The conduct of COVID-19 vaccine trials in the context of a candidate vaccine being issued with Emergency Use Designation raises challenging ethical
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questions, including in relation to the use of placebo controls and unblinding of trial participants in current and future COVID-19 vaccine trials. This policy brief was developed by the WHO Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator Ethics & Governance Working Group, to provide guidance for researchers, sponsors, regulators, research ethics committees, and policy-makers, on these and related issues.
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This publication provides managers with guidance on how to create basic HIV prevention cascades as a starting point to enhance their ability to monitor and improve their programming and to facilitate comparisons
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of programme effectiveness across sites.
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This 2011 update of Guidelines for the programmatic management of drug-resistant tuberculosis is intended as a tool for use by public health professionals working
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in response
to the Sixty-second World Health Assembly’s resolution on prevention and control of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.
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The purpose of the landscape analysis is ultimately to facilitate improved engagement of private providers, thereby contributing to universal access to quality and affordable TB care and the end
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of the TB epidemic. It focuses on the role of private for-profit providers and on specific challenges and experiences in engaging them for TB prevention and care.
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The aim of this handbook is to provide network members and other laboratories involved in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, with an agreed list
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of key diagnostic methods and their protocols in various areas of TB diagnosis, ranging from microbiological diagnosis of active TB to the diagnosis of latent TB infection. This handbook offers a single source of reference by compiling all methods, with a strong focus on standard (reference) and evidence-based methods. In so doing, it will also contribute to the improvement of disease surveillance data for Europe.
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One important application of digital health in TB patient care is the support that it can lend to medication adherence. TB programmes have already been using short message
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service (SMS), video-supported treatment (VOT) and event monitoring device for medication support (EMM)1 to help patients complete treatment and health-care workers to monitor both daily dosing and treatment continuity
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This is the ninth paper in our series, “Community Health Workers at the Dawn of a New Era”. Community health workers (CHWs) are in an intermedi
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ary position between the health system and the community. While this position provides CHWs with a good platform to improve community health, a major challenge in large-scale CHW programmes is the need for CHWs to establish and maintain benefcial relationships with both sets of actors, who may have diferent expectations and needs. This paper focuses on the quality of CHW relationships with actors at the local level of the national health system and with communities.
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Malaria is a prevalent cause of febrile illnesses in areas with high transmission, and its clinical presentation overlaps with initial signs of Ebo
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la disease. For this reason, the effectiveness of the Ebola response in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone can be optimized through the deployment of targeted measures to reduce the number of fever cases due to malaria
WHO recommends specific adaptations in the diagnosis of malaria and in LLIN distribution in countries heavily affected by the Ebola outbreak and mass drug administration using artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) in areas where transmission of both Ebola and malaria is high and access to malaria treatment is very low.
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This document highlights the key aspects of safe health-care waste management in order to guide policy-makers, practitioners and facility managers to improve such services
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in health-care facilities. It is based on the comprehensive WHO handbook Safe management of wastes from health-care activities (WHO, 2014), and also takes into consideration relevant World Health Assembly resolutions, other UN documents and emerging global and national developments on water, sanitation and hygiene and infection prevention and control.
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Nature Reviews Microbiology Vol. 17 (2019)pp.51-62
Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) technologies help to accelerate the
initiation of targeted antimicrobial therapy for patients with inf
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ections and could potentially
extend the lifespan of current narrow- spectrum antimicrobials. Although conceptually new and
rapid AST technologies have been described, including new phenotyping methods, digital
imaging and genomic approaches, there is no single major, or broadly accepted, technological
breakthrough that leads the field of rapid AST platform development
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In 2014, the World Heart Federation (WHF) launched
an initiative to develop a series of Roadmaps [1e6]. Their
aim is to identify potential roadblocks on the pathway to
effective prevention, detec
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tion, and management of cardiovascular disease (CVD), along with evidence-based
solutions to overcome them. The resulting documents
provide a framework to translate strategic intent into action
on integrating epidemiology, population, and cardiovascular outcome trial data into national plans for optimal
CVD management.
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Training Manual
Building on earlier EngenderHealth work in counseling, Counseling for Effective Use of Family Planning responds to an identified gap in
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existing materials and fills the needs expressed by those in the field. The intended audiences for this curriculum are health care providers, their supervisors, and the managers of the programs in which they work. The counseling skills addressed here are expected to be relevant to the provision of both preventive and curative health services through the workshop participants’ national health systems. Finally, the curriculum’s participatory approach to defining terms and to generating profiles of potential clients is designed to assist trainees in addressing the realities and exploring the reproductive health priorities of their communities in a culturally appropriate manner.
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This publication is a compendium of 49 country examples highlighting efforts in improving refugees’ and migrants’ health following the adoption of
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the WHO Global Action Plan on Promoting the health of refugees and migrants at the seventy-second World Health Assembly, in May 2019.
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Recommendations of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee and the HICPAC/SHEA/APIC/IDSA Hand Hygiene Task Force
Purpose of this document: to present eight practical steps that Member States can take at the national and sub-national level to improve WASH in health care facilities
This guidance provides an overview of interventions to improve early diagnosis of TB and treatment completion in these populations, as well as fact
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ors to consider when developing programmes for health communication, awareness and education, and programme monitoring and evaluation
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The impact of maternal mental health problems on infants in high income countries has been identified mostly in terms
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of psychosocial and emotional development, thanks to the groundbreaking early work of Spitz (2) and of Bowlby (3), who studied the emotional needs of infants and mother-child attachment. Subsequently, a large body of literature, also from HICs, documented the effects of maternal mental health on the child's psychological development (4), intellectual competence(5), psychosocial functioning (6) and rate of psychiatric morbidity (7, 8).
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Six months in, the indirect impacts of COVID-19 take a toll on health, social and economic outcomes.
Confronted with the important issue of patient safety, in 2002 the Fifty-fifth World Health Assembly adopted a resolution urging countries to pay the closest possible attention to the problem and to
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strengthen safety and monitoring systems. In May 2004, the Fifty-seventh World Health Assembly approved the creation of an international alliance as a global initiative to improve patient safety. The World Alliance for Patient Safety was launched in October 2004 and currently has its place in the WHO Patient Safety programme included in the Information, Evidence and Research Cluster.
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Adolescence, defined as the period between 10 and 19 years of age, is a developmental stage during which many psychosocial and mental health challenges emerge. There is a well-established link between mental health and
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HIV outcomes. Adolescents and young adults living with HIV typically have additional mental health needs linked to their experiences of living with and managing a chronic illness, along with prevailing stigma and discrimination. Mental health promotion and prevention is thus a critical priority for this group.
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