The World Heart Federation (WHF) has been advocating globally for stronger
legislation and policy regarding cardiovascular disease (CVD) for many years. Now, as focus shifts from global to national progress, we call on members and colleagues to advocate for greater action on CVD in your local setti...ngs. This ‘Road to 2018 Toolkit’ provides World Heart Federation members with information
and specific, practical tools to support national CVD advocacy, especially around the United Nations High-Level Meeting on NCDs in 2018.
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This report provides an overview of the operations and activities of the WHO Country Office in Ukraine in 2023. Despite the acute health impacts of the war in Ukraine, the Country Office continued its work according to its core mandate. WHO supported the Government of Ukraine in managing the health ...emergency and pursued existing priorities set out in WHO’s Thirteenth General Programme of Work 2019–2023, the European Programme of Work 2020–2025, and the Biennial Collaborative Agreement 2022–2023 signed with the Government of Ukraine. The report presents the achievements of the WHO Country Office in Ukraine in 2023 in the context of the war’s impact on the lives, health, and well-being of Ukrainians.
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Asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease (CRD) worldwide and is estimated to affect 262 million causing significant mortality and morbidity, and has emerged as an important public health problem in many Latin American (LA) countries over the last 30 or so years. LA is a highly diverse r...egion in terms of geography, climate, wealth, and ethnicity including 20 different countries with 639 million inhabitants, where 40 million are estimated to have asthma. A common feature of LA countries is the high level of social inequalities3 (Figure 1). In LA, asthma prevalence in both children and adults is highly variable and, where high, is among the highest worldwide, particularly in coastal tropical cities.
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The European Respiratory Society (ERS)/American Thoracic Society (ATS) Task Force on severe asthma includes an updated definition of severe asthma, a discussion of severe asthma phenotypes in relation to genetics, natural history, pathobiology and physiology, as well as sections on evaluation and tr...eatment of severe asthma where specific recommendations for practice are made. See the unabridged online version of the document for detailed discussion of the definition of severe asthma, phenotypes and recommendations for practice.
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Women, girls and marginalized groups who are largely dependent on natural resources for livelihoods are among the hardest hit by extreme weather patterns. These weather patterns limit their access to food, water, shelter, education and access to essential health services, including those that addres...s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), gender-based violence (GBV) and preventing harmful practices such as child marriage and female genital mutilation.
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Several challenges face asthma management in Egypt, including the high percentage of uncontrolled patients, inadequate compliance, and overuse of short-acting beta-agonists (SABAs) leading to increased asthma-related morbidity and mortality. In this regard, the recent Global Initiative for Asthma (G...INA) recommendations included inhaled corticosteroids containing therapy for mild asthma. Local healthcare systems and healthcare professionals (HCPs) often experience practical challenges when implementing global guidelines.
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National action plans on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) often overlook the critical intersection of gender, despite evidence that exposure and susceptibility to infection, health-seeking behaviours, as well as antimicrobial prescribing and use patterns are all influenced by gender.
World Vision’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) approach actively strives to examine, question, and change harmful social norms and power imbalances as a means of reaching gender equality and social inclusion objectives in a programme area.
This reference guide is designed to help WASH... practitioners implement GESI-transformative WASH programmes by supporting change across all five GESI domains – access, decision-making, participation, systems, and well-being. It provides information on how to design, implement, monitor and evaluate a WASH project or programme to address GESI.
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for major societal transformations that will require significant fiscal outlays as well as private investments. The fiscal outlays cover public investments, the public provision of social services, and social protection for vulnerable populations. The ke...y message of this paper, building on recent reports by the IMF and SDSN (IMF, 2019b; SDSN, 2018) is that the governments of Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs) will require a substantial increase in fiscal (budget) revenues, far beyond what they can achieve by their own fiscal reforms. For this reason, SDG financing will require substantial international cooperation to enable the LIDCs to finance their SDG fiscal outlays. One important source of increased revenues should be the globally coordinated taxation of ultra-high-net worth assets. Today’s ultra-rich should help to pay for the survival and basic needs of the world’s poorest people.
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Unmet mental health needs in the Region of the Americas are a leading source of morbidity and mortality, which result in tremendous health, social, and economic consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the mental health crisis in the Region, necessitating urgent action at the highest leve...ls of government and across sectors to build back better mental health now and for the future. This landmark report is the result of the PAHO High-Level Commission on Mental Health and COVID-19. It provides an analysis of the mental health situation in the Region, followed by a series of recommendations and corresponding actions to support countries in the Americas to prioritize and advance mental health using human rights- and equity-based approaches.
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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has launched a new Compendium of forgotten foods in Africa which is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive collection of 100 African forgotten food crops.
Also referred to as neglected, underutilized or orphan crops, these species offer valua...ble benefits, including nutrition and diet diversification, while supporting resilient, climate-smart agriculture but they are at risk of being lost as foods such as maize, rice and wheat dominate African diets.
The compendium list includes details on each crop's botanical classification, agroecological suitability, agronomic requirements, traditional and medicinal uses, value-added prospects and nutritional content. Among the entries are: African locust beans, African nightshade, baobab, Bambara nut, bush mango, cassava, fonio, marula, moringa, teff and tigernut.
Produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s Regional Office for Africa with the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the Compendium is a direct response to the UN Food Systems Summit and the Call for Collective Action in the Global Manifesto on Forgotten Foods.
Embracing both agricultural heritage and innovation can transform agrifood systems across Africa. By cataloguing these forgotten or underutilized crops, traditional knowledge is being honoured in the push to unlock the potential for better nutrition, sustainable agriculture, and resilience against the climate crisis.
In a joint foreword to the publication, FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Africa Abebe Haile-Gabriel and FARA Executive Director Aggrey Agumya urged the mainstreaming of forgotten foods into African agrifood systems.
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Global HIV control funding falls short of need. To maximize health outcomes, it is critical that national governments sustain reasonable commitments, and that international donor assistance be distributed according to country needs and funding gaps. We develop a country classification framework in t...erms of actual versus expected national domestic funding, considering resource needs and donor financing. With UNAIDS and World Bank data, we examine domestic and donor HIV program funding in relation to need in 84 low- and middle-income countries. We estimate expected domestic contributions per person living with HIV (PLWH) as a function of per capita income, relative size of the health sector, and per capita foreign debt service.
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The Creditor Reporting System was analysed for official development assistance funding disbursements towards TB control in 11 conflict-affectedstates, 17 non-conflict-affected fragile states and 38 comparable non-fragile states. The amounts of funding, funding relative to burden, funding relative to... malaria and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) control, disbursements relative to commitments, sources of funding as well as funding activities were extracted and analysed.
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UNAIDS leads and inspires the world to achieve its shared vision of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. It unites the efforts of 11 UN Cosponsor organizations- UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP,UNFPA, UNODC, UN Women, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank- and a Secretari...at.
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Little is known about foreign aid provided by private donors. This paper contributes to closing this research gap by comparing the allocation of private humanitarian aid to that of official humanitarian aid awarded to 140 recipient countries over the 2000-2016 period. We construct a new database tha...t offers information on the country in which the headquarters of private donors are located to test whether private donors follow the aid allocation pattern of their home country. Our empirical results confirm that private aid “follows the flag.” This finding is robust against the inclusion of various fixed effects, estimating instrumental variables models, and disaggregating private aid into corporate aid and NGO aid. Donor country-specific estimations reveal that private aid from China, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States “follow the flag.”
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Mental disorders are a leading cause of the global burden of disease, and the provision of mental health services in developing countries remains very limited and far from equitable. Using the Creditor Reporting System, we estimate the amounts and patterns of development assistance for global mental... health (DAMH) between 2007 and 2013. This allows us to examine how well international donors have responded to calls by global mental health advocates to scale up evidence-based services. Although DAMH did increase between 2007 and 2013, it remains low both in absolute terms and as a proportion of total development assistance for health (DAH). The average annual DAMH between 2007 and 2013 was US$133.57 million, and the proportion of DAH attributed to mental health is less than 1%. Approximately 48% of total DAMH was for humanitarian assistance, education, and civil services. More annual DAMH was channelled into the nonpublic sector than the public sector. Despite an expanding body of evidence suggesting that sustainable mental health care can be effectively integrated into existing health systems at relatively low cost, mental health has not received significant development assistance.
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With sustained economic growth in many parts of the developing world, an increasing number of countries are transitioning away from the most subsidized development finance as they exceed income and other qualification requirements. Cross-country evidence suggests that Development Assistance Committe...e (DAC) donors view the crossing over of the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA) eligibility threshold to signal that a country needs less aid, with subsequent reductions in both IDA and other donors’ concessional funding. Within the health sector, it is particularly important to understand the implications of these status changes for children under five years of age since improving early childhood health is critical to fostering health and social and economic development. Therefore, we examine the implications of the IDA transition by measuring the extent t which World Bank commitments—including both IDA and IBRD—are directed to infant and child health needs in Nigeria. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models were used in a difference-indifferences (DID) strategy to compare World Bank IBRD/IDA lending before and after the crossover to regions with varying initial levels of under-five and infant need.
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As the Americas undergo profound demographic change and there are more persons aged 65 years or older than children younger than 5 years, it is crucial to recognize that national immunization programs must be redesigned to ensure comprehensive protection for individuals across the lifespan. By adopt...ing a life course approach (LCA) to immunization, vaccination programs can be tailored to close immunity gaps at different stages of life. The life course approach foresees the establishment of multiple strategies to reduce missed opportunities for vaccination according to age group. This technical document explains the key concepts of the LCA with a focus on immunization by vaccination, as well as the underlying biological mechanisms that require the application different vaccines at different life stages according to changes to the immune system and in the epidemiological situation of a community.
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The report summarizes key global health expenditure patterns and trends, and illustrates the potential of the new database to inform thinking about financing reforms to progress towards UHC, and also raises issues for further research. It analyses the following areas:
This WHO laboratory manual provides the most up to date methods and procedures for the laboratory identification of yellow fever virus infection in humans. It provides guidance on the establishment and maintenance of an effective laboratory providing routine surveillance testing for yellow fever, wh...ich operates within the WHO coordinated Global Yellow Fever Laboratory Network (GYFLaN) capable of providing confirmation of yellow fever infection reliably and timely. This second edition supersedes the first edition of the 2004 WHO manual for the monitoring of yellow fever virus infection.
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