30 January 2020
This document outlines the standard operating procedures for detection and response to case/s of suspected novel coronavirus disease (2019-nCoV) in South Africa. The content of this document should inform provincial preparedness plans.
This policy paper underscores that, although children do not represent a high-risk group for direct COVID-19 fatality, the pandemic posts far-reaching secondary impacts that heighten risks to African children’s rights and wellbeing.
8 January 2021
Sequencing enabled the world to rapidly identify SARS-CoV-2 and develop diagnostic tests and other tools for outbreak management. Continued genome sequencing supports the monitoring of the disease’s spread and evolution of the virus. Accelerated integration of genome sequencing int...o the practices of the global health community is required if we want to be better prepared for the future threats. This document provides guidance for laboratories on maximizing the impact of SARS-CoV-2 sequencing now and other emerging pathogens in the future.
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7 Febr. 2021
As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in countries – decimating people’s livelihoods, and leaving health systems struggling to provide healthcare and vaccines for the entire population - governments and donors should look to the Church as a partner. The essential Church networks, tr...usted and rooted in local communities, can reach the most vulnerable people and remote places where governments often struggle to reach. DR Congo is among several countries where the Catholic Church is the main provider of community health services, particularly in more remote areas.
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This global guidance provided the framework for over 100 countries to develop their NDVPs. This updated (second) version supersedes the previous version published in 16 November 2020. New information has been added on the following areas:
the COVID-19 Partners Platform;
the use of COVID...-19 simulation exercises to test deployment strategies;
the indemnity agreement and no-fault compensation programme for vaccines secured through the COVAX Facility in the Advance Market Commitment (AMC) eligible economies;
the availability and use of the WHO-UNICEF COVID-19 Vaccine Introduction and deployment Costing (CVIC) tool;
the COVAX Facility’s humanitarian buffer that enables allocation of vaccine to cover high-risk populations in humanitarian settings;
recommendations for vaccination of pregnant and lactating women;
supplementary information on infection prevention and control (IPC) measures to be used to deliver COVID-19 vaccines safely;
the WHO licensed COVID-19 vaccines product-specific information;
use of geospatial data and digital micro plans for equitable access and delivery of COVID-19 vaccines;
lessons learned from the development of NDVPs and early experiences in COVID-19 vaccine deployment in countries; and
updated additional resources at the end of each chapter.
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Background Unrest in Chile over inequalities has underscored the need to improve public hospitals. Nursing has been overlooked as a solution to quality and access concerns, and nurse staffing is poor by international standards. Using Chile’s new diagnosis-related groups system and surveys of nurse...s and patients, we provide information to policy makers on feasibility, net costs, and estimated improved outcomes associated with increasing nursing resources in public hospitals.
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To assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and HIV expenditure, UNAIDS carried out a modelling study on fiscal space for health and HIV. From a sample of 28 countries, three countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jamaica, and Lesotho—were selected to capture health and HIV ...expenditure impacts across countries with especially marked differences in burdens of disease (including HIV prevalence), HIV donor dependency, level of economic development, and geographic location. While the three-country sample is too small to permit findings to be generalized to other countries, these analyses are useful for informing UNAIDS’ work to identify some policy positions to minimize the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the HIV response.
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The Manifesto was launched at a High Level Event in London on the 31st July 2019, where Emergency response mechanisms to address the Climate and Environmental Crisis are being explored. The Manifesto has been developed in response to the increasing international and United Nations evidence and under...standing of the severity of our global climate and environmental crisis. This builds upon collaborative action to advance the InterAction Council's Dublin Charter, endorsed at its Plenary Session in 2017. The overall aim is to secure a healthy planet for the wellbeing of future generations for all, by placing the health of the planet at the heart of decision making and establishing emergency response mechanisms at global, national and community levels.
Now more than ever, we need courageous leadership to take crucial decisions and actions to secure a healthy planet for all, including the very existence of human civilization. The InterAction Council is encouraged by the boldness and energy of our younger generations, as well as the commitment expressed by the 30 organisations endorsing the Manifesto. The establishment of the Digital Platform for Planet, Place and People, a Hub of the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health, will act as a collaborative mechanism to promote innovation and rapid responses as a common good. Going forward, we welcome everyone to become a Guardian to Secure a Healthy Planet for All, and to support this initiative in scaling up the ambitions laid out in the Manifesto.
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Understanding and building resilience to early life trauma in Belarus and Ukraine
In 2018 and early 2019, the WHO Regional Office for Europe’s cultural contexts of health and well-being project worked alongside the University of Exeter’s WHO Collaborating Centre on Culture and Health, the Minsk... Regional Centre for Psychiatry and Addiction, and the Institute of Mental Health of the Ukrainian Catholic University to engage researchers, practitioners, health-care workers and other relevant stakeholders in a series of workshops on the cultural contexts of early life trauma in Belarus and Ukraine.
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The marathon to eradicate polio is on its final lap: the world is more than 99% of the way to success. After millennia of living with poliovirus and suffering the paralysis it causes, today nearly all the world’s people live in polio-free countries; two of the three strains of wild poliovirus (WPV...) have been eradicated. Some 20 million people are walking who would have been paralysed had it not been for the efforts of national governments and health workers. If eradicating polio has been a marathon, the finishing line is in sight.
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Women have less access to the development services and support – such as adequate healthcare, education and
modern technology – that make people more resilient to climate change and other shocks and stressors.2
Women’s unequal access to resources, their disproportionate responsibility for ca...re of dependents (typically unpaid),
and the insecurity and precariousness of their paid labour all contribute to the feminisation of poverty and women’s
heightened vulnerability to climate hazards. Climate change is a multiplier of existing vulnerabilities and threatens to
reverse hard-earned development gains for all people, and particularly for women.
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The Arab region in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) represents a substantial area of the terrestrial landmass encompassing several countries and ecosystems. This area is generally drier and warmer compared to the rest of the world and has extreme resource limitations that are highly vulnerabl...e to a changing climate, geopolitical instability and land degradation (Slimani & Aidoud, 2004). Agriculture (crops and livestock) is a critical source of employment and a potential option for engaging rural youth. However, environmental degradation coupled with declining and variable agricultural productivity may pose a massive challenge already beset by instability and declining oil reserves (Tagliapietra, 2017). The Arab region is also subjected to short and long-duration climate extreme events, and the overall impact of their cascading effects on ecosystems, societies and economies is still an open question. Climate change, along with post-war geopolitical complexities, has greatly affected the Arab region in terms of its economy and social balance. Climate change has penetrating effects on the region’s agriculture sector and hence its economy. These are mainly manifested via changes in water resources and extreme weather conditions such as heatwaves and a drastic decline in precipitation.
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Website last accessed on 10.04.2023
The Chagas disease is frequently referred to as the effects that the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi) has on people’s health. However, from our perspective, Chagas is much more than that: it is a complex socioenvironmental health problem in which elemen...ts of different nature converge and interact. The biomedical and epidemiological aspects, which are most frequently addressed, are only a piece of the puzzle that needs to be complete in order to understand Chagas in all its complexity. Social, environmental, economic, political, cultural, and educational elements turn out to be essential in comprehending the magnitude of the problem without prejudice or stigmatizations.
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This document is an output of a WHO cross-programme initiative aiming to improve the prevention, diagnosis and management of anaemia and thereby accelerate reduction in its prevalence. It comes at an important time, midway through the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, when progress in reduci...ng anaemia has stagnated. This framework is based on the core principles of primary health care: meeting people’s health needs through comprehensive promotive, protective, curative, and rehabilitative care along the life course; systematically addressing the broader determinants of health; and empowering individuals, families, and communities to optimize their health
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China and other so-called “emerging” donors and creditors are fundamentally changing the international development finance landscape; however, many of these actors do not participate in existing global reporting systems, such as the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and the International ...Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).
To address this challenge and help those who seek to understand the nature, distribution, and effects of development finance from emerging donors and creditors, AidData developed the Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF) in collaboration with an international network of researchers from Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Göttingen, the University of Cape Town, Brigham Young University, and William and Mary.
The methodology codifies a systematic, transparent, and replicable set of procedures that facilitate the collection of information about aid and credit from official sector donors and lenders who do not publish comprehensive or detailed information about their overseas activities. It does so by synthesizing and standardizing vast amounts of unstructured, open-source, project-level information published by governments, intergovernmental organizations, companies, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and research institutions.
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To assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and HIV expenditure, UNAIDS carried out a modelling study on fiscal space for health and HIV. From a sample of 28 countries, three countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jamaica, and Lesotho—were selected to capture health and HIV ...expenditure impacts across countries with especially marked differences in burdens of disease (including HIV prevalence), HIV donor dependency, level of economic development, and geographic location. While the three-country sample is too small to permit findings to be generalized to other countries, these analyses are useful for informing UNAIDS’ work to identify some policy positions to minimize the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the HIV response.
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An unprecedented amount of money is being pledged and used to fund health research and services throughout the
world. Although estimates are diffi cult to obtain, the 2004 estimate for international health funding was about
US$14 billion, and is rapidly increasing, largely because of the emergence... and growth of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the US Government’s AIDS initiative
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Strategic communication is at the heart of public health and more important than ever in the digital age. Using communication strategically requires expertise, skills and resources to plan, implement and evaluate interventions that encourage governments to implement policies that improve people’s ...lives and well-being, that empower health workers to deliver the best care possible, and that encourage people to take actions that protect and improve their health and that of their family and community. This Regional Action Framework on Communication for Health (C4H) aims to support Member States in implementing the C4H approach. It outlines steps to be taken by WHO and Member States to use C4H to achieve shared public health goals in the Western Pacific.
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The article "Air Pollution: The Emergence of a Major Global Health Risk Factor" discusses the significant health impacts of air pollution, a leading risk factor for global mortality. It highlights the adverse effects of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and tropospheric ozone, linking them to cardiova...scular and respiratory diseases, cancer, and reduced life expectancy. While high-income countries have reduced air pollution levels, low- and middle-income countries face rising pollution, contributing to 4.9 million deaths in 2017. The article emphasizes the need for research to understand pollution’s health effects, identify key sources, and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to improve air quality globally.
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