The World Health Assembly opened its annual meeting of member states Sunday on a celebratory note marking the 75th anniversary of the World Health Organization’s foundation in 1948. Eradicating smallpox, eliminating polio in most countries worldwide, and dramatic reductions in deaths from once-deadly childhood diseases preventable by clean water, basic medicines and vaccines are among […] Continue reading ->
The World Health Organization (WHO) has ended the global health emergency for mpox, marking the end of a 10-month juggling act by the UN health agency as it scrambled to deal with concurrent global pandemics. The announcement arrives just days after WHO declared the end of the global health emergency for COVID-19 last Friday, three […] Continue reading ->
Equity and intellectual property (IP) rights are – unsurprisingly – the most important and trickiest issues facing countries negotiating the terms on which the next global pandemic will be addressed. This emerged at a World Health Organization (WHO) briefing on Thursday addressed by Precious Matsoso, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) crafting a pandemic […] Continue reading ->
February 20, 2020, was the day on which the first COVID-19 case was recorded in Mexico. The infected person was a 35-year-old man from Mexico City, the capital of the Latin American country, who had travelled to Italy. The announcement was made by Hugo López Gatell, epidemiologist and undersecretary of Prevention and Health Promotion of […] Continue reading ->
Authorities in Equatorial Guinea have confirmed another four cases of deadly Marburg virus disease, bringing the total number of cases for the country’s current outbreak to 13 – although some sources warn that the case count could be much higher, due to the lack of lab capacity and reporting delays. In a Twitter post late […] Continue reading ->
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2019, an explosion of information and misinformation burned across the Internet. Health experts and officials had a choice: To turn a blind eye to the fake news being shared on social networks or to take action themselves and use these portals to disseminate essential information rapidly. […] Continue reading ->
More than 300 health facilities have been destroyed or flooded in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique in the wake of Cyclone Freddy, WHO estimates. That has left hundreds of communities without adequate access to health services even as the cyclone’s double whammy of devastation has raised public health risks including the increased spread of cholera, […] Continue reading ->
Eight more countries in the global south have dangerously low numbers of healthcare workers in the wake of the COVID pandemic, a new WHO report has found. The World Health Organization’s 2023 report on “Health workforce support and safeguards” found that some 55 countries now rank below the global median in terms of their density […] Continue reading ->
Three years after the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the era of hourly headlines updating death and case counts has come to a merciful end. But the virus is still killing around 1,000 people worldwide every day, and it isn’t going anywhere. As of 7 March, WHO has confirmed over 750 […] 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 ->