In Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis acknowledged that “numerous scientists, philosophers, theologians and civic groups have enriched the Church’s thinking” on sustainability. Hospitals and health care organizations may not be an obvious resource for ecological inspirati
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on, but they have been responsible for shaping the contours of sustainability as well. While some Catholic health care organizations have already established measures to mitigate climate change, Laudato Si’ challenges all of Catholic health care to reflect the dual concerns for “God’s creation and the poor and outcast.” Concretely, two ways this can be achieved are by cutting carbon emissions and reducing water footprints.
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After eight years of armed conflict in the east of the country, the Russian Federation started a military offensive in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The impact
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of this war has been devastating. It has so far caused 16,200 civilian casualties and destroyed key infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools, homes, and water installations.
Since the beginning of the conflict, nearly 14 million people - a third of all Ukrainians - have been forced to leave their homes, 90% of them women, children, and elderly people. An estimated 6.2 million people are displaced within Ukraine, while more than 7 million sought safety in Poland, Romania and Moldova or passed through to other destinations in Europe. Some have returned to Ukraine. Another 13 million people are estimated to be stranded in or unable to leave affected areas within the country.
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This report describes the activities of the WHO European Centre for Primary Health Care in 2022.The Centre accelerated face-to-face country support after the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to support
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countries in engaging in analysis and diagnosis, developing strategies and policies, building capacity and tracking implementation progress and impact. The Centre delivered intensive support in the countries of the Universal Health Coverage Partnership. The Centre continued to develop policy guidance, publish good practices, have capacity-building activities and policy dialogues and solidified its signature product Let’s Talk Primary Health Care talk show platform. The highlight of 2022 was the launch of two WHO Primary Health Care Demonstration Platforms to facilitate cross-country experience exchange.
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The Mapping Antimicrobial Resistance and Antimicrobial Use Partnership (MAAP) project has conducted a multi-year, multi-country study that provides stark insights on the under-reported depth of the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis across Africa
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and lays out urgent policy recommendations to address the emergency.
MAAP reviewed 819,584 AMR records from 2016-2019, from 205 laboratories across Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Eswatini, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. MAAP also reviewed data from 327 hospital and community pharmacies and 16 national-level AMC datasets.
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Evidence-based psychological interventions are an important part of health, social, protection and education services and can help increase access to effective mental health treatments and progression towards universal health coverage.
This manua
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l provides managers and others responsible for planning and delivering services with practical guidance on how to implement manualized psychological interventions for adults, adolescents and children. It covers the five key implementation steps: make an implementation plan; adapt for context; prepare the workforce; identify, assess and support potential beneficiaries; and monitor and evaluate the service.
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A manual intended for medical and other personnel responsible for humanitarian activities in armed conflicts. It covers the following topics: setting up a health-care system that meets the essential needs of war victims, particularly
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of displaced persons; public health tools most frequently used for evaluation, establishment of priorities, analysis of possible activities and their follow-up; protecting war victims and aspects of humanitarian law related to health; and lastly, ethical problems
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A Manual for Maternity Unit Personnel - Part of the CBM Prevention Toolkit on Birth Impairments
This study aimed to determine the drug resistance profile of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Mozambique and concludes that M. tuberculosis resistance to antituberculosis drugs is high in Mozambique, especially in previously treated patients. The frequ
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ency of M. tuberculosis strains that were resistant to isoniazid, rifampin, and streptomycin in combination was found to be high, particularly in samples from previously treated patients.
J Bras Pneumol. 2014;40(2):142-147
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People younger than 20 years comprise 35% of the global population and 40% of the global population of least-developed nations. The number
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of children - neonates, infants, children, and adolescents up to 19 years of age - who need pediatric palliative care (PPC) each year may be as high as 21 million. Another study found that almost 2.5 million children die each year with serious health related suffering and that more than 98% of these children are in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (3). While estimates differ, there is no doubt that there is an enormous need for prevention and relief of suffering among children - for PPC.
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Child sex trafficking is a severe form of trauma exposure that has significant immediate and long-term consequences for survivors. According to the United Nations International Labor Organization, in 2016 more than 1 million children worldwide were
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victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Currently, no reliable estimate of the prevalence of child sex trafficking in the US exists, in part due to its hidden nature, disparities in definitions, and methodological challenges.
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A systematic review informing a radical transformation of health workforce development
PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185526 September 28, 2017
Global Health and Tropical Medicine, GHTM, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, IHMT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, UNL, Lisboa, Portugal
The infectious disease burden in India is among the highest in the world. A large amount of antibiot-ics are consumed in fighting infections, some of them saving lives, but every use adding to antib
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iotic resistance in bacteria. Antibiotic use is increasing steadily (table 1), particularly certain antibiotic classes (beta-lactam antibacterials), most notably in the more prosperous states. Resistance follows in lock-step.
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WHO published guidance for clinicians and health care decision-makers on the use of corticosteroids in patients with COVID-19.
We recommend systemic corticosteroids for the treatment of patients
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with severe and critical COVID-19. We suggest not to use corticosteroids in the treatment of patients with non-severe COVID-19 as the treatment brought no benefits, and could even prove harmful. Treatment should be under supervision of a clinician.
Corticosteroids are listed in the WHO model list of essential medicines, readily available globally at a low cost. WHO encourages countries to maintain sufficient stocks of corticosteroids to treat COVID-19 and the other disease for which they are effective, while not maintaining excessive stocks which could deny other countries access.
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In order to help Member States understand what commercial foods for infants and young children are currently on the market, and to support implementation of the Guidance on ending inappropriate promotion o
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f foods for infants and young children at the European level, the WHO Regional Office for Europe developed a methodology for identifying commercial baby foods available in retail settings and collecting data on their nutritional content, as well as various aspects of their packaging, labelling and promotion.
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It will be updated continuously.
Details of COVID-19 availability in all ten ASEAN countries and another 30 Asian nations.
Due to the developing situation in China and Asia concerning the Coronavirus, we will be operating this article as a running
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live update service to keep businesses involved in ASEAN and Asia updated with the latest relevant regional news.
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Interim guidance 2 march 2021
Current use of drugs to prevent COVID-19 is variable, reflecting large-scale uncertainty. Numerous randomized trials of many different drugs are underway to inform pra
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ctice. This first version of the Drugs to prevent COVID-19: A WHO living guideline contains new information and a recommendation on hydroxychloroquine. It follows the publication of six trials synthesized in a living network meta-analysis (NMA).
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Member States have requested WHO policy guidance on how to facilitate the implementation of national AMS activities in an integrated and programmatic approach. This policy guidance responds to that demand from Member States and is anchored in public
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health guiding principles in the human health sector. It aims to provide a set of evidence-based and pragmatic recommendations to drive comprehensive and integrated AMS activities under the purview of a central national coordination unit, National AMR steering or coordinating committees or other equivalent national authorities.
Available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese
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Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been
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increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Buruli ulcer at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland on 25 to 27 March 2019