4th edition
The WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual (LBM) has been in broad use at all levels of clinical and public health laboratories, and other biomedical sectors globally, serving as a de facto global standard that presents best practices and sets trends in biosafety.
LBM encouraged countries t...o accept and implement basic concepts in biological safety and to develop national codes of practice for the safe handling of biological agents in laboratories within their geographical borders.
This fourth edition of the manual builds on the risk assessment framework introduced in the third edition. A thorough, evidence-based and transparent assessment of the risks allows safety measures to be balanced with the actual risk of working with biological agents on a case-by-case basis.
This novel evidence- and risk-based approach will allow optimised resource use and sustainable laboratory biosafety and biosecurity policies and practices that are relevant to their individual circumstances and priorities, enabling equitable access to clinical and public health laboratory tests and biomedical research opportunities without compromising safety.
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Version 4
The purpose of these standard operating procedures (SOPs) is to offer policy guidance and to provide performance standards on how to respond to any type of poliovirus outbreak or event in a timely and effective manner, and specifically, to stop an outbrea...k within 120 days.
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Sudan recorded the first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020 and, at the beginning of July, the Federal Ministry of Health had confirmed that nearly 10,000 people had contracted the virus, including over 600 who died from the disease across the country. Although more than 70 per cent of the confirmed cas...es are in the Khartoum area, COVID-19 has spread throughout the country, with the highest numbers recorded in the central and eastern states. With extremely low testing capacity — around 800 samples per day, the lowest in the region — the official figures of confirmed cases likely underestimate the extent of the pandemic and the actual situation is unknown.
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The situation in South Sudan has proven to be unpredictable and volatile. New hotspots of violent conflict and civil unrest have continued to emerge and levels of severe acute food insecurity have become progressively worse. In addition to years of fighting and political instability, the country fac...es natural hazards, disease and pests, such as the desert locust, and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Collectively, these risks have had and continue to have a catastrophic impact on the lives and livelihoods of South Sudanese, the majority of whom rely on agriculture, livestock, forestry and fisheries as their main source of income.
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A One Health Response. A Briefing Note
The Lancet. 13 March 2022. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02868-3. Previous Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) studies have reported
national health estimates for Ethiopia. Substantial regional variations in socioeconomic status, population, demography, and access to hea...lth care within Ethiopia require comparable estimates at the subnational level. The GBD 2019 Ethiopia subnational analysis aimed to measure the progress and disparities in health across nine regions and two chartered cities.
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Together for One Health. Building on the momentum of increased collaboration, the WHO, FAO, OIE and UNEP have developed a Strategic Framework for collaboration on antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This Framework reflects the joint work of the four organizations to advance a One Health response to AMR ...at the global, regional and country level. It broadly supports the implementation of the five pillars of the Global Action Plan on AMR, as well as strengthening global AMR governance.
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The authors conduct an integrated survey of Antimicrobial Resistant Organisms (AMR) in drinking water, wastewater and surface water in three settings in Bangladesh: rural households, rural poultry farms, and urban food markets. Results show that untreated water discharged from rural households, poul...try farms and urban markets are major contributors to surface water pollution and antibiotic resistant bacteria genes, calling for increased surveillance and monitoring.
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The Kigali Declaration on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) is a high-level, political declaration which aims to mobilise political will and secure commitments to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) target on NTDs and to deliver the targets set out in the World Health Organization’s... Neglected Tropical Disease Roadmap (2021-2030).
Available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Kiswahli, Chinese,
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As the world recovers from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and reflects on lessons learnt from failure of global public health systems to contain the global outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, new infectious disease threats, caused by movement of people globally, remain omnipresent, and repeated calls for mo...re proactive action go unheeded. This is aptly shown by the unprecedented and unexpected outbreaks of human monkeypox cases and clusters since May 7, 2022, across Europe, the Americas, and Australia,
which yet again, have taken global public authorities by surprise.
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Updated 2 June 2022.#
This entry contains the Status Report of WHO Collaborating Centres in the Americas by Country and a new document with information of Collaborating Centres by Outcome of the Strategic Plan of the Pan American Health Organization 2020‑2025.
This report presents an analysis of antibacterial agents in preclinical (third annual review) and clinical (fifth annual review) development. The analysis covers traditional (direct-acting small molecules) and non-traditional antibacterial agents in development worldwide. It evaluates to what extent... the present pipeline addresses infections caused by WHO Priority Pathogens, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Clostridioides difficile. The report also provides an assessment of the traditional agents with respect to whether they meet a set of predefined criteria for innovation, namely absence of known cross-resistance, new target, mode of action and/or class. It also includes an overview of the agents that obtained authorization since 1 July 2017.
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As a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, especially the most vulnerable, are paying an enormous price. Lives and livelihoods are being lost, with more than ten million people forced from their homes— and their country—in search of safety. The war has unleashed catast...rophic damage to the country’s economy and threatens lasting increases in poverty and societal upheaval. The scale of the war and the devastation it has caused have jeopardized Ukraine’s hard-fought development gains, through destruction of production and property, disruption of trade, diminished investment due to amplified uncertainty, and erosion of human capita
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The Global guidance framework for the responsible use of the life sciences: mitigating biorisks and governing dual-use research (the framework) aims to provide values and principles, tools and mechanisms to support Member States and key stakeholders to mitigate and prevent biorisks and govern dual-u...se research.
The framework adopts the One health approach and focuses on the role that responsible life sciences research can play in preventing and mitigating risks caused by accidents, inadvertent or deliberate misuse with the intention to cause harm to humans, nonhuman animals, plants and agriculture, and the environment.
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Climate change is already having severe impacts across our planet, bringing new and previously unimaginable challenges to the people least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions.
This report, the first we’ve released jointly in the history of our organizations, provides a sobering review of h...ow just one of those challenges – the increase in deadly heat-waves – threatens to drive new emergency needs in the not-so-distant future.
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This policy brief aims to provide a review of the current progress on implementing the Malawi national action plan on AMR, identifies critical gaps, and highlights findings to accelerate further progress in the human health sector. The target audience includes all those concerned with implementing a...ctions to combat antimicrobial resistance in Malawi.
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The Quadripartite Organizations – the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO) – collaborate to drive the change and tra...nsformation required to mitigate the impact of current and future health challenges at the human–animal– plant–environment interface at global, regional and country level.
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