European Union Pushes for Stronger Air Pollution Rules 19/01/2023 Stefan Anderson Air pollution is the 10th leading cause of death in the European Union. At least 300,000 people lose their lives to air pollution each year across the European Union, and the bloc is pushing to tighten air quality regulations as part of its Green New Deal legislative package. The new rules aim to reduce the number of premature deaths and illness caused by air pollution, as well as reducing pressure on ecosystems and biodiversity caused by poor air quality – two criteria the EU said are critical to its ambition of reaching an environment free of harmful pollution by 2050. “Each year, hundreds of thousands of Europeans die prematurely and many more suffer from heart- and lung diseases or pollution-induced cancers,” said Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president for the European Green Deal. “The longer we wait to reduce this pollution, the higher the costs to society.” The new rules aim to limit PM2.5 and NO2, the two deadliest air pollutants, to 10 µg/m3 and 20 µg/m3 respectively, which the EU says will cut premature deaths due to air pollution by at least 55% by 2030, potentially saving over 150,000 lives. The WHO’s air quality guidelines are more stringent, advising targets of 5 µg/m3 for PM2.5 and 10 µg/m3 for NO2, half of the levels under the new proposal. But the EU says its proposed levels will reduce deaths resulting from air pollution above WHO guidelines by 75% in 10 years. Ambient air pollution is a leading cause of strokes, cancer and diabetes in the EU, costing an estimated €300-853 billion per year to public authorities. The new air quality standards will cost less than 0.1% of GDP and provide a return of at least seven times that number, with gross annual benefits estimated between €42 billion and €121 billion in 2030, at an annual cost of less than €6 billion. “The cost in inaction is far greater than the cost of prevention,” EU Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevičius said in a statement. The health effects of polluted air affect “the vulnerable most of all,” he added. Most European cities are above new air pollution targets European cities will need to make major advances by 2030 to meet the new limits. An analysis of 2019 data released this week by the Health Effects Institute and State of Global Air found only 22% of European cities met the proposed limits on PM2.5 levels, while 84% met the new target for NO2 concentration. The health effects of air pollution, even if they are not fatal, can be devastating. Pregnant women who are exposed to air with PM2.5 concentrations are at a higher risk of delivering infants with health issues such as premature birth and low birth weight. Additionally, research has shown that air pollution caused by traffic can lead to the development of asthma in both children and adults, as well as increase the risk of acute lower respiratory infections in children and lung cancer-related deaths. For its part, NO2 has been linked to increased vulnerability to severe respiratory infections and asthma, while long-term exposure can cause chronic lung disease. That report also reinforced the stark geographic patterns in air quality noted by previous studies, with countries and cities in Central and Western Europe seeing the highest PM2.5 concentrations. Higher air pollution levels in the region correlate to its elevated reliance on coal and solid fuel in industrial and domestic settings. The Bulgarian capital of Sophia topped the list for most polluted air of European capital cities, while 15 of the top 20 most polluted cities overall were in Poland. NO2 concentrations were observed to be highest in large cities like Paris and Barcelona, likely due to heavy vehicle traffic. Central and Eastern European cities tended to have lower NO2 concentrations. Overall, eight out of 10 urban residents in the EU are exposed to PM2.5 levels above the new target of 10 µg/m3, while 5 out of 10 breathe air above the 20 µg/m target for NO2. While the modelling of NO2’s effects on premature mortality are not yet well-developed, a recent study found PM2.5 to be associated with 90.4% of all air pollutions deaths in Europe between 1990 and 2019. Progress is in the right direction, but danger lingers in the air The average annual population-weighted aPM2.5 concentration in European countries for 1990 (left) and 2019 (right). While it still has a long way to go to meet its goals, Europe has made steady progress in reducing air pollution in recent decades. A 2021 study exploring the impact of air quality on health in 43 European countries – including Russia and Iceland – between 1990 and 2019 found that on average, public exposure to PM2.5 fell by 33.7%. The report also found socioeconomic determinants had a substantial impact on air pollution-related deaths. Countries ranking in the lowest income bracket lost 11 times as many adjusted life years on average to ischemic heart disease attributed to air pollution, and 25 times more adjusted life years to air pollution-induced strokes. Air-pollution deaths per capita were highest in Eastern European countries where PM2.5 concentrations remain unchecked. Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia had death rates five and seven times higher than the European average, respectively. Their average lost adjusted life years were also the highest in Europe and 32 times higher than Iceland, which had the lowest rate of the countries surveyed. Some 24,917 years of life were lost per 100,000 people in Europe in 2019 from premature deaths from air pollution exposure, which marked a decrease of 63% from 1990. “By 2050, we want our environment to be free of harmful pollutants,” Timmermans said. “That means we need to step up action today.” Image Credits: Tangopaso, Mariordo, State of Global Air, Scientific Reports. Hybrid Immunity Protects Better Against Hospitalisation and Severe COVID Infection 19/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Those with hybrid immunity enjoy better protection from hospitalisation and severe COVID even after a year. 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 who were previously infected but unvaccinated were 74.6% less likely, according to the study, which was funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). The likelihood reported on unvaccinated individuals could, however, be a combination of several factors, while “exposure could also differ between groups, as in the case of individuals who are unvaccinated because they are severely immunocompromised, and thus also have a greater risk of infection”. The study analysed 26 papers, of which 11 reported on the immunity derived from previous infections and 15 reported on hybrid immunity. Individuals with immunity from previous infections were 25% less likely to be reinfected at 12 months, while individuals with hybrid immunity were 42% less likely to be reinfected at 12 months. Individuals who had previously been infected and received their first booster doses were 95% less likely to be hospitalised or severely ill and 47% less likely to be reinfected six months after receiving the booster. “Individuals with hybrid immunity had the highest magnitude and durability of protection, and as a result might be able to extend the period before booster vaccinations are needed compared to individuals who have never been infected,” the authors noted. They added that individuals with previous infection and full primary vaccination can delay receiving their booster shots by six months, while still having high protection against severe COVID. The analysis demonstrates the advantages of vaccination even after people have had COVID-19, the WHO said in a press statement. In countries with low resources and high infection rates, this evidence can come in handy for policy-makers. “In settings with high seroprevalence, scarce resources, and competing health priorities, evidence suggests that it is reasonable to focus on achieving high coverage rates with primary series vaccination among individuals who are at higher risk of poor outcomes, as this will provide a high level of protection against severe disease for at least 1 year among those with previous infection,” the authors added. Image Credits: Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash. New Partnership to Produce Health and Climate Research 19/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Climate and health panel at WEF 2023, Davos. The World Economic Forum (WEF) will partner with Wellcome Trust to collect research-based data on how climate change is affecting health. Making the announcement, WEF’s head of health Shyam Bishen said that while several organisations were working on data collection, most data is fragmented with different organisations. “We want to ensure that we have a good amount of research-based data that we can take to policymakers and bring it all together to respond to it,” said Bishen. However, Dr Victor Dzau, the president of the US National Academy of Medicine, said that not research was being produced on climate change and health. “Most of the evidence is associative evidence, like air pollution causes 700,000 deaths and therefore it’s climate change. So we need to do some serious research in linking climate and health and health outcomes, providing the evidence,” he told a panel on climate and health. “I think there needs to be more action-oriented research to say, what do we need to do? Or what are the interventions that will result in any evidence. I think the policy makers will be willing to listen to those issues. We’ve told the narratives and data to say it’s really hurting people’s lives, but here’s where actions need to be taken,” Dzau explained. Disease prevention key What several people overlook when talking about climate crisis and the ways to address it is the role prevention of diseases plays in it, said Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson. “If you go on to be diabetic, you’ll create between 30 and 45 tons of carbon because the way healthcare is delivered to you, medicines that are made, transportation to a hospital, caregivers getting to a hospital. So preventative health, helping people not make the journey from pre-diabetic to diabetic, for example, can have a mind boggling impact, positively, not only on them, but also on the climate,” said Hudson. The global average carbon emissions per person is around five tons. While the world thinks a lot about climate change and communicable diseases, the same importance is not given to the relationship between climate change and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), said Vanessa Kerry, CEO of Seed Global Health. She added that malnutrition, preterm births and stillbirths are all impacted by climate change. “Air pollution is the second leading cause of non-communicable diseases globally right now and the first in southeast Asia. When you think about what that impact looks like, that’s actually about $47 trillion in costs globally between 2010 and 2030 just to manage some of that disease,” she pointed out. A 2022 study of 137 countries estimated that nearly half of all stillbirths across the world have links with air pollution. Although the exact mechanisms behind this link are unclear, the study estimated that cutting air pollution down to the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) could prevent around 710,000 stillbirths every year. Image Credits: Screengrab from WEF live stream. . WHO Announces New TB Vaccine ‘Accelerator’ at Davos as High-Level Panel Discusses Elimination Challenge 18/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Left to Right: Sir Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome; Hon Gloria Arroyo, Philippines; Sally Buzbee, (moderator) Washington Post; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO; and Peter Sands, The Global Fund discuss plans to accelerate TB vaccine research at the World Economic Forum 2023, Davos. 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 Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for the involvement of all countries to make it a reality. “We have 16 TB vaccine candidates under development, many of which from before COVID. The difference between COVID and the 16 candidates is the whole world focussed on really finding a solution for COVID and so accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines, while TB [vaccine research] started decades ago,” Tedros said, adding that research into the latter is still “lagging behind.” Urging countries to renew their commitment towards eliminating TB, Tedros urged high-income countries to take the lead. “Not only governments, you will need health agencies. I think some of us are here-academia, the private sector, the civil society, all of us together, like we did for COVID. If we can use the lessons that we have learned there to accelerate [vaccine development], it’s doable,” he added. In 2021, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with TB and 1.6 million died – partly as a result of the decline in rates of diagnosis and treatment during the COVID pandemic. The only WHO-approved TB vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) developed in 1921, is now over 100 years old, and only partly effective when it is used, mostly to protect children in high-burden countries. In contrast, a vaccine with just 75% efficacy could prevent 110 million new cases and 12.3 million deaths over 25 years, a recent WHO study found. The new accelerator council will include global agencies and governments, funders, and people who have TB. A United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB is planned for the week of the UN General Assembly in September to review progress against commitments made in the 2018 UN political declaration on ending TB, WHO said, in a press release. Lessons from COVID Hon. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippines House of Representatives, and former President (2001-2010). COVID-19 set a precedent in how countries and scientists can cooperate to tackle a pandemic, said Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, deputy speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives who served as the country’s 14th president (2001-2010). Arroyo said that the foremost lesson she took away from the pandemic was that vaccines are a game changer. “We saw it was a game changer in the face of COVID. It can be a game changer in the case of tuberculosis,” she said. Another lesson that Arroyo took away from the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, was that strong public-private partnerships in the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment as well as vaccines, works wonders. Sir Jeremy Farrar, outgoing director of the Wellcome Trust. But vaccines alone are not going to be sufficient to tackle an age-old pandemic like TB, warned Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust. While vaccines may have largely stamped out childhood diseases like polio and measles, there must also be access to diagnostics and treatment, in robust health systems that have gained public trust, added Farrar, who is set to assume the position of WHO Chief Scientist in the first quarter of 2023. “So my one caveat to this vaccine discussion would be to put vaccines into a broader system, rather than thinking it’s gonna be the only thing….Don’t wait for vaccines. I don’t know when we are going to have a vaccine. Don’t wait for vaccines to do the things that we already know work and double down on those.” Private sector should invest in workplace-based TB programmes Peter Sands, executive director of The Global Fund: ‘shockingly small amount of money,’ is spent on TB, as compared to COVID. Even so, it is embarrassing that TB, a disease that’s been around for centuries still has not been eliminated, said Peter Sands, the executive director of The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said. “This is a disease that’s been around for a very long time,” he said, “we’ve proven that we can eliminate it as a public health threat in virtually all the richest countries in the world. And yet we allow millions of people to be sick and die continuing [in poorer countries].” The Global Fund is the lead agency in the fight against TB, and yet the total annual allocation to the disease amounts to less than $1 billlion, he admitted. “I mean, it’s a shockingly small amount of money when you think about the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in fund, um, fighting Covid 19. And in 2022, the number of people in the world who will have died of Covid 19, and the number of people who will have died of TB won’t be massively different. It’s just that the people who died of Covid 19 are, on average, a lot richer than the people who died of TB.” Explaining that TB, and particularly multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) are far more dangerous than COVID, Sands said, “That would be my message to the rich countries. If you’re worried about health security, you’ve gotta be looking at this one.” Sands called on the private sector to invest in workplace-based TB programmes. He said that companies that employ many workers in high TB-burden regions stand to lose out hugely in terms of productivity as a result of workers’ TB cases. “There are companies who’ve done the work and know exactly how much they were losing because you lose people for six, nine months and that’s if they get better. It’s a very cost-effective intervention to do workplace TB programs where you screen people and you provide them the support in the workplace around treatment. It just works as an economic equation.” Eyes pinned on India to champion fight against TB Mansukh L. Mandaviya, India’s Minister of Health and Familly Welfare While there are tools and even money available to tackle TB, the key to effective moblization is political will, particularly in high-burden nations, panelists agreed – echoing Farrar’s comments on the importance of systemic approaches. “The most important is the political leadership in a country like the Philippines,India and Bangladesh, Indonesia, in all the places where TB is,” Sands stressed. “Because without that domestic political leadership, you’re not gonna win it. It’s not gonna be done from outside.” Added Arroyo, who as president of the Philippines from 2001-2010, helped drive a decline in the national TB burden, executive governance is crucial for the success of global programs against TB. “Policies and programs are good but in the end, the decisive action will be implementation and executive management. And that’s what we [politicians] would have to provide as a country that is dealing with tuberculosis.” With India heading the G20 as President in 2023, eyes are also pinned on the country to lead the way in the global battle TB. Already in 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared that the country would eliminate TB by 2025, five years in before the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline. In opening remarks before the session, India’s Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya, described the country’s latest scheme Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (the Prime Minister’s TB Free Mission) which takes a whole-of-society approach. It aims to provide TB patients with higher nutritional, diagnostic and vocational support through their communities. The initiative, launched in September 2022, has already seen over 50,000 volunteers delivering support to over 1.3 million TB patients across the country, he said. “Just as vaccines were a game changer in the battle against COVID-19, the global plan calls for approving a new TB vaccine by 2025 and making it widely available to adults and adolescents in TB affected countries. India is fully prepared and in an advanced stage for taking this forward.” Added Tedros, “If we can use the opportunity of India’s G20 presidency, I think we can make good progress even this year. But we need to have everybody that can contribute, come to the tent and give their best to accelerate and make progress.” Image Credits: Screengrab, Screengrab from WEF panel, Screengrab from WEF panel. , Megha Kaveri. Switzerland and Ecuador Appeal for Treaty to End the ‘Plastic Crisis’ 17/01/2023 John Heilprin Microplastics from a river in Maryland, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Marine Debris Program. Recent research have now found microplastics in human blood samples. DAVOS, Switzerland – The presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador led a call here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Tuesday for greater international cooperation to fight plastic pollution, urging passage of a global treaty with tough regulations to confront a burgeoning environmental and health crisis from the ubiquitous material once seen as a symbol of modernity. Swiss President Alain Berset, heading a panel discussion hosted by Switzerland, told a packed room that an international treaty and new “regulatory framework” is needed to get rid of plastics that are clogging the world’s ecosystems, choking oceans and poisoning fish and wildlife – with severe human health consequences. “We are facing a major plastic crisis. The world cannot deal with the amount of plastic it produces,” he said. “If we continue on this path there could be more plastic than fish by 2050.” Berset said the plastic crisis is not only an environmental crisis, but also a health and socioeconomic challenge, “and Switzerland is ready to do its part.” Switzerland’s President Alain Berset at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza noted that his nation and Switzerland are “united by a historic commitment” to work together to end plastics pollution as two of the five countries joining the United Nations Security Council this year. Japan, Malta, Mozambique are the other three countries elected to a two-year term on the 15-nation Council, the world body’s most powerful arm, based in New York. “With our commitment we are indeed making history. We must find a solution to the global crisis of plastic waste,” said Lasso Mendoza. “In just a few years, there will be more plastic in our oceans by tons than there is fauna.” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. In a historic moment in March 2022, the world’s environment ministries agreed to negotiate a treaty on plastics pollution. The decision by some 175 UN member states was reached at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. But the road to approval and ratification of a legal instrument that has teeth promises to be a major lift in light of the powerful oil and gas interests that will oppose it every step of the way. Political leadership by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, in the Security Council and in other UN Fora, will thus be key to making progress in treaty negotiations. Fossil fuel producers scale up plastics production Currently, an estimated 5% of global total goods trade is in plastics, Lasso Mendoza said, citing UN data. But even as knowledge about the enormous environmental and health risks of plastics grows, fossil fuel producers are scaling up their plastics production, with plans to double the production of virgin plastic resin by 2040. At current rates, plastics are on track to account for 20% of oil and gas consumption by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. “Political will and leadership are the foundations upon which we must build,” Lasso Mendoza said. “Ecuador takes the fight against plastic very seriously. We need a globally binding treaty. We should reach agreement by the end of 2024.” Over the past 30 years, plastics production increased fourfold, with growth rates still rising exponentially. Already over the past 30 years, plastic consumption increased four-fold. Although global production of recycled plastics more than quadrupled over the same period, recycled plastics only represent about 6% of global plastics production, while 94% are “virgin” plastics, according to the OECD. Burgeoning health and environmental impacts Plastic waste from an informal landfill litters a rural seascape in Albania while goats graze nearby. Of the majority of plastic waste that doesn’t get reprocessed and reused, 19% is incinerated, 50% ends up in landfills, and 22% is burned in open pits, with the remainder winding up in uncontrolled dumpsites, scattered along roadsides, farmlands or littering coastal beaches and waters of poorer countries. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that plastic contamination of farmland from single-use soil and plant coverings, tubing and other materials, poses an increasing threat to soil quality, food safety and human health. In 2022, a new study identified microplastics in human blood samples for the first time. On the high seas, a recent Nature study found that the blue whales, which typically feed upon krill, may consume some 10 million pieces of microplastics a day, a taste of what other large fish like tuna and salmon are likely eating as well. Human exposure to plastic additives such as DEHP and Phthalates, which are used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC), leads to higher risks of cancer and hormonal disorders that cause reproductive health problems, research has shown. Not only are phthalate additives health harmful, but the production of PVC out of fossil fuel-derived ethylene, generates considerable mercury emissions, which are toxic for humans and to wildlife. Along with its uses in waterproof garments and building materials, PVC is ubiquitous in healthcare settings where it is a key component of basic medical devices like IV tubes. ‘Dangerous for all living things’ Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, whose nation has teamed with Norway to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, told the panel that “plastic pollution is not only dangerous for nature but for all living things, including human beings.” “No one country can solve the problem alone, she emphasized. Marco Lambertini, a special envoy for Gland, Switzerland-based World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), said that negotiations on an international treaty need to be inclusive of governments, businesses, investors and citizens. “Without everybody, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “We also need to look at the plastic value chain in its entirety, from production to disposal.” (Left to right): At the WEF panel on plastic pollution, the Graduate Institute’s Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, moderator; WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya; Kristin Hughes of WEF; and Marco Lambertini of WWF. Developing countries that lack the infrastructure for waste management will need special help, he added, and recycling must be increased globally from its current “outrageous” low of less than 10%. “I see a real parallel between the phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing out of fossil fuel- based plastics,” he said. Kristin Hughes, director of WEF’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, added: “you don’t just need business, you also need the government component. And they need to work together.” WHO – ending plastics pollution critical to healthier environment The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ending plastics pollution is a critical part of creating a healthier environment for everyone, but more study is needed to determine the range of biological and human health impacts that plastics can and do have. “I don’t think plastics pollution and health – that connection – has been given the attention it needed,” Tedros said. “And not only that, we don’t have research that documents well how plastics affect human health throughout the [product] lifecycle. “They do actually.” Image Credits: John Heilprin, Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program, Plastics Atlas, 2019, @Antoine Giret/ Unsplash. ‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
Hybrid Immunity Protects Better Against Hospitalisation and Severe COVID Infection 19/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Those with hybrid immunity enjoy better protection from hospitalisation and severe COVID even after a year. 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 who were previously infected but unvaccinated were 74.6% less likely, according to the study, which was funded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). The likelihood reported on unvaccinated individuals could, however, be a combination of several factors, while “exposure could also differ between groups, as in the case of individuals who are unvaccinated because they are severely immunocompromised, and thus also have a greater risk of infection”. The study analysed 26 papers, of which 11 reported on the immunity derived from previous infections and 15 reported on hybrid immunity. Individuals with immunity from previous infections were 25% less likely to be reinfected at 12 months, while individuals with hybrid immunity were 42% less likely to be reinfected at 12 months. Individuals who had previously been infected and received their first booster doses were 95% less likely to be hospitalised or severely ill and 47% less likely to be reinfected six months after receiving the booster. “Individuals with hybrid immunity had the highest magnitude and durability of protection, and as a result might be able to extend the period before booster vaccinations are needed compared to individuals who have never been infected,” the authors noted. They added that individuals with previous infection and full primary vaccination can delay receiving their booster shots by six months, while still having high protection against severe COVID. The analysis demonstrates the advantages of vaccination even after people have had COVID-19, the WHO said in a press statement. In countries with low resources and high infection rates, this evidence can come in handy for policy-makers. “In settings with high seroprevalence, scarce resources, and competing health priorities, evidence suggests that it is reasonable to focus on achieving high coverage rates with primary series vaccination among individuals who are at higher risk of poor outcomes, as this will provide a high level of protection against severe disease for at least 1 year among those with previous infection,” the authors added. Image Credits: Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash. New Partnership to Produce Health and Climate Research 19/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Climate and health panel at WEF 2023, Davos. The World Economic Forum (WEF) will partner with Wellcome Trust to collect research-based data on how climate change is affecting health. Making the announcement, WEF’s head of health Shyam Bishen said that while several organisations were working on data collection, most data is fragmented with different organisations. “We want to ensure that we have a good amount of research-based data that we can take to policymakers and bring it all together to respond to it,” said Bishen. However, Dr Victor Dzau, the president of the US National Academy of Medicine, said that not research was being produced on climate change and health. “Most of the evidence is associative evidence, like air pollution causes 700,000 deaths and therefore it’s climate change. So we need to do some serious research in linking climate and health and health outcomes, providing the evidence,” he told a panel on climate and health. “I think there needs to be more action-oriented research to say, what do we need to do? Or what are the interventions that will result in any evidence. I think the policy makers will be willing to listen to those issues. We’ve told the narratives and data to say it’s really hurting people’s lives, but here’s where actions need to be taken,” Dzau explained. Disease prevention key What several people overlook when talking about climate crisis and the ways to address it is the role prevention of diseases plays in it, said Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson. “If you go on to be diabetic, you’ll create between 30 and 45 tons of carbon because the way healthcare is delivered to you, medicines that are made, transportation to a hospital, caregivers getting to a hospital. So preventative health, helping people not make the journey from pre-diabetic to diabetic, for example, can have a mind boggling impact, positively, not only on them, but also on the climate,” said Hudson. The global average carbon emissions per person is around five tons. While the world thinks a lot about climate change and communicable diseases, the same importance is not given to the relationship between climate change and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), said Vanessa Kerry, CEO of Seed Global Health. She added that malnutrition, preterm births and stillbirths are all impacted by climate change. “Air pollution is the second leading cause of non-communicable diseases globally right now and the first in southeast Asia. When you think about what that impact looks like, that’s actually about $47 trillion in costs globally between 2010 and 2030 just to manage some of that disease,” she pointed out. A 2022 study of 137 countries estimated that nearly half of all stillbirths across the world have links with air pollution. Although the exact mechanisms behind this link are unclear, the study estimated that cutting air pollution down to the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) could prevent around 710,000 stillbirths every year. Image Credits: Screengrab from WEF live stream. . WHO Announces New TB Vaccine ‘Accelerator’ at Davos as High-Level Panel Discusses Elimination Challenge 18/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Left to Right: Sir Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome; Hon Gloria Arroyo, Philippines; Sally Buzbee, (moderator) Washington Post; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO; and Peter Sands, The Global Fund discuss plans to accelerate TB vaccine research at the World Economic Forum 2023, Davos. 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 Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for the involvement of all countries to make it a reality. “We have 16 TB vaccine candidates under development, many of which from before COVID. The difference between COVID and the 16 candidates is the whole world focussed on really finding a solution for COVID and so accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines, while TB [vaccine research] started decades ago,” Tedros said, adding that research into the latter is still “lagging behind.” Urging countries to renew their commitment towards eliminating TB, Tedros urged high-income countries to take the lead. “Not only governments, you will need health agencies. I think some of us are here-academia, the private sector, the civil society, all of us together, like we did for COVID. If we can use the lessons that we have learned there to accelerate [vaccine development], it’s doable,” he added. In 2021, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with TB and 1.6 million died – partly as a result of the decline in rates of diagnosis and treatment during the COVID pandemic. The only WHO-approved TB vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) developed in 1921, is now over 100 years old, and only partly effective when it is used, mostly to protect children in high-burden countries. In contrast, a vaccine with just 75% efficacy could prevent 110 million new cases and 12.3 million deaths over 25 years, a recent WHO study found. The new accelerator council will include global agencies and governments, funders, and people who have TB. A United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB is planned for the week of the UN General Assembly in September to review progress against commitments made in the 2018 UN political declaration on ending TB, WHO said, in a press release. Lessons from COVID Hon. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippines House of Representatives, and former President (2001-2010). COVID-19 set a precedent in how countries and scientists can cooperate to tackle a pandemic, said Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, deputy speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives who served as the country’s 14th president (2001-2010). Arroyo said that the foremost lesson she took away from the pandemic was that vaccines are a game changer. “We saw it was a game changer in the face of COVID. It can be a game changer in the case of tuberculosis,” she said. Another lesson that Arroyo took away from the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, was that strong public-private partnerships in the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment as well as vaccines, works wonders. Sir Jeremy Farrar, outgoing director of the Wellcome Trust. But vaccines alone are not going to be sufficient to tackle an age-old pandemic like TB, warned Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust. While vaccines may have largely stamped out childhood diseases like polio and measles, there must also be access to diagnostics and treatment, in robust health systems that have gained public trust, added Farrar, who is set to assume the position of WHO Chief Scientist in the first quarter of 2023. “So my one caveat to this vaccine discussion would be to put vaccines into a broader system, rather than thinking it’s gonna be the only thing….Don’t wait for vaccines. I don’t know when we are going to have a vaccine. Don’t wait for vaccines to do the things that we already know work and double down on those.” Private sector should invest in workplace-based TB programmes Peter Sands, executive director of The Global Fund: ‘shockingly small amount of money,’ is spent on TB, as compared to COVID. Even so, it is embarrassing that TB, a disease that’s been around for centuries still has not been eliminated, said Peter Sands, the executive director of The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said. “This is a disease that’s been around for a very long time,” he said, “we’ve proven that we can eliminate it as a public health threat in virtually all the richest countries in the world. And yet we allow millions of people to be sick and die continuing [in poorer countries].” The Global Fund is the lead agency in the fight against TB, and yet the total annual allocation to the disease amounts to less than $1 billlion, he admitted. “I mean, it’s a shockingly small amount of money when you think about the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in fund, um, fighting Covid 19. And in 2022, the number of people in the world who will have died of Covid 19, and the number of people who will have died of TB won’t be massively different. It’s just that the people who died of Covid 19 are, on average, a lot richer than the people who died of TB.” Explaining that TB, and particularly multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) are far more dangerous than COVID, Sands said, “That would be my message to the rich countries. If you’re worried about health security, you’ve gotta be looking at this one.” Sands called on the private sector to invest in workplace-based TB programmes. He said that companies that employ many workers in high TB-burden regions stand to lose out hugely in terms of productivity as a result of workers’ TB cases. “There are companies who’ve done the work and know exactly how much they were losing because you lose people for six, nine months and that’s if they get better. It’s a very cost-effective intervention to do workplace TB programs where you screen people and you provide them the support in the workplace around treatment. It just works as an economic equation.” Eyes pinned on India to champion fight against TB Mansukh L. Mandaviya, India’s Minister of Health and Familly Welfare While there are tools and even money available to tackle TB, the key to effective moblization is political will, particularly in high-burden nations, panelists agreed – echoing Farrar’s comments on the importance of systemic approaches. “The most important is the political leadership in a country like the Philippines,India and Bangladesh, Indonesia, in all the places where TB is,” Sands stressed. “Because without that domestic political leadership, you’re not gonna win it. It’s not gonna be done from outside.” Added Arroyo, who as president of the Philippines from 2001-2010, helped drive a decline in the national TB burden, executive governance is crucial for the success of global programs against TB. “Policies and programs are good but in the end, the decisive action will be implementation and executive management. And that’s what we [politicians] would have to provide as a country that is dealing with tuberculosis.” With India heading the G20 as President in 2023, eyes are also pinned on the country to lead the way in the global battle TB. Already in 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared that the country would eliminate TB by 2025, five years in before the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline. In opening remarks before the session, India’s Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya, described the country’s latest scheme Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (the Prime Minister’s TB Free Mission) which takes a whole-of-society approach. It aims to provide TB patients with higher nutritional, diagnostic and vocational support through their communities. The initiative, launched in September 2022, has already seen over 50,000 volunteers delivering support to over 1.3 million TB patients across the country, he said. “Just as vaccines were a game changer in the battle against COVID-19, the global plan calls for approving a new TB vaccine by 2025 and making it widely available to adults and adolescents in TB affected countries. India is fully prepared and in an advanced stage for taking this forward.” Added Tedros, “If we can use the opportunity of India’s G20 presidency, I think we can make good progress even this year. But we need to have everybody that can contribute, come to the tent and give their best to accelerate and make progress.” Image Credits: Screengrab, Screengrab from WEF panel, Screengrab from WEF panel. , Megha Kaveri. Switzerland and Ecuador Appeal for Treaty to End the ‘Plastic Crisis’ 17/01/2023 John Heilprin Microplastics from a river in Maryland, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Marine Debris Program. Recent research have now found microplastics in human blood samples. DAVOS, Switzerland – The presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador led a call here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Tuesday for greater international cooperation to fight plastic pollution, urging passage of a global treaty with tough regulations to confront a burgeoning environmental and health crisis from the ubiquitous material once seen as a symbol of modernity. Swiss President Alain Berset, heading a panel discussion hosted by Switzerland, told a packed room that an international treaty and new “regulatory framework” is needed to get rid of plastics that are clogging the world’s ecosystems, choking oceans and poisoning fish and wildlife – with severe human health consequences. “We are facing a major plastic crisis. The world cannot deal with the amount of plastic it produces,” he said. “If we continue on this path there could be more plastic than fish by 2050.” Berset said the plastic crisis is not only an environmental crisis, but also a health and socioeconomic challenge, “and Switzerland is ready to do its part.” Switzerland’s President Alain Berset at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza noted that his nation and Switzerland are “united by a historic commitment” to work together to end plastics pollution as two of the five countries joining the United Nations Security Council this year. Japan, Malta, Mozambique are the other three countries elected to a two-year term on the 15-nation Council, the world body’s most powerful arm, based in New York. “With our commitment we are indeed making history. We must find a solution to the global crisis of plastic waste,” said Lasso Mendoza. “In just a few years, there will be more plastic in our oceans by tons than there is fauna.” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. In a historic moment in March 2022, the world’s environment ministries agreed to negotiate a treaty on plastics pollution. The decision by some 175 UN member states was reached at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. But the road to approval and ratification of a legal instrument that has teeth promises to be a major lift in light of the powerful oil and gas interests that will oppose it every step of the way. Political leadership by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, in the Security Council and in other UN Fora, will thus be key to making progress in treaty negotiations. Fossil fuel producers scale up plastics production Currently, an estimated 5% of global total goods trade is in plastics, Lasso Mendoza said, citing UN data. But even as knowledge about the enormous environmental and health risks of plastics grows, fossil fuel producers are scaling up their plastics production, with plans to double the production of virgin plastic resin by 2040. At current rates, plastics are on track to account for 20% of oil and gas consumption by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. “Political will and leadership are the foundations upon which we must build,” Lasso Mendoza said. “Ecuador takes the fight against plastic very seriously. We need a globally binding treaty. We should reach agreement by the end of 2024.” Over the past 30 years, plastics production increased fourfold, with growth rates still rising exponentially. Already over the past 30 years, plastic consumption increased four-fold. Although global production of recycled plastics more than quadrupled over the same period, recycled plastics only represent about 6% of global plastics production, while 94% are “virgin” plastics, according to the OECD. Burgeoning health and environmental impacts Plastic waste from an informal landfill litters a rural seascape in Albania while goats graze nearby. Of the majority of plastic waste that doesn’t get reprocessed and reused, 19% is incinerated, 50% ends up in landfills, and 22% is burned in open pits, with the remainder winding up in uncontrolled dumpsites, scattered along roadsides, farmlands or littering coastal beaches and waters of poorer countries. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that plastic contamination of farmland from single-use soil and plant coverings, tubing and other materials, poses an increasing threat to soil quality, food safety and human health. In 2022, a new study identified microplastics in human blood samples for the first time. On the high seas, a recent Nature study found that the blue whales, which typically feed upon krill, may consume some 10 million pieces of microplastics a day, a taste of what other large fish like tuna and salmon are likely eating as well. Human exposure to plastic additives such as DEHP and Phthalates, which are used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC), leads to higher risks of cancer and hormonal disorders that cause reproductive health problems, research has shown. Not only are phthalate additives health harmful, but the production of PVC out of fossil fuel-derived ethylene, generates considerable mercury emissions, which are toxic for humans and to wildlife. Along with its uses in waterproof garments and building materials, PVC is ubiquitous in healthcare settings where it is a key component of basic medical devices like IV tubes. ‘Dangerous for all living things’ Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, whose nation has teamed with Norway to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, told the panel that “plastic pollution is not only dangerous for nature but for all living things, including human beings.” “No one country can solve the problem alone, she emphasized. Marco Lambertini, a special envoy for Gland, Switzerland-based World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), said that negotiations on an international treaty need to be inclusive of governments, businesses, investors and citizens. “Without everybody, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “We also need to look at the plastic value chain in its entirety, from production to disposal.” (Left to right): At the WEF panel on plastic pollution, the Graduate Institute’s Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, moderator; WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya; Kristin Hughes of WEF; and Marco Lambertini of WWF. Developing countries that lack the infrastructure for waste management will need special help, he added, and recycling must be increased globally from its current “outrageous” low of less than 10%. “I see a real parallel between the phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing out of fossil fuel- based plastics,” he said. Kristin Hughes, director of WEF’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, added: “you don’t just need business, you also need the government component. And they need to work together.” WHO – ending plastics pollution critical to healthier environment The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ending plastics pollution is a critical part of creating a healthier environment for everyone, but more study is needed to determine the range of biological and human health impacts that plastics can and do have. “I don’t think plastics pollution and health – that connection – has been given the attention it needed,” Tedros said. “And not only that, we don’t have research that documents well how plastics affect human health throughout the [product] lifecycle. “They do actually.” Image Credits: John Heilprin, Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program, Plastics Atlas, 2019, @Antoine Giret/ Unsplash. ‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
New Partnership to Produce Health and Climate Research 19/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Climate and health panel at WEF 2023, Davos. The World Economic Forum (WEF) will partner with Wellcome Trust to collect research-based data on how climate change is affecting health. Making the announcement, WEF’s head of health Shyam Bishen said that while several organisations were working on data collection, most data is fragmented with different organisations. “We want to ensure that we have a good amount of research-based data that we can take to policymakers and bring it all together to respond to it,” said Bishen. However, Dr Victor Dzau, the president of the US National Academy of Medicine, said that not research was being produced on climate change and health. “Most of the evidence is associative evidence, like air pollution causes 700,000 deaths and therefore it’s climate change. So we need to do some serious research in linking climate and health and health outcomes, providing the evidence,” he told a panel on climate and health. “I think there needs to be more action-oriented research to say, what do we need to do? Or what are the interventions that will result in any evidence. I think the policy makers will be willing to listen to those issues. We’ve told the narratives and data to say it’s really hurting people’s lives, but here’s where actions need to be taken,” Dzau explained. Disease prevention key What several people overlook when talking about climate crisis and the ways to address it is the role prevention of diseases plays in it, said Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson. “If you go on to be diabetic, you’ll create between 30 and 45 tons of carbon because the way healthcare is delivered to you, medicines that are made, transportation to a hospital, caregivers getting to a hospital. So preventative health, helping people not make the journey from pre-diabetic to diabetic, for example, can have a mind boggling impact, positively, not only on them, but also on the climate,” said Hudson. The global average carbon emissions per person is around five tons. While the world thinks a lot about climate change and communicable diseases, the same importance is not given to the relationship between climate change and non-communicable diseases (NCDs), said Vanessa Kerry, CEO of Seed Global Health. She added that malnutrition, preterm births and stillbirths are all impacted by climate change. “Air pollution is the second leading cause of non-communicable diseases globally right now and the first in southeast Asia. When you think about what that impact looks like, that’s actually about $47 trillion in costs globally between 2010 and 2030 just to manage some of that disease,” she pointed out. A 2022 study of 137 countries estimated that nearly half of all stillbirths across the world have links with air pollution. Although the exact mechanisms behind this link are unclear, the study estimated that cutting air pollution down to the levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) could prevent around 710,000 stillbirths every year. Image Credits: Screengrab from WEF live stream. . WHO Announces New TB Vaccine ‘Accelerator’ at Davos as High-Level Panel Discusses Elimination Challenge 18/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Left to Right: Sir Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome; Hon Gloria Arroyo, Philippines; Sally Buzbee, (moderator) Washington Post; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO; and Peter Sands, The Global Fund discuss plans to accelerate TB vaccine research at the World Economic Forum 2023, Davos. 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 Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for the involvement of all countries to make it a reality. “We have 16 TB vaccine candidates under development, many of which from before COVID. The difference between COVID and the 16 candidates is the whole world focussed on really finding a solution for COVID and so accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines, while TB [vaccine research] started decades ago,” Tedros said, adding that research into the latter is still “lagging behind.” Urging countries to renew their commitment towards eliminating TB, Tedros urged high-income countries to take the lead. “Not only governments, you will need health agencies. I think some of us are here-academia, the private sector, the civil society, all of us together, like we did for COVID. If we can use the lessons that we have learned there to accelerate [vaccine development], it’s doable,” he added. In 2021, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with TB and 1.6 million died – partly as a result of the decline in rates of diagnosis and treatment during the COVID pandemic. The only WHO-approved TB vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) developed in 1921, is now over 100 years old, and only partly effective when it is used, mostly to protect children in high-burden countries. In contrast, a vaccine with just 75% efficacy could prevent 110 million new cases and 12.3 million deaths over 25 years, a recent WHO study found. The new accelerator council will include global agencies and governments, funders, and people who have TB. A United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB is planned for the week of the UN General Assembly in September to review progress against commitments made in the 2018 UN political declaration on ending TB, WHO said, in a press release. Lessons from COVID Hon. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippines House of Representatives, and former President (2001-2010). COVID-19 set a precedent in how countries and scientists can cooperate to tackle a pandemic, said Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, deputy speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives who served as the country’s 14th president (2001-2010). Arroyo said that the foremost lesson she took away from the pandemic was that vaccines are a game changer. “We saw it was a game changer in the face of COVID. It can be a game changer in the case of tuberculosis,” she said. Another lesson that Arroyo took away from the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, was that strong public-private partnerships in the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment as well as vaccines, works wonders. Sir Jeremy Farrar, outgoing director of the Wellcome Trust. But vaccines alone are not going to be sufficient to tackle an age-old pandemic like TB, warned Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust. While vaccines may have largely stamped out childhood diseases like polio and measles, there must also be access to diagnostics and treatment, in robust health systems that have gained public trust, added Farrar, who is set to assume the position of WHO Chief Scientist in the first quarter of 2023. “So my one caveat to this vaccine discussion would be to put vaccines into a broader system, rather than thinking it’s gonna be the only thing….Don’t wait for vaccines. I don’t know when we are going to have a vaccine. Don’t wait for vaccines to do the things that we already know work and double down on those.” Private sector should invest in workplace-based TB programmes Peter Sands, executive director of The Global Fund: ‘shockingly small amount of money,’ is spent on TB, as compared to COVID. Even so, it is embarrassing that TB, a disease that’s been around for centuries still has not been eliminated, said Peter Sands, the executive director of The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said. “This is a disease that’s been around for a very long time,” he said, “we’ve proven that we can eliminate it as a public health threat in virtually all the richest countries in the world. And yet we allow millions of people to be sick and die continuing [in poorer countries].” The Global Fund is the lead agency in the fight against TB, and yet the total annual allocation to the disease amounts to less than $1 billlion, he admitted. “I mean, it’s a shockingly small amount of money when you think about the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in fund, um, fighting Covid 19. And in 2022, the number of people in the world who will have died of Covid 19, and the number of people who will have died of TB won’t be massively different. It’s just that the people who died of Covid 19 are, on average, a lot richer than the people who died of TB.” Explaining that TB, and particularly multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) are far more dangerous than COVID, Sands said, “That would be my message to the rich countries. If you’re worried about health security, you’ve gotta be looking at this one.” Sands called on the private sector to invest in workplace-based TB programmes. He said that companies that employ many workers in high TB-burden regions stand to lose out hugely in terms of productivity as a result of workers’ TB cases. “There are companies who’ve done the work and know exactly how much they were losing because you lose people for six, nine months and that’s if they get better. It’s a very cost-effective intervention to do workplace TB programs where you screen people and you provide them the support in the workplace around treatment. It just works as an economic equation.” Eyes pinned on India to champion fight against TB Mansukh L. Mandaviya, India’s Minister of Health and Familly Welfare While there are tools and even money available to tackle TB, the key to effective moblization is political will, particularly in high-burden nations, panelists agreed – echoing Farrar’s comments on the importance of systemic approaches. “The most important is the political leadership in a country like the Philippines,India and Bangladesh, Indonesia, in all the places where TB is,” Sands stressed. “Because without that domestic political leadership, you’re not gonna win it. It’s not gonna be done from outside.” Added Arroyo, who as president of the Philippines from 2001-2010, helped drive a decline in the national TB burden, executive governance is crucial for the success of global programs against TB. “Policies and programs are good but in the end, the decisive action will be implementation and executive management. And that’s what we [politicians] would have to provide as a country that is dealing with tuberculosis.” With India heading the G20 as President in 2023, eyes are also pinned on the country to lead the way in the global battle TB. Already in 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared that the country would eliminate TB by 2025, five years in before the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline. In opening remarks before the session, India’s Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya, described the country’s latest scheme Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (the Prime Minister’s TB Free Mission) which takes a whole-of-society approach. It aims to provide TB patients with higher nutritional, diagnostic and vocational support through their communities. The initiative, launched in September 2022, has already seen over 50,000 volunteers delivering support to over 1.3 million TB patients across the country, he said. “Just as vaccines were a game changer in the battle against COVID-19, the global plan calls for approving a new TB vaccine by 2025 and making it widely available to adults and adolescents in TB affected countries. India is fully prepared and in an advanced stage for taking this forward.” Added Tedros, “If we can use the opportunity of India’s G20 presidency, I think we can make good progress even this year. But we need to have everybody that can contribute, come to the tent and give their best to accelerate and make progress.” Image Credits: Screengrab, Screengrab from WEF panel, Screengrab from WEF panel. , Megha Kaveri. Switzerland and Ecuador Appeal for Treaty to End the ‘Plastic Crisis’ 17/01/2023 John Heilprin Microplastics from a river in Maryland, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Marine Debris Program. Recent research have now found microplastics in human blood samples. DAVOS, Switzerland – The presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador led a call here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Tuesday for greater international cooperation to fight plastic pollution, urging passage of a global treaty with tough regulations to confront a burgeoning environmental and health crisis from the ubiquitous material once seen as a symbol of modernity. Swiss President Alain Berset, heading a panel discussion hosted by Switzerland, told a packed room that an international treaty and new “regulatory framework” is needed to get rid of plastics that are clogging the world’s ecosystems, choking oceans and poisoning fish and wildlife – with severe human health consequences. “We are facing a major plastic crisis. The world cannot deal with the amount of plastic it produces,” he said. “If we continue on this path there could be more plastic than fish by 2050.” Berset said the plastic crisis is not only an environmental crisis, but also a health and socioeconomic challenge, “and Switzerland is ready to do its part.” Switzerland’s President Alain Berset at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza noted that his nation and Switzerland are “united by a historic commitment” to work together to end plastics pollution as two of the five countries joining the United Nations Security Council this year. Japan, Malta, Mozambique are the other three countries elected to a two-year term on the 15-nation Council, the world body’s most powerful arm, based in New York. “With our commitment we are indeed making history. We must find a solution to the global crisis of plastic waste,” said Lasso Mendoza. “In just a few years, there will be more plastic in our oceans by tons than there is fauna.” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. In a historic moment in March 2022, the world’s environment ministries agreed to negotiate a treaty on plastics pollution. The decision by some 175 UN member states was reached at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. But the road to approval and ratification of a legal instrument that has teeth promises to be a major lift in light of the powerful oil and gas interests that will oppose it every step of the way. Political leadership by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, in the Security Council and in other UN Fora, will thus be key to making progress in treaty negotiations. Fossil fuel producers scale up plastics production Currently, an estimated 5% of global total goods trade is in plastics, Lasso Mendoza said, citing UN data. But even as knowledge about the enormous environmental and health risks of plastics grows, fossil fuel producers are scaling up their plastics production, with plans to double the production of virgin plastic resin by 2040. At current rates, plastics are on track to account for 20% of oil and gas consumption by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. “Political will and leadership are the foundations upon which we must build,” Lasso Mendoza said. “Ecuador takes the fight against plastic very seriously. We need a globally binding treaty. We should reach agreement by the end of 2024.” Over the past 30 years, plastics production increased fourfold, with growth rates still rising exponentially. Already over the past 30 years, plastic consumption increased four-fold. Although global production of recycled plastics more than quadrupled over the same period, recycled plastics only represent about 6% of global plastics production, while 94% are “virgin” plastics, according to the OECD. Burgeoning health and environmental impacts Plastic waste from an informal landfill litters a rural seascape in Albania while goats graze nearby. Of the majority of plastic waste that doesn’t get reprocessed and reused, 19% is incinerated, 50% ends up in landfills, and 22% is burned in open pits, with the remainder winding up in uncontrolled dumpsites, scattered along roadsides, farmlands or littering coastal beaches and waters of poorer countries. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that plastic contamination of farmland from single-use soil and plant coverings, tubing and other materials, poses an increasing threat to soil quality, food safety and human health. In 2022, a new study identified microplastics in human blood samples for the first time. On the high seas, a recent Nature study found that the blue whales, which typically feed upon krill, may consume some 10 million pieces of microplastics a day, a taste of what other large fish like tuna and salmon are likely eating as well. Human exposure to plastic additives such as DEHP and Phthalates, which are used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC), leads to higher risks of cancer and hormonal disorders that cause reproductive health problems, research has shown. Not only are phthalate additives health harmful, but the production of PVC out of fossil fuel-derived ethylene, generates considerable mercury emissions, which are toxic for humans and to wildlife. Along with its uses in waterproof garments and building materials, PVC is ubiquitous in healthcare settings where it is a key component of basic medical devices like IV tubes. ‘Dangerous for all living things’ Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, whose nation has teamed with Norway to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, told the panel that “plastic pollution is not only dangerous for nature but for all living things, including human beings.” “No one country can solve the problem alone, she emphasized. Marco Lambertini, a special envoy for Gland, Switzerland-based World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), said that negotiations on an international treaty need to be inclusive of governments, businesses, investors and citizens. “Without everybody, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “We also need to look at the plastic value chain in its entirety, from production to disposal.” (Left to right): At the WEF panel on plastic pollution, the Graduate Institute’s Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, moderator; WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya; Kristin Hughes of WEF; and Marco Lambertini of WWF. Developing countries that lack the infrastructure for waste management will need special help, he added, and recycling must be increased globally from its current “outrageous” low of less than 10%. “I see a real parallel between the phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing out of fossil fuel- based plastics,” he said. Kristin Hughes, director of WEF’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, added: “you don’t just need business, you also need the government component. And they need to work together.” WHO – ending plastics pollution critical to healthier environment The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ending plastics pollution is a critical part of creating a healthier environment for everyone, but more study is needed to determine the range of biological and human health impacts that plastics can and do have. “I don’t think plastics pollution and health – that connection – has been given the attention it needed,” Tedros said. “And not only that, we don’t have research that documents well how plastics affect human health throughout the [product] lifecycle. “They do actually.” Image Credits: John Heilprin, Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program, Plastics Atlas, 2019, @Antoine Giret/ Unsplash. ‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
WHO Announces New TB Vaccine ‘Accelerator’ at Davos as High-Level Panel Discusses Elimination Challenge 18/01/2023 Megha Kaveri Left to Right: Sir Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome; Hon Gloria Arroyo, Philippines; Sally Buzbee, (moderator) Washington Post; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO; and Peter Sands, The Global Fund discuss plans to accelerate TB vaccine research at the World Economic Forum 2023, Davos. 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 Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for the involvement of all countries to make it a reality. “We have 16 TB vaccine candidates under development, many of which from before COVID. The difference between COVID and the 16 candidates is the whole world focussed on really finding a solution for COVID and so accelerated the development of the COVID vaccines, while TB [vaccine research] started decades ago,” Tedros said, adding that research into the latter is still “lagging behind.” Urging countries to renew their commitment towards eliminating TB, Tedros urged high-income countries to take the lead. “Not only governments, you will need health agencies. I think some of us are here-academia, the private sector, the civil society, all of us together, like we did for COVID. If we can use the lessons that we have learned there to accelerate [vaccine development], it’s doable,” he added. In 2021, an estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with TB and 1.6 million died – partly as a result of the decline in rates of diagnosis and treatment during the COVID pandemic. The only WHO-approved TB vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) developed in 1921, is now over 100 years old, and only partly effective when it is used, mostly to protect children in high-burden countries. In contrast, a vaccine with just 75% efficacy could prevent 110 million new cases and 12.3 million deaths over 25 years, a recent WHO study found. The new accelerator council will include global agencies and governments, funders, and people who have TB. A United Nations High-Level Meeting on TB is planned for the week of the UN General Assembly in September to review progress against commitments made in the 2018 UN political declaration on ending TB, WHO said, in a press release. Lessons from COVID Hon. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Philippines House of Representatives, and former President (2001-2010). COVID-19 set a precedent in how countries and scientists can cooperate to tackle a pandemic, said Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, deputy speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives who served as the country’s 14th president (2001-2010). Arroyo said that the foremost lesson she took away from the pandemic was that vaccines are a game changer. “We saw it was a game changer in the face of COVID. It can be a game changer in the case of tuberculosis,” she said. Another lesson that Arroyo took away from the COVID-19 pandemic, she added, was that strong public-private partnerships in the development of tools for diagnosis and treatment as well as vaccines, works wonders. Sir Jeremy Farrar, outgoing director of the Wellcome Trust. But vaccines alone are not going to be sufficient to tackle an age-old pandemic like TB, warned Jeremy Farrar, of the Wellcome Trust. While vaccines may have largely stamped out childhood diseases like polio and measles, there must also be access to diagnostics and treatment, in robust health systems that have gained public trust, added Farrar, who is set to assume the position of WHO Chief Scientist in the first quarter of 2023. “So my one caveat to this vaccine discussion would be to put vaccines into a broader system, rather than thinking it’s gonna be the only thing….Don’t wait for vaccines. I don’t know when we are going to have a vaccine. Don’t wait for vaccines to do the things that we already know work and double down on those.” Private sector should invest in workplace-based TB programmes Peter Sands, executive director of The Global Fund: ‘shockingly small amount of money,’ is spent on TB, as compared to COVID. Even so, it is embarrassing that TB, a disease that’s been around for centuries still has not been eliminated, said Peter Sands, the executive director of The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said. “This is a disease that’s been around for a very long time,” he said, “we’ve proven that we can eliminate it as a public health threat in virtually all the richest countries in the world. And yet we allow millions of people to be sick and die continuing [in poorer countries].” The Global Fund is the lead agency in the fight against TB, and yet the total annual allocation to the disease amounts to less than $1 billlion, he admitted. “I mean, it’s a shockingly small amount of money when you think about the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent in fund, um, fighting Covid 19. And in 2022, the number of people in the world who will have died of Covid 19, and the number of people who will have died of TB won’t be massively different. It’s just that the people who died of Covid 19 are, on average, a lot richer than the people who died of TB.” Explaining that TB, and particularly multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) are far more dangerous than COVID, Sands said, “That would be my message to the rich countries. If you’re worried about health security, you’ve gotta be looking at this one.” Sands called on the private sector to invest in workplace-based TB programmes. He said that companies that employ many workers in high TB-burden regions stand to lose out hugely in terms of productivity as a result of workers’ TB cases. “There are companies who’ve done the work and know exactly how much they were losing because you lose people for six, nine months and that’s if they get better. It’s a very cost-effective intervention to do workplace TB programs where you screen people and you provide them the support in the workplace around treatment. It just works as an economic equation.” Eyes pinned on India to champion fight against TB Mansukh L. Mandaviya, India’s Minister of Health and Familly Welfare While there are tools and even money available to tackle TB, the key to effective moblization is political will, particularly in high-burden nations, panelists agreed – echoing Farrar’s comments on the importance of systemic approaches. “The most important is the political leadership in a country like the Philippines,India and Bangladesh, Indonesia, in all the places where TB is,” Sands stressed. “Because without that domestic political leadership, you’re not gonna win it. It’s not gonna be done from outside.” Added Arroyo, who as president of the Philippines from 2001-2010, helped drive a decline in the national TB burden, executive governance is crucial for the success of global programs against TB. “Policies and programs are good but in the end, the decisive action will be implementation and executive management. And that’s what we [politicians] would have to provide as a country that is dealing with tuberculosis.” With India heading the G20 as President in 2023, eyes are also pinned on the country to lead the way in the global battle TB. Already in 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared that the country would eliminate TB by 2025, five years in before the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) deadline. In opening remarks before the session, India’s Minister for Health and Family Welfare Mansukh Mandaviya, described the country’s latest scheme Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (the Prime Minister’s TB Free Mission) which takes a whole-of-society approach. It aims to provide TB patients with higher nutritional, diagnostic and vocational support through their communities. The initiative, launched in September 2022, has already seen over 50,000 volunteers delivering support to over 1.3 million TB patients across the country, he said. “Just as vaccines were a game changer in the battle against COVID-19, the global plan calls for approving a new TB vaccine by 2025 and making it widely available to adults and adolescents in TB affected countries. India is fully prepared and in an advanced stage for taking this forward.” Added Tedros, “If we can use the opportunity of India’s G20 presidency, I think we can make good progress even this year. But we need to have everybody that can contribute, come to the tent and give their best to accelerate and make progress.” Image Credits: Screengrab, Screengrab from WEF panel, Screengrab from WEF panel. , Megha Kaveri. Switzerland and Ecuador Appeal for Treaty to End the ‘Plastic Crisis’ 17/01/2023 John Heilprin Microplastics from a river in Maryland, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Marine Debris Program. Recent research have now found microplastics in human blood samples. DAVOS, Switzerland – The presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador led a call here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Tuesday for greater international cooperation to fight plastic pollution, urging passage of a global treaty with tough regulations to confront a burgeoning environmental and health crisis from the ubiquitous material once seen as a symbol of modernity. Swiss President Alain Berset, heading a panel discussion hosted by Switzerland, told a packed room that an international treaty and new “regulatory framework” is needed to get rid of plastics that are clogging the world’s ecosystems, choking oceans and poisoning fish and wildlife – with severe human health consequences. “We are facing a major plastic crisis. The world cannot deal with the amount of plastic it produces,” he said. “If we continue on this path there could be more plastic than fish by 2050.” Berset said the plastic crisis is not only an environmental crisis, but also a health and socioeconomic challenge, “and Switzerland is ready to do its part.” Switzerland’s President Alain Berset at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza noted that his nation and Switzerland are “united by a historic commitment” to work together to end plastics pollution as two of the five countries joining the United Nations Security Council this year. Japan, Malta, Mozambique are the other three countries elected to a two-year term on the 15-nation Council, the world body’s most powerful arm, based in New York. “With our commitment we are indeed making history. We must find a solution to the global crisis of plastic waste,” said Lasso Mendoza. “In just a few years, there will be more plastic in our oceans by tons than there is fauna.” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. In a historic moment in March 2022, the world’s environment ministries agreed to negotiate a treaty on plastics pollution. The decision by some 175 UN member states was reached at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. But the road to approval and ratification of a legal instrument that has teeth promises to be a major lift in light of the powerful oil and gas interests that will oppose it every step of the way. Political leadership by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, in the Security Council and in other UN Fora, will thus be key to making progress in treaty negotiations. Fossil fuel producers scale up plastics production Currently, an estimated 5% of global total goods trade is in plastics, Lasso Mendoza said, citing UN data. But even as knowledge about the enormous environmental and health risks of plastics grows, fossil fuel producers are scaling up their plastics production, with plans to double the production of virgin plastic resin by 2040. At current rates, plastics are on track to account for 20% of oil and gas consumption by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. “Political will and leadership are the foundations upon which we must build,” Lasso Mendoza said. “Ecuador takes the fight against plastic very seriously. We need a globally binding treaty. We should reach agreement by the end of 2024.” Over the past 30 years, plastics production increased fourfold, with growth rates still rising exponentially. Already over the past 30 years, plastic consumption increased four-fold. Although global production of recycled plastics more than quadrupled over the same period, recycled plastics only represent about 6% of global plastics production, while 94% are “virgin” plastics, according to the OECD. Burgeoning health and environmental impacts Plastic waste from an informal landfill litters a rural seascape in Albania while goats graze nearby. Of the majority of plastic waste that doesn’t get reprocessed and reused, 19% is incinerated, 50% ends up in landfills, and 22% is burned in open pits, with the remainder winding up in uncontrolled dumpsites, scattered along roadsides, farmlands or littering coastal beaches and waters of poorer countries. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that plastic contamination of farmland from single-use soil and plant coverings, tubing and other materials, poses an increasing threat to soil quality, food safety and human health. In 2022, a new study identified microplastics in human blood samples for the first time. On the high seas, a recent Nature study found that the blue whales, which typically feed upon krill, may consume some 10 million pieces of microplastics a day, a taste of what other large fish like tuna and salmon are likely eating as well. Human exposure to plastic additives such as DEHP and Phthalates, which are used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC), leads to higher risks of cancer and hormonal disorders that cause reproductive health problems, research has shown. Not only are phthalate additives health harmful, but the production of PVC out of fossil fuel-derived ethylene, generates considerable mercury emissions, which are toxic for humans and to wildlife. Along with its uses in waterproof garments and building materials, PVC is ubiquitous in healthcare settings where it is a key component of basic medical devices like IV tubes. ‘Dangerous for all living things’ Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, whose nation has teamed with Norway to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, told the panel that “plastic pollution is not only dangerous for nature but for all living things, including human beings.” “No one country can solve the problem alone, she emphasized. Marco Lambertini, a special envoy for Gland, Switzerland-based World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), said that negotiations on an international treaty need to be inclusive of governments, businesses, investors and citizens. “Without everybody, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “We also need to look at the plastic value chain in its entirety, from production to disposal.” (Left to right): At the WEF panel on plastic pollution, the Graduate Institute’s Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, moderator; WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya; Kristin Hughes of WEF; and Marco Lambertini of WWF. Developing countries that lack the infrastructure for waste management will need special help, he added, and recycling must be increased globally from its current “outrageous” low of less than 10%. “I see a real parallel between the phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing out of fossil fuel- based plastics,” he said. Kristin Hughes, director of WEF’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, added: “you don’t just need business, you also need the government component. And they need to work together.” WHO – ending plastics pollution critical to healthier environment The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ending plastics pollution is a critical part of creating a healthier environment for everyone, but more study is needed to determine the range of biological and human health impacts that plastics can and do have. “I don’t think plastics pollution and health – that connection – has been given the attention it needed,” Tedros said. “And not only that, we don’t have research that documents well how plastics affect human health throughout the [product] lifecycle. “They do actually.” Image Credits: John Heilprin, Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program, Plastics Atlas, 2019, @Antoine Giret/ Unsplash. ‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
Switzerland and Ecuador Appeal for Treaty to End the ‘Plastic Crisis’ 17/01/2023 John Heilprin Microplastics from a river in Maryland, collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Marine Debris Program. Recent research have now found microplastics in human blood samples. DAVOS, Switzerland – The presidents of Switzerland and Ecuador led a call here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Tuesday for greater international cooperation to fight plastic pollution, urging passage of a global treaty with tough regulations to confront a burgeoning environmental and health crisis from the ubiquitous material once seen as a symbol of modernity. Swiss President Alain Berset, heading a panel discussion hosted by Switzerland, told a packed room that an international treaty and new “regulatory framework” is needed to get rid of plastics that are clogging the world’s ecosystems, choking oceans and poisoning fish and wildlife – with severe human health consequences. “We are facing a major plastic crisis. The world cannot deal with the amount of plastic it produces,” he said. “If we continue on this path there could be more plastic than fish by 2050.” Berset said the plastic crisis is not only an environmental crisis, but also a health and socioeconomic challenge, “and Switzerland is ready to do its part.” Switzerland’s President Alain Berset at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza noted that his nation and Switzerland are “united by a historic commitment” to work together to end plastics pollution as two of the five countries joining the United Nations Security Council this year. Japan, Malta, Mozambique are the other three countries elected to a two-year term on the 15-nation Council, the world body’s most powerful arm, based in New York. “With our commitment we are indeed making history. We must find a solution to the global crisis of plastic waste,” said Lasso Mendoza. “In just a few years, there will be more plastic in our oceans by tons than there is fauna.” Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso Mendoza at the WEF panel on plastic pollution. In a historic moment in March 2022, the world’s environment ministries agreed to negotiate a treaty on plastics pollution. The decision by some 175 UN member states was reached at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. But the road to approval and ratification of a legal instrument that has teeth promises to be a major lift in light of the powerful oil and gas interests that will oppose it every step of the way. Political leadership by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, in the Security Council and in other UN Fora, will thus be key to making progress in treaty negotiations. Fossil fuel producers scale up plastics production Currently, an estimated 5% of global total goods trade is in plastics, Lasso Mendoza said, citing UN data. But even as knowledge about the enormous environmental and health risks of plastics grows, fossil fuel producers are scaling up their plastics production, with plans to double the production of virgin plastic resin by 2040. At current rates, plastics are on track to account for 20% of oil and gas consumption by 2050, according to the UN Environment Programme. “Political will and leadership are the foundations upon which we must build,” Lasso Mendoza said. “Ecuador takes the fight against plastic very seriously. We need a globally binding treaty. We should reach agreement by the end of 2024.” Over the past 30 years, plastics production increased fourfold, with growth rates still rising exponentially. Already over the past 30 years, plastic consumption increased four-fold. Although global production of recycled plastics more than quadrupled over the same period, recycled plastics only represent about 6% of global plastics production, while 94% are “virgin” plastics, according to the OECD. Burgeoning health and environmental impacts Plastic waste from an informal landfill litters a rural seascape in Albania while goats graze nearby. Of the majority of plastic waste that doesn’t get reprocessed and reused, 19% is incinerated, 50% ends up in landfills, and 22% is burned in open pits, with the remainder winding up in uncontrolled dumpsites, scattered along roadsides, farmlands or littering coastal beaches and waters of poorer countries. A 2021 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that plastic contamination of farmland from single-use soil and plant coverings, tubing and other materials, poses an increasing threat to soil quality, food safety and human health. In 2022, a new study identified microplastics in human blood samples for the first time. On the high seas, a recent Nature study found that the blue whales, which typically feed upon krill, may consume some 10 million pieces of microplastics a day, a taste of what other large fish like tuna and salmon are likely eating as well. Human exposure to plastic additives such as DEHP and Phthalates, which are used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC), leads to higher risks of cancer and hormonal disorders that cause reproductive health problems, research has shown. Not only are phthalate additives health harmful, but the production of PVC out of fossil fuel-derived ethylene, generates considerable mercury emissions, which are toxic for humans and to wildlife. Along with its uses in waterproof garments and building materials, PVC is ubiquitous in healthcare settings where it is a key component of basic medical devices like IV tubes. ‘Dangerous for all living things’ Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, whose nation has teamed with Norway to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, told the panel that “plastic pollution is not only dangerous for nature but for all living things, including human beings.” “No one country can solve the problem alone, she emphasized. Marco Lambertini, a special envoy for Gland, Switzerland-based World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF), said that negotiations on an international treaty need to be inclusive of governments, businesses, investors and citizens. “Without everybody, we won’t get anywhere,” he said. “We also need to look at the plastic value chain in its entirety, from production to disposal.” (Left to right): At the WEF panel on plastic pollution, the Graduate Institute’s Carolyn Deere Birkbeck, moderator; WHO’s Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Rwanda’s Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya; Kristin Hughes of WEF; and Marco Lambertini of WWF. Developing countries that lack the infrastructure for waste management will need special help, he added, and recycling must be increased globally from its current “outrageous” low of less than 10%. “I see a real parallel between the phasing out of fossil fuels and the phasing out of fossil fuel- based plastics,” he said. Kristin Hughes, director of WEF’s Global Plastic Action Partnership, added: “you don’t just need business, you also need the government component. And they need to work together.” WHO – ending plastics pollution critical to healthier environment The World Health Organization’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said ending plastics pollution is a critical part of creating a healthier environment for everyone, but more study is needed to determine the range of biological and human health impacts that plastics can and do have. “I don’t think plastics pollution and health – that connection – has been given the attention it needed,” Tedros said. “And not only that, we don’t have research that documents well how plastics affect human health throughout the [product] lifecycle. “They do actually.” Image Credits: John Heilprin, Will Parson/Chesapeake Bay Program, Plastics Atlas, 2019, @Antoine Giret/ Unsplash. ‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
‘Transactional’ Pathogen Sharing Undermines Global Health Security 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The existing international framework for sharing pathogens is ‘transactional’ and undermines global health security, according to research commissioned by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA). Produced by legal consultancy Covington, the research was developed partly from interviews with 82 public health experts. There were drawn from the pharmaceutical companies (44% of respondents), the World Health Organization (17%), public health institutions including the US Center for Disease Control, (23%), biobanks (7%), academia (1%), NGOs (7%), and other stakeholders (1%). Through interviews with global health experts, our new report points to concerns of a “politicization” of #pathogens sharing, leading to significant delays in developing vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics. Find out more: https://t.co/xmjfhNz7as #NagoyaProtocol @IFPMA pic.twitter.com/cR6CRxWKm0 — Covington (@CovingtonLLP) January 17, 2023 “The research “points to an increased ‘politicization’ of access to samples of pathogens, as well as access to sequence information on pathogens,” according to a statement released by the IFPMA on Tuesday. “This is due to countries’ adoption of national access and benefit-sharing (ABS) rules under the Nagoya Protocol and potentially, the future draft Pandemic Accord,” The Nagoya Protocol “employs a transactional model”, requiring almost 100 countries to get a permit “each time a researcher wishes to access that nation’s biodiversity for R&D”, according to the IFPMA. “In return for the permit, benefit-sharing in the form of a payment on the result from R&D is usually required.” While this was meant to attach value to and protect biodiversity, “there is a broad consensus among stakeholders interviewed by Covington that the transactional model of the Nagoya Protocol applied to pathogens is not logical, and undermines global health security”. A possible solution, it adds, would be to unlink “access” to pathogens from “benefits” derived from such access. This would “ensure rapid and free sharing of pathogen samples and sequence data, while addressing equity concerns separately”, it adds. “Coming on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic and as negotiations commence on the so-called pandemic accord led by the WHO, our report demonstrates the need to secure free, rapid and unhindered access for scientists to pathogen samples and sequence data,” said Bart Van Vooren, who led the Covington team. ‘Held hostage to deals’ “Currently, pathogens are being held hostage to deals on benefit-sharing through the Nagoya Protocol. This represents a grave risk for humanity when the next pandemic hits,” he added. The report provides examples of how ABS laws have blocked or delayed researchers’ access to pathogen samples of seasonal influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, mpox, Japanese Encephalitis, Foot and Mouth Disease, Ebola, and African Swine Fever. It also shows that delays or refusals for pathogen-sharing have led to “sub-optimal vaccine composition, including lack of regional representativeness”; diagnostics that were not tailored or tested against original or new variants of pathogens and “skewed and non-representative epidemiology in genomic surveillance”. Thomas Cueni, Director General of IFPMA, said: “Investments in global health security, especially improved and expanded pathogen and disease surveillance, will not achieve the ultimate goal of protecting people and saving lives, if immediate and unfettered access to pathogens and their genetic information is constrained.” Image Credits: Paul Owere/Twitter . Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
Amid Grim Economic Outlook, Women’s Health is Still Best Investment 17/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, Diminishing democracy, growing nationalism, widening social inequality, growing climate-related crises and debt are part of the “unprecedented” trends of 2023, according to world leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday. “Our generation has reached a turning point confronted by truly existential problems: climate change, exploitation of nature, nuclear possible incidents or even worse, extreme poverty and violence. They all can lead to the extinction of large parts of our global population,” warned WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Swiss president Alain Berset warned that “extreme inequality undermines social cohesion, creates resentments, causing us to seek scapegoats and it is politically toxic, eating away at our faith in democracy”. Only 20% of the world’s population lives in democracies, down from 50% 30 years ago, said Berset. Inequality was exacerbated by climate change, the Ukraine war and the COVID-19 pandemic, added Berst, pointing out that 300 million people faced “acute risk of hunger”. Investment in women’s health UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem But investment in basic healthcare for women still offers one of the best returns on investment. UNFPA executive director Natalia Kanem said that “there are still 300 million women who would want to access family planning that are knocking on the door of a clinic and nobody is there. “We’ve seen the wisdom and the high return of almost $10 for every dollar you invest in family planning and maternal health,” Kanem added. Smriti Zubin Irani, India’s Minister of Women and Child Development, said her government’s introduction of health insurance for the country’s poorest families had resulted in the “unprecedented number “ of 120 million Indian women being scanned for cervical and breast cancer. Irani said that there is “a conscious effort on behalf of the government to ensure that the whole life cycle needs of a woman’s health are looked after by every government entity”. After a 40-year wait, a Bill allowing abortion from 24 weeks “passed both houses of parliament without a whimper”, said Irani. In addition, 703 emergency and crisis centres for women had helped 220 million women in distress, and “given them medical, psychological and police help so that they can transition from challenges towards solutions”. “When you invest in the health of a woman, you invest in the health of community. When you empower her financially, she tends to spend more on health and education.” Bio-pharmaceutical company Organon is focusing on “femtech” solutions to address women’s health, said CEO Kevin Ali. In the 18 months since it was listed on the New York stock exchange, Organon has “done eight deals’, said Ali. “Two are in the medical device space, one to solve the issues of postpartum haemorrhage, and one to solve some of the issues around minimally invasive hysterectomy,” said Ali. His company is also investing in “new mechanisms of action for endometriosis, preterm labour and polycystic ovary syndrome”. Nutrition and pregnancy Mark Suzman, Gates Foundation CEO “Nutrition is such a critical enabler for healthy pregnancies and healthy birth,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “An area where we are prioritising investment right now is treatments for anaemia, which is actually one of the most fundamental challenges facing women and particularly women in pregnancy.” While a number of companies were researching the microbiome “to figure out how to do better weight loss”, the Gates Foundation was focusing on “what elements of treating the microbiome can actually be most important in the antenatal and postnatal period for women and children”, added Suzman. “We were also able to do some research as a public good which showed the efficacy of a single dose of HPV vaccine [to prevent cervical cancer] was as good as multiple doses. That basically allowed you to vaccinate twice as many children,” he added. World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
World Economic Forum Warns of Uncertain and Turbulent Decade Ahead 16/01/2023 Kerry Cullinan The “cost-of-living crisis” and failure to mitigate climate change are the most acute global risks, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) which opened in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. The forum’s risk assessment report 2023 released last week identifies a “polycrisis” of risks, most of which relate to environmental and societal issues, such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and large-scale involuntary migration. However, despite the prominence of environmental concerns, environmental activists have already called out WEF leaders for hypocrisy. On Sunday, protestors blocked a number of private jets from landing at Davos airport – over 1000 jets are expected to bring the rich and powerful to the meeting, causing significant carbon emissions. Protestors block private jets at Davos’s airport. In addition, a social media campaign was also launched by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, demanding that energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need” or face legal action and protests. ‘Tax the rich’ Meanwhile, Oxfam also called for new measures to tax the world’s super-rich, releasing research on the eve of the meeting showing that, since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the richest 1% had “grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth” – almost twice as much money as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. “A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%,” according to Oxfam, which calculated that a tax of up to 5% on the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires “could raise $1.7 trillion a year, enough to lift two billion people out of poverty”. The WEF, the first in-person meeting of the annual event since 2020, was set up to promote public-private collaboration, and has become a marketplace for world leaders to promote investment in their countries and for businesses to court government support. However, the annual risk assessment frankly acknowledges the dire economic conditions faced particularly by people in poorer countries thanks to the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cost-of-living crisis Based on interviews with key leaders, the cost-of-living crisis is ranked as the most severe global risk over the next two years. “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks – inflation, cost-of-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare – which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced,” it warns. “These are being amplified by comparatively new developments in the global risks landscape, including unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, low global investment and de-globalization, a decline in human development after decades of progress, rapid and unconstrained development of dual-use (civilian and military) technologies, and the growing pressure of climate change impacts and ambitions in an ever-shrinking window for transition to a 1.5°C world.” Taking all these factors into account, the WEF warns of a “unique, uncertain and turbulent decade” ahead. Nine risks are featured in the top 10 rankings over both the short and the long term, including “geoeconomic confrontation” and “erosion of social cohesion and societal polarisation”, alongside “widespread cybercrime and cyber insecurity” and “large-scale involuntary migration”. Health is the focus of a number of sessions of the forum, which runs midday on Friday These include sessions on pandemic preparedness, women’s health, tuberculosis and equity. One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy Loading Comments... You must be logged in to post a comment.
One Billion People Lack Access to Health Facilities with Reliable Electricity 16/01/2023 Stefan Anderson One-eighth of the global population does not have access to health facilities with reliable electricity. The resulting treatment gaps threaten the health and lives of nearly one billion people around the world. Nearly one billion people in low- and middle-income countries lack access to health facilities with reliable electricity, a joint report by the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank, and International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) found. Electricity is essential for the functioning of medical equipment like ventilators, incubators, and cold-chain storage for vaccines, as well as basic hospital needs like computers and air circulation systems required to keep them running smoothly. Without a steady supply of electricity, healthcare services like childbirth, emergency care, and vaccinations cannot be adequately provided. Despite its importance, the electrification of healthcare infrastructure has long been overlooked, leaving one-eight of the global population in danger of not being able to reliably access the care they need. In total, over 430 million people are served by medical facilities without any electricity at all. The report is the first to map electricity access in low- and middle-income countries worldwide, and revealed large gaps in electricity access in the world’s poorest countries. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan countries, only half of health facilities reported having reliable access to electricity, while 12-15%, or 25,000 facilities, reported having no electricity whatsoever. “It is simply unacceptable that tens of thousands of clinics in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are equipped with little more than kerosene lanterns and rapid diagnostic tests,” the report said. “The image of health care providers bent over a patient’s bedside, hand-holding his or her pulse under a fading kerosene lamp – needs to be relegated once and for all to the annals of history.” $4.9 billion to bring facilities up to a minimal standard Central and eastern Africa have the highest proportion of health facilities with no electricity access at all – 50% or more in some regions. At least 912 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa rely on medical facilities with no electricity access or an unreliable energy supply. An analysis by the World Bank included in the report found that nearly two-thirds of facilities across these regions are in need of urgent intervention to improve their access to reliable electricity. With over 100,000 facilities requiring new off-grid electrical connections and over 230,000 others needing a backup energy system, the World Bank estimates $4.9 billion will be required to bring them to a minimal standard of electrification. But the cost-estimate limits itself only to the most basic level of energy needs required to operate essential health services, set at 15 kilowatts per hour for clinics and 500 kilowatts per hour for hospitals, and does not reflect the same standard present in hospitals in rich countries. Expanding health clinics’ energy access to 32 kilowatts per hour, to allow for the provision of a broader range of healthcare services, also increases the price tag to $8.9 billion. Importantly, the estimates also do not include costs related to the acquisition of new medical equipment. Electrification without a parallel investment in such equipment, the report found, would be an incomplete strategy, meaning the real amount of investment needed is higher than the figures set forth in the report. “This required amount is much lower than the social cost of inaction,” the report said. No need to “wait for the grid” Sub-Saharan Africa and East and Pacific Asia, the two regions with the highest rates of non-electrified health facilities, are ideally situated to take advantage of advances in solar technology. Centralised grid extension has long served as the go-to strategy for expanding energy access. But this approach often falls short when trying to reach rural and remote regions of low-income countries due to the distance the grid needs to expand to reach the populations living in their farthest reaches. Technological advances and price drops in renewables, especially solar, have triggered a rethink of the grid-based approach. Instead, the report found decentralized sustainable energy solutions are often “the most technically and economically viable solution” to reach people living in areas with challenging terrain for traditional infrastructural expansion. In a presentation delivered at the report’s launch event, Dr Maria Neira, acting assistant-director general of Healthier Populations at the WHO, said there are “no excuses” for not making progress on increasing access to decentralized, sustainable energy sources given the availability and affordability of these technologies. “No need to wait for the grid. IRENA has pointed out the role of centralized renewable energy to increase electricity access,” she said. “It’s cheap and more resilient to climate change. This is a major development priority as it saves lives.” Decentralized approaches have the added benefit of allowing healthcare facilities to be energy independent, insulating them from the risks of fuel shortages or price shocks inherent to a reliance on fuel generators. The higher reliability of renewable energy solutions, in turn, means higher uptime for life saving medical equipment, and essentials like clean water access, particularly in regions vulnerable to water insecurity or extreme weather events. “Solutions are available and rapidly deployable,” the report added. “The impact on saving lives and improving the health of vulnerable populations would be huge.” Electricity access is a story of inequalities Stark inequalities in accessing reliable electricity in healthcare facilities emerge when comparing different countries based on income, facility type, and location. Generally, facilities in low-income countries have less access to reliable electricity than those in lower-middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have the lowest rates of electrification, followed by the Pacific and East Asia regions. Low rates of medical facility electrification are often symptoms of a wider lack of development of energy infrastructure. In South Sudan, for example, overall energy access – let alone that for medical facilities – was estimated at just 7.24% nationally. Disparities in access to electricity are also pronounced within countries. Non-hospital healthcare facilities, like primary health centers, which often serve poorer regions due to their lower operating costs, tend to have less access to reliable electricity supplies than hospitals. A divide can also be seen between urban and rural areas, with urban healthcare facilities reporting better access to than rural facilities in the same country. Until the electrification gap can be bridged, one eighth of the world’s population, equal to the populations of the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia and Germany combined, remain in a medical no man’s land. “Electricity access in healthcare facilities can make the difference between life and death,” Neira said. Image Credits: WHO, World Bank. Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts This site uses cookies to help give you the best experience on our website. Cookies enable us to collect information that helps us personalise your experience and improve the functionality and performance of our site. By continuing to read our website, we assume you agree to this, otherwise you can adjust your browser settings. Please read our cookie and Privacy Policy. Our Cookies and Privacy Policy
Most Long COVID Symptoms ‘Resolve’ within 12 Months 16/01/2023 Maayan Hoffman A patient sits outside Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital in New Delhi, which was one of India’s largest COVID treatment facilities. 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 from diagnosis,” according to researchers. The clinical definition of long COVID is still evolving. So far, it has been defined as persistent symptoms or appearance of new symptoms beyond four weeks from the diagnosis of COVID-19, which cannot be attributed to another condition. More than two million people in the United Kingdom are living with long COVID, according to various studies published over the summer. Similarly, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed in June that more than 40% of US adults have COVID-19 and one in five of those (19%) had long COVID symptoms. Long COVID symptoms can vary from loss of smell and taste, concentration and memory impairment and breathing difficulties to weakness, palpitations, streptococcal tonsillitis and dizziness. The main objective of the Israeli study was to compare the long-term incidence of long COVID symptoms between uninfected people and people who were diagnosed with mild cases of the virus. To do so, the Israeli team analyzed electronic health records from the database of the country’s second-largest health fund, Maccabi Healthcare Services. Difficulty breathing Some 299,885 members with complete data were eligible for the study, all of who had tested positive for COVID-19 between 1 March 2020 and 1 October 2021 but had not been hospitalized within 30 days of diagnosis. The eligible cohort was matched with 299,870 similar people who tested negative. Potentially influential factors, such as alcohol intake, smoking status, socioeconomic level and a range of pre-existing chronic conditions were also taken into account. Because of the study time period, the results covered all of the earliest COVID-19 waves, including the Delta wave, but did not include patients diagnosed with the Omicron variant. Over 70 long COVID conditions were analysed, comparing these during early (30-180 days) and late (180-360 days) time periods after infection. Conditions in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people with COVID-19 were also compared over the same time periods. Chest pain, cough, hair loss, muscle and joint pain and respiratory disorders were significantly increased only during the early phase, the research showed. In contrast, brain fog, breathing problems, dizziness and weakness, heart palpitations, loss of smell and taste and strep throat remained risks in both the early and late time periods. However, even for most of these symptoms, the risk difference between the people who tested positive for the virus and those who did not was less dramatic in the second six months of follow-up. Difficulty with breathing was the most common complaint. The study found that vaccinated people were at lower risk of breathing difficulties compared with unvaccinated people. In general, children had fewer long COVID symptoms than adults and recovered from most of them well within a year. A separate study published by the UK Office of National Statistic in January found that around one-third (30%) of people who self-reported long COVID symptoms as of December 2022 reported experiencing symptoms for at least two years. Nonetheless, “these findings suggest that, although the long COVID phenomenon has been feared and discussed since the beginning of the pandemic, the vast majority of mild disease cases do not suffer serious or chronic long-term illness,” the researchers said. Image Credits: Flickr. Posts navigation Older postsNewer posts