The health and socioeconomic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the countries ...an class="attribute-to-highlight medbox">of Latin America hard and laid bare the profound inequities about which numerous international, regional and national reports have sounded warnings in recent decades. In this context, the historical political and economic exclusion and marginalization of the more than 800 indigenous peoples in the region has been accentuated as a result of insufficient State responses to the crisis, which have not adequately considered the collective rights of these peoples and have had little cultural relevance.
This document provides an overview of the situation of indigenous peoples in the region in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses both the State’s and indigenous peoples’ own responses to the crisis, as well as offering a set of recommendations to rectify the neglect of these peoples in the management of the pandemic, centring on their collective rights.
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Moving avidence into action
This document is part of a series of briefs for health program managers interested in implementing evidence-based prog...rams. With a special emphasis on underutilized interventions, they present evidence on programs that work and provide guidance and resources for replication.
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We will soon be piloting a project titled “Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care” that will form “spiritual care teams” to assess and address patients’ spiritual needs in physician outpatient practices within Adventist Health Sy...stem, the largest Protestant healthcare system in the United States.This paper describes the goals, the rationale, and the structure of the spiritual care teams that will soon be implemented, and discusses the barriers to providing spiritual care that health professionals are likely to encounter.Spiritual care teams may operate in an outpatient or an inpatient setting, and their purpose is to provide health professionals with resources necessary to practice whole person healthcare that includes spiritual care.We believe that this project will serve as a model forfaith-based health systems seeking to visibly demonstrate their mission in a way that makes them unique and expresses their values.Not only does this model have the potential to be cost-effective, but also the capacity to increase the quality of patient care and the satisfaction that health professionals derive from providing care.If successful, this model could spread beyond faith-based systems to secular systems as well both in the U.S. and worldwide.
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This report examines the support to private healthcare provision in India by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corpo...ration (IFC). Despite supporting private healthcare in the country since 1997, no healthcare results for lending and investments have been disclosed since the start of these operations over twenty-five years ago. The IFC has overwhelmingly invested in high-end urban hospitals which are out of reach for the majority of Indians. Several have consistently failed to provide free healthcare to poor patients despite this being a condition under which free or subsidized public land was allotted to these hospitals. Supporting private healthcare in a context where 37% of Indians experience catastrophic health expenditures in private hospitals appears to run counter to the World Bank Group’s focus on poverty reduction. These investments do not contribute to the building of stronger healthcare infrastructure or respond to unmet healthcare needs. Only 14% of IFC-financed hospitals are located in the 10 states ranked lowest in terms of the overall performance of the health system. Furthermore, we found many instances where regulators upheld complaints pertaining to violations of patients’ rights by these hospitals including overcharging, denial of healthcare, price rigging, financial conflict of interest and medical negligence.
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The report underscores that sexual and reproductive health and rights are often the first to be sacrificed during epidemics and that ...ttribute-to-highlight medbox">the gains of the past decade must be protected. The report also makes it clear that scarce resources must be focused on the most marginalized women and girls, including sex workers, gender diverse people, women in prison and migrants and others without proof of employment or residence.
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A all for global Action. The Oral Health Atlas. Second edition
This report documents the secondary humanitarian problems and impacts of large-scale Ebola outbreak on the different humanitarian sectors, to provi...de a non-exhaustive plan to help future responders. A large scale Ebola outbreak, in this document, refers to an epidemic with an unprecedented scale, geographical spread and duration.
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This study of Adolescent Boys and Young Men highlights the importance of engaging adolescent boys and young men in sexual and reproductive ...ass="attribute-to-highlight medbox">health and rights (srhr) and gender equality. This paper establishes a conceptual framework for engaging adolescent boys and young men. It reviews current research on boys’ and young men’s specific risks and realities in relation to their general health status, violence, sexuality and sexual and reproductive health, media violence, sexual exploitation, and other vulnerabilities.
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These guidelines provide recommendations for the non-pharmacological aspects of infection prevention and control for acute respiratory diseases (ARD) in h...ealth care. Administrative and infection controls, including early detection, isolation and reporting, and establishment of infection control infrastructure, are key components for containment and mitigation of the impact of pathogens that may constitute a major public health threat. In these guidelines, the options of using natural ventilation and/or exhaust fan assisted ventilation in health-care facilities (HCF) are considered.
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This report provides an update on the key facets of HIV treatment access, including the latest HIV treatment guidelines from World ...ribute-to-highlight medbox">Health Organization (WHO), an overview on pricing for first-line, second-line, and salvage regimens, and a summary of the opportunities for – and threats to – expanding access to affordable antiretroviral therapy (ART).
The report is supplemented by 11 drug profiles that contain more detailed information on pricing trends and patent barriers for key antiretroviral drugs and fixed-dose combinations. Also included is an annex of conditions that define eligibility for reduced prices from 15 pharmaceutical companies.
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Advising principles. The purpose of this document is to support competent authorities in charge of IHR implementation to improve national capacitie...s for the prevention, detection and control of events, by strengthening communications and coordination between points of entry and the national health surveillance system
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22 Sept. 2021
The rapid development of effective Covid-19 vaccines in 2020 gave hope to the world in t...he darkest days of the deadly pandemic. However, the vaccine roll-out has been massively skewed towards wealthy nations. While rich states have hoarded vaccines, companies have also played a decisive role in restricting fair access to a life-saving health product. This report focuses on six leading vaccine developers, AstraZeneca, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer, assessing each company’s human rights policy, pricing structure, records on intellectual property, knowledge and technology sharing, allocation of available vaccine doses and transparency.
Available in Arabic, English, French, German and Spanish
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Formularies are lists of antibiotics that are suggested for certain healthcare settings. In developing a recommended formulary, countries should consider the needs ...t medbox">of patients and facilities where they receive care. For example, clinicians in rural or primary health centers may need wide access to first-line antibiotics (e.g., penicillin, ampicillin, TMP-SMX), but last resort antibiotics such as carbapenems or colistin might be limited to tertiary care hospitals. Efforts to create antibiotic formularies may be linked to efforts within countries to create or update essential medicine lists (EML).
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In 1997, the Fiftieth World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA50.29 on the elimination of
l...ymphatic filariasis as a public health problem. Preliminary guidance from WHO printed in 2011 referred to “verification” as the official process by which the achievements of the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis (GPELF) would be confirmed. For the sake of harmonization, the terminology now used for elimination of lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem is “validation”. In 2015, the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Neglected Tropical Diseases endorsed standardized processes for confirming and acknowledging success for all neglected tropical diseases targeted for eradication, elimination of transmission, or elimination as a public health problem.
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An international field study by African and German theologicans and health workers.
This briefing note summarises key mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) considerations in relation to the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
The regional Migrant Response Plan (MRP) for the Horn of Africa and Yemen includes urgent life-saving humanitarian and protection interventions to ...improve safe and dignified access to basic services for migrants and host communities while ensuring medium- to long-term actions aimed at addressing the drivers of migration.
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This was a Phase 3, multi-center, randomized, open-label, parallel-group, active control study where 273 male and female patients with first stage Trypanosoma brucei gambiense HAT were treated at six sites: one trypanosomiasis reference center in Angola, one hospital in South Sudan, and four hospita...ls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between August 2005 and September 2009 to support the registration of pafuramidine for treatment of first stage HAT in collaboration with the United States Food and Drug Administration. Patients were treated with either 100 mg of pafuramidine orally twice a day for 10 days or 4 mg/kg pentamidine intramuscularly once daily for 7 days to assess the efficacy and safety of pafuramidine versus pentamidine. Pregnant and lactating women as well as adolescents were included.
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Cervical cancer continues to be a significant public health problem and a major cause of premature mortality among women, disproportionately affecting the... socioeconomically disadvantaged population in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In the absence of implementing the known evidence-based, cost-effective interventions, the number of deaths per year is projected to reach approximately 416 000 globally in 2035. It was estimated in 2020 that 32% of incident cervical cancer cases and 34% of cervical cancer deaths in the world occurred in the 11 Member States of the WHO South-East Asia (SEA) Region. In 2020, 190 874 new cases and 116 015 deaths were estimated due to cervical cancer, which is the third commonest cancer in the Region
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This technical brief was developed by the UNFPA Global Ageing Network to complement the UN Department o...f Economic and Social Affairs' (UN DESA) Issue Brief: Older Persons and COVID-19, which emphasized the humanitarian imperative of addressing older persons' specific needs within preparedness and response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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