Cities that fail to take meaningful climate action face a future of severe degradation with infrastructure collapse and environmental deterioration, warned climate and health experts at the yearly Academy of Medical Sciences & The Lancet International Health Lecture in London. “Madrid’s climate in 2050 will resemble Marrakech’s climate today. I don’t think we want that,” […] Continue reading ->
GENEVA — Six of the ten leading risk factors for premature deaths and years of healthy life lost due to disability are within an individual’s control, according to new data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. The study, the most comprehensive effort to quantify health loss worldwide to date, aims to identify and […] Continue reading ->
A team of researchers from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford have identified diabetes, traffic-related air pollution exposures and alcohol use as the most harmful out of 15 modifiable risk factors for dementia. Their paper, published last month in Nature Communications, examines how genetic traits and modifiable risk factors affect […] Continue reading ->
Karabo Rafube was born to a single mother in 1982 in Soweto, a sprawling township south of Johannesburg, South Africa. His mother abandoned him three months later, and Rafube was taken to live with his father. In the final years of apartheid, Soweto was a harsh place to grow up. His father already had an […] Continue reading ->
According to an article recently published in the Lancet, some 10% to 25% of the USD $7 trillion spent on healthcare globally every year is lost because of corruption – an amount that exceeds the investments needed to achieve universal healthcare by 2030. To understand how corruption affects healthcare worldwide, the Global Health Centre at […] Continue reading ->
Infant formula companies have “pathologised” normal baby behaviour to promote their products, and there should be “an international, legal treaty” to prevent their marketing, according to health experts. In addition, political lobbying by milk formula companies to influence public policy should be sharply curtailed. These are some of the suggestions contained in a three-part series […] 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 ->
“Power has been increasingly centralised around the Director-General’s office under Tedros’ leadership. This strategy might be advantageous in a crisis that demands a commander-in-control. But a lack of depth in wider leadership leaves shortcomings in the organisation. Thus states the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, in an editorial marking the start of WHO Director General Dr Tedros […] Continue reading ->
Two leading researchers who have raised questions about the reliability of Sputnik V’s vaccine efficacy ratings across age groups shared their concerns with Health Policy Watch. One called the results “impossible” and “very concerning”. More than 70 countries have approved the use of Sputnik V, Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine, based on the reported 91.6% efficacy across […] Continue reading ->
Health and peace, sex and war, money and management. Whether in chorus or cacophony – last week’s World Health Assembly of WHO member states played most of the notes in the symphony of global debate over strategies to tackle disease, epidemics and pandemics and bolster health systems. But the root causes of emerging disease threats […] Continue reading ->