Working Document Nov. 2020
The COVAX Supply and Logistics workstream lead by UNICEF, Gavi and WHO have released a working copy of the COVID-19 Vaccination, Country Readiness & Delivery: Supply
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and Logistics Guidance. Countries might find this Guide useful when developing and strengthening their supply chain strategies to receive, store, distribute and manage the COVID-19 vaccines and their ancillary products, in line with their national deployment and vaccination plan (NDVP). The document also provides links to the different tools and resources to aid countries in performing assessment, planning and capacity-building activities.
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The purpose of this handbook is to provide guidance to Member States on the practical aspects of maintaining sanitary standards at international borders at ports, airports, and ground crossings (points of entry) as set out in the International Healt
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h Regulations (2005). It provides technical advice for developing a comprehensive programme for systematic monitoring of disease vectors and integrated vector control at points of entry. This includes standardizing procedures at points of entry and ensuring a sufficient monitoring and response capacity with the necessary infrastructure for surveillance and control of vectors. In addition, this handbook to serves as reference material for port health officers, regulators, port operators, and other competent authorities in charge of implementing the IHR (2005) at points of entry and on conveyances.
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The revised guidelines contain recommendations for specific administrative, environmental controls and respiratory protection, following the assessment made by an external group of experts convened
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as members of the Guideline Development Group. Moreover, these guidelines focus on interventions specific to preventing transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bridging with the core components of infection prevention and control programmes at the national and acute health care facility level
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Children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable in humanitarian settings, yet they are often not able to access the services and protection they need. While multiple factors create these barriers, a major cause is how data about children with
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disabilities is collected and mapped. Data collection processes often exclude or underrepresent the views of children with disabilities and thier caretakers. When the experiences of children with disabilities and their caretakers are not defined and collected, they become excluded from mainstreamed protective services, which are meant to serve all children. Children with disabilities also do not get the specialised interventions they need.
This guidance note explores how to use qualitative methods to create more robust assessment processes to ensure more effective programming and services for children with disabilities. This note provides promising practices for engaging with children with disabilities and includes sample tools that can be tailored to fit the needs of a particular assessment process. The note also explores the importance of thoughtful cross-sectoral responses so that children with disabilities, and their families, are carefully considered in areas like water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), education, health, and nutrition, and therefore receive the holistic support they need and deserve.
This note is intended for a broad audience of relevant child protection actors, including practitioners, coordination groups, researchers, and donors. The information is not limited to one type of humanitarian setting, geographic region, or culture. As a result, the practices and guidance should be adapted to each specific context, ideally in partnership with well-informed local actors, such as representatives from local organisations for persons with disabilities.
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Working document from an informal consultation of experts. A Protocol for risk assessment at the field level. The purpose of document is to provide guidance on the methodology to be used for assessing, at field level, the yellow fever virus circula
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tion in areas at risk, and is primarily intended for public health specialists
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In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessm
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ent Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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2nd edition. The purpose of the WHO human health risk assessment toolkit: chemical hazards is to provide its users with guidance to identify, acquire and use the information needed to assess chemica
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l hazards, exposures and the corresponding health risks in their given health risk assessment contexts at local and/or national levels.
The Toolkit provides road maps for conducting a human health risk assessment, identifies information that must be gathered to complete an assessment and provides electronic links to international resources from which the user can obtain information and methods essential for conducting the human health risk assessment
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The World Climate and Security Report (WCSR) 2021 from the Expert Group of the International
Military Council on Climate and Security is a global assessm
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ent of the security dimensions of a changing
climate and effective means to address them. It is intended to inform timely climate and security policy
and action, and builds upon the analysis in the first WCSR, released in February 2020.
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The World Climate and Security Report (WCSR) 2021 from the Expert Group of the International Military Council on Climate and Security is a global assessme
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nt of the security dimensions of a changing climate and effective means to address them. It is intended to inform timely climate and security policy and action, and builds upon the analysis in the first WCSR, released in February 2020.
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Parasites & Vectors volume 11, Article number: 264 (2018)
Dengue creates a staggering epidemiological and economic burden for endemic countries. Without a specific therapy and with a commercial
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vaccine that presents some problems relative to its full effectiveness, initiatives to improve vector control strategies, early disease diagnostics and the development of vaccines and antiviral drugs are priorities. In this study, we present the probable origins of dengue in America and the trajectories of its spread. Overall, dengue diagnostics are costly, making the monitoring of dengue epidemiology more difficult and affecting physicians’ therapeutic decisions regarding dengue patients, especially in developing countries. This review also highlights some recent and important findings regarding dengue in Brazil and the Americas. We also summarize the existing DENV polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic tests to provide an improved reference since these tests are useful and accurate at discriminating DENV from other flaviviruses that co-circulate in the Americas. Additionally, these DENV PCR assays ensure virus serotyping, enabling epidemiologic monitoring.
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PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0004762
This study shows the importance of an integrated entomological and medical surveillance for the evaluation of arbovira
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l disease risk, which is a precondition for designing cost-effective vector control programs.
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The Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) calls for making AMR a core component of professional education and training. In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) published Competency framework for health workers’ education
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and training on AMR to ensure that academic institutions and regulatory agencies provided pre-service and in-service training to equip health workers with the adequate competencies to address AMR. This was followed by Health workers’ training and education on AMR: curricula guide, which outlines the learning objectives and expected outcomes of pre-service training of health workers to improve curricula. These tools were designed to strengthen the capacity of health workers in various settings to address the growing challenge of AMR.
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With eleven years left to achieve the ambitious goals of the 2030 Agenda, how close are OECD countries to reaching the SDGs? And how is our understanding constrained by targets and indicators that s
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till cannot be measured? The OECD Measuring Distance to the SDG Targets Study aims to help member countries assess where they stand now and to identify the areas where additional effort is required in order to achieve the goals. It also sets out the statistical agenda – showing how much we do not yet know, and how this might impact both the achievement of the SDGs, and decisions about what to prioritise across this vast agenda. The methodology underlying the Study also provides a way for OECD countries to understand their SDG achievements and challenges in a comparative context.
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Hepatitis B (HBV) infection is a major public health problem and cause of chronic liver disease.
The 2024 HBV guidelines provide updated evidence-informed recommendations on key priority topics. These include expanded
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and simplified treatment criteria for adults but now also for adolescents; expanded eligibility for antiviral prophylaxis for pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HBV; improving HBV diagnostics through use of point-of-care HBV DNA viral load and reflex approaches to HBV DNA testing; who to test and how to test for HDV infection; and approaches to promote delivery of high-quality HBV services, including strategies to promote adherence to long-term antiviral therapy and retention in care.
The 2024 guidelines include 11 updated chapters with new recommendations and also update existing chapters without new recommendations, such as those on treatment monitoring and surveillance for liver cancer.
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The key updates include: content update in various sections based on new evidence; design changes for enhanced usability; a streamlined and simplified clinical assessment that includes an algorithm
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for follow-up; inclusion of two new modules
- Essential Care and Practice that includes general guidelines and Iminterventions and implementation module to support the proposed interventions by necessary infrastructure and resources; and, revised modules for Psychoses, Child and Adolescent Mental and Behavioural Disorders and Disorders due to Substance Use
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The Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) is a global effort launched by WHO and UNICEF to implement practices that protect, promote and support breastfeeding. It was launched in 1991 in response
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to the Innocenti Declaration. The global BFHI materials have been revised, updated and expanded for integrated care. The materials reflect new research and experience, reinforce the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, support mothers who are not breastfeeding, provide modules on HIV and infant feeding and mother-friendly care, and give more guidance for monitoring and reassessment.
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WHO’s Ambition and Action in Nutrition 2016-2025 is anchored in the six global targets for improving maternal, infant and young child nutrition a
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nd the global diet-related NCD targets.
In support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly SDG2 and SDG3, and in concert with the 2016-2025 UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, WHO’s Ambition and Action in Nutrition 2016-2025 aims for “A world free from all forms of malnutrition where all people achieve health and well-being”. It defines the unique value of WHO for advancing nutrition: the provision of leadership, guidance and monitoring and proposes a theory of change. Finally, following a set of guiding principles, it proposes priority actions for WHO, the delivery model and a clear allocation of roles across the Organization.
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The objectives of these guidelines are to provide recommendations outlining a public health approach to managing people presenting with advanced HIV disease, and to provide guidance on the timing of initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for all
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people living with HIV.
WHO recommends that a package of screening, prophylaxis, rapid ART initiation and intensified adherence interventions be offered to everyone living with HIV presenting with advanced disease.
WHO strongly recommends that rapid ART initiation should be offered to people living with HIV following confirmed diagnosis and clinical assessment. Rapid initiation of ART is defined as within seven days of HIV diagnosis. WHO further strongly recommends ART initiation on the same day as HIV diagnosis based on the person’s willingness and readiness to start ART immediately, unless there are clinical reasons to delay treatment.
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This report presents further analysis of the 2015 Nepal Health Facility Survey. Data analysis is based on the Donabedian framework for assessing quality of care in health services, which divides the indicators into three groups: structure, process, and
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outcome. The World Health Organization Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) indicator guideline was used to assess facility service readiness, service quality and client satisfaction with maternal health services. The study performed both bivariate and multivariate regression analysis to examine the association of maternal health service readiness and quality indicators with client satisfaction.
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