The World Health Organization was requested by Member States to develop a global priority pathogens list (global PPL) of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to help in prioritizing the research and development (R&D) of new and effective antibiotic treatme
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nts. To date, the selection of pathogens for R&D activities has been largely guided by small and large pharmaceutical companies according to a variety of parameters, such as perceived/unmet medical need, pressure of investors, market size, scientific discovery potential, and availability of specific technologies. Previous PPLs, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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BMJ Global Health, Vol. 4 (2019) no.2
Antibiotic resistance is threatening global health, development and food security; however, measures for assessing and communicating the threat of resistance are lacking. The
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Drug Resistance Index (DRI) allows for global assessment of the relative efficacy of countries’ antibiotic therapy.
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WHO MiNDbank is an online platform bringing together country and international resources, covering mental health, substance abuse, disability, general health, human rights and development. It is part of WHO’s QualityRights campaign to end violatio
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ns against people with mental disabilities. MiNDbank aims to facilitate dialogue, advocacy and research, to promote reform in these areas in line with international human rights and best practice standards.
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Yaws is targeted for eradication by 2030, using a strategy based on mass drug administration (MDA) with azithromycin. New diagnostics are needed to aid eradication. Serology is currently the mainstay for yaws diagnosis; however, inaccuracies associa
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ted with current serological tests makes it difficult to fully assess the need for and impact of eradication campaigns using these tools. Under the recommendation of the WHO Diagnostic Technical Advisory Group (DTAG) for Neglected Tropical Diseases(NTDs), a working group was assembled and tasked with agreeing on priority use cases for developing target product profiles (TPPs) for new diagnostics tools.
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In preparing this paper, the Pharmacovigilance Group of the Pan American Health Organization’s Pan American Network for Drug Regulatory Harmonization (PANDRH) adopted the perspective of PAHO/WHO, which considers Pharmacovigilance, an essential com
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ponent of public health programs. Its intention was to facilitate the development of pharmacovigilance systems in the Region of the Americas and improve, strengthen, and promote the adoption of good practices to improve safety for patients and the general population, based on the needs of the Region.
Document also available in Spanish and Portuguese!
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The document is a summary report by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, focusing on a capacity-building workshop held in Abu Dhabi in 2019. The workshop addressed the management and care of substance use disorders, aiming to improve technical and manage
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rial capacities in areas such as policy development, treatment services, prevention, monitoring, and international collaboration. Participants included representatives from 12 countries, WHO collaborating centers, and other UN agencies.
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Drugs and medical supplies are dispensed at the cutting edge level of the interface between the public health system and the people. Availability or lack of it brings either credit or discredit to the public health system. The primary reason for holding stocks of medicines and medical supplies in a
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proper scientific manner is to ensure continuous and uninterrupted availability to prevent stock-outs, especially of critical items of supply while at the same time ensuring that stocks of medicines do not get expired. An efficient inventory management is a pre-requisite for optimal stock management. It enables the management of health facilities to know the current pattern of consumption of drug trends over a period of time and also variances. The environmental control of the drugs and other medical supplies play an important role to keep the products' efficacy intact. Some medicines and vaccines need special storage temperature, otherwise, there may be wastage. The quality of the medicines can be adversely affected by poor storage, transportation and distribution. Thus, maintaining proper storage condition for health commodities is vital for ensuring their quality. So, by this training, CDMU wants to educate different people dealing with medicines and equip them for the roles they have to perform efficiently so that the wastage does not take place or can be minimized.
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This Situation Update describes events occurring in Bilin Township, Thaton District during the period between July and October 2017, including healthcare, education, development projects and drug is
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sues.
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Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of disability and premature death throughout the world, and contributes substantially to the escalating costs of health care. The underlying pathology is atherosclerosis, which develops over many years and is usually advanced by the time symptoms occur, genera
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lly in middle age. Acute coronary and cerebrovascular events frequently occur suddenly, and are often fatal before medical care can be given. Modification of risk factors has been shown to reduce mortality and morbidity in people with diagnosed or undiagnosed cardiovascular disease.
This publication provides guidance on reducing disability and premature deaths from coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and peripheral vascular disease in people at high risk, who have not yet experienced a cardiovascular event. People with established cardiovascular disease are at very high risk of recurrent events and are not the subject of these guidelines. They have been addressed in previous WHO guidelines.
Several forms of therapy can prevent coronary, cerebral and peripheral vascular events. Decisions about whether to initiate specific preventive action, and with what degree of intensity, should be guided by estimation of the risk of any such vascular event. The risk prediction charts that accompany these guidelinesb allow treatment to be targeted accord-
ing to simple predictions of absolute cardiovascular risk.
Recommendations are made for management of major cardiovascular risk factors through changes in lifestyle and prophylactic drug therapies. The guidelines provide a framework for the development of national guidance on prevention of cardiovascular disease that takes into account the particular political, economic, social and medical circumstances.
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The OECD's "Alcohol Consumption" indicator measures the annual sales of pure alcohol in liters per person aged 15 and older. This metric helps assess long-term trends in alcohol consumption across countries. It's important to note that the methodology for converting alcoholic beverages to pure alcoh
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ol may vary between nations. Additionally, official data typically do not account for tourist consumption or unrecorded alcohol intake, such as homemade or illegally produced alcohol. While this indicator provides insight into overall consumption patterns, it does not capture harmful drinking behaviors like heavy episodic drinking.
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Chagas disease is a neglected tropical disease caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. It is a significant public health problem, affecting millions of people worldwide. And although it was described 110 years ago, only two old nitroheterocyclic drugs, benznidazole and nifurtimox, are cu
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rrently available for the treatment of Chagas disease and both have several limitations. Besides the clear unmet medical need, many challenges preclude the development of new treatments, some of them related to a lack of understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease and parasite-host interactions. New knowledge and tools are becoming available, but the number of new chemical entities progressing through the preclinical pipeline is inadequate. Therefore, it is still uncertain whether safe, effective and accessible new drugs will be available in the near future. The Chagas disease research community must commit to even greater collaboration to ensure that patients eventually benefit from better treatments.
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Lymphatic filariasis (LF) is a parasitic disease that is a major cause of chronic disability in the developing world. According to the 2021–2030 road map for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) published by the World Health Organization (WHO), the global goal for LF is elimination as a public healt
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h problem by 2030 through repeated rounds of mass drug administration (MDA). Critical components of any elimination program are monitoring and surveillance. Appropriate assessment tools and methods are needed for each stage of an elimination program; mapping to identify which areas require intervention, monitoring to assess the impact of interventions, and post-intervention surveillance to validate elimination or detect recrudescence.
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Historically, the discovery of the sulfa drugs in the 1930s and the subsequent development of penicillin during World War II ushered in a new era in the treatment of infectious diseases. Infections that
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were common causes of death and disease in the pre-antibiotic era - rheumatic fever, syphilis, cellulitis and bacterial pneumonia - became treatable, and over the next 20 years most of the classes of antibiotics that find clinical use today were discovered and changed medicine in a profound way. The availability of antibiotics enabled revolutionary medical interventions such as cancer chemotherapy, organ transplants and essentially all major invasive surgeries from joint replacements to coronary bypass. Antibiotics, though, are unique among drugs in that their use precipitates their obsolescence. Paradoxically, these cures select for organisms that can evade them, fueling an arms race between microbes, clinicians and drug discoverers.
Wright BMC Biology 2010, 8:123 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/8/12
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For the Fiscal Year 2015-2016, the Health Sector continued to implement actions meant to improve the availability, and access to quality healthcare. The following report highlights achievements registered by the health sector for the fiscal 2015-2016 in different health programs, as well as in the a
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rea of health system strengthening.
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The Global status report on alcohol and health and treatment of substance use disorders presents a comprehensive overview of alcohol consumption, alcohol-related harm and policy responses as well as treatment capacities for alcohol and drug use diso
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rders worldwide. The report is based on data collected by WHO from Member States and organized in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals health target 3.5 which calls on countries to strengthen “the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol”. The chapter on alcohol and health continues the series of WHO global status reports on alcohol and health and presents the latest available data on the status of, and trends in, alcohol consumption, as well as estimates of the alcohol-attributable disease burden and descriptions of policy responses worldwide. On the basis of data collected from countries on the treatment of substance use disorders the report describes the status of key components of treatment responses to alcohol and drug use disorders and proposes a new service capacity index for these disorders as an additional contextual indicator for monitoring progress in this domain of SDG health target 3.5. The report concludes with broad directions for international action to accelerate progress towards achievement of SDG health target 3.5.
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Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT, sleeping sickness) and Animal African Trypanosomiasis (AAT) are neglected tropical diseases generally caused by the same etiological agent, Trypanosoma brucei. Despite important advances in the reduction or disappearance of HAT cases, AAT represents a risky reserv
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oir of the infections. There is a strong need to control AAT, as is claimed by the European Commission in a recent document on the reservation of antimicrobials for human use. Control of AAT is considered part of the One Health approach established by the FAO program against African Trypanosomiasis. Under the umbrella of the One Health concepts, in this work, by analyzing the pharmacological properties of the therapeutic options against Trypanosoma brucei spp., we underline the need for clearer and more defined guidelines in the employment of drugs designed for HAT and AAT. Essential requirements are addressed to meet the challenge of drug use and drug resistance development. This approach shall avoid inter-species cross-resistance phenomena and retain drugs therapeutic activity.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed the "Implementation Roadmap 2023–2030" to advance the Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (NCDs) 2013–2030. This roadmap addresses the recommendations from the mid-term evaluation of the original action p
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lan. It outlines strategic directions and priority actions to assist countries in accelerating their responses to NCDs, aiming to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.4, which focuses on reducing premature mortality from NCDs by one-third by 2030.
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