vector-borne diseases and eliminate malaria, says a new WHO position statement. Genetically modified mosquitoes are designed to suppress mosquito populations and reduce their susceptibility to infection and their ability to transmit disease-carrying pathogens. WHO announced their support for the continued investigation into genetically modified mosquitoes as […] Continue reading ->
Brazzaville – The independent Africa Regional Certification Commission (ARCC) for Polio Eradication officially declared on Tuesday that the World Health Organization (WHO) African Region is free of wild poliovirus. This marks the eradication of the second virus from the face of the continent since smallpox 40 years ago.  And while vaccine derived polio is still circulating […] Continue reading ->
Amidst the battle against a new infectious threat, the fight against tuberculosis, one of humankind’s oldest recorded infectious diseases, is also progressing. Pretomanid – only the second TB drug to hit the market in over two decades – received conditional marketing approval Monday from the European Commission as part of a new, three-drug treatment regimen […] Continue reading ->