IFAKARA, Tanzania – When you think of malaria, a swarm of mosquitoes flying against an orange sunset is a dangerous sight. As part of their mating ritual, the dreaded bloodsuckers brazenly hover for 30 minutes, males adroitly flapping their slender wings to produce a sound that lures female partners to join them. The mosquito proliferation […] 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 ->
DAVOS, Switzerland – The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced plans to set up a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council to increase momentum for the development of a vaccine to combat the world’s most deadly infectious disease. Speaking at a high-level panel at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting where the plan was launched, WHO […] Continue reading ->
Most long COVID symptoms are resolved within a year of diagnosis, according to the results of a retrospective Israeli study published last week in the peer-reviewed BMJ medical journal. “Our study suggests that mild COVID-19 patients are at risk for a small number of health outcomes and most of them are resolved within a year […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for stricter masking policies and reduced isolation time recommendations for people with COVID-19 isolation, the organization announced on Friday. Patients who test positive for COVID-19 but do not have signs or symptoms are now recommended to isolate for five days in the absence of testing, WHO suggested – […] Continue reading ->
There is no clear path to test the three candidate vaccines developed to combat the Ebola Sudan strain now that Uganda’s outbreak is over. The three candidate vaccines – produced by IAVI (called SUDV), Sabin (ChAD3) and Oxford (ChAdOx1) – were delivered to Uganda with much fanfare in mid-December. But scientists attending a meeting convened […] Continue reading ->