Policy brief, 24 July 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected older people disproportionately, especially those living in long-term care facilities. In many countries, evidence shows that more than 40% of COVID-19 related deaths have been linked to long-term care facilities, with figures being as h...igh as 80% in some high-income countries. Concerted action is needed to mitigate the impact across all aspects of long-term care, including home- and community-based care, given that most users and providers of care are those who are vulnerable to severe COVID-19.
This policy brief provides 11 policy objectives and key action points to prevent and manage COVID-19 across long-term care. Its intended audience is policy makers and authorities (national, subnational and local) involved in the COVID-19 pandemic. The brief builds on currently available evidence on the measures taken to prevent, prepare for and respond to the COVID‑19 pandemic across long-term care services including care providers
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Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) provides a vast amount of information and the highest possible resolution for pathogen subtyping. The application of WGS for global surveillance can provide information on the early emergence and spread of AMR and further inform timely policy development on AMR control.... Sequencing data emanating from AMR surveillance may provide key information to guide the development of rapid diagnostic tools for better and more rapid characterization of AMR, and thus complement phenotypic methods. This document addresses the applications of WGS for AMR surveillance, including the benefits and limitations of current WGS technologies
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Technical Meeting Report, 14-15 July 2020, Geneva
The purpose of this field guide is to provide comprehensive information on planning and implementing high-quality3 SIAs for injectable vaccines and highlight the opportunities to strengthen RI and surveillance. The guide uses measles–rubella SIAs as the main example throughout, but the informatio...n provided aims to be applicable to SIAs delivering any injectable vaccine. It can serve as a reference for the preparation of regional/national SIA field guides and materials.
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Health Evidence Network synthesis report 72
Available in English, French and Spanish
This manual describes methods for investigating clusters or outbreaks that may be of chemical origin and describes the importance of a structured, coordinated, collaborative multidisciplinary, multi-agency approach at local, regional, national and international levels.
This update of the Guidelines for poison control, entitled Guidelines for establishing a poison centre, reflects the development of the role of poison centres in public health and the sound management of chemicals, described in section 1, and the opportunities provided by new technology. Assessments... carried out under the IHR show
continuing gaps in capacity for managing chemicals (2). In particular, many countries still lack access to poison
centre services (3). There is therefore demand for updated guidance.
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This document is based on currently available scientific evidence on treatment for drug use disorders and sets out a framework for the implementation of the Standards, in line with principles of public health care. The Standards identify major components and features of effective systems for the tre...atment of drug use disorders. They describe treatment modalities and interventions to match the needs of people at different stages and severities of drug use disorders, in a manner consistent with the treatment of any chronic disease or health condition. The Standards are aspirational, and such, national or local treatment services or systems need not attempt to meet all the standards and recommendations made in this document all at once. However over time, progressive quality improvement, with ‘evidence-based and ethical practice’ as an objective, can and should be expected to achieve better organized, more effective and ethical systems and services for people with drug use disorders.
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No country can claim to be free from health-care associated infections, therefore, improvement of infection prevention and control (IPC) strategies is essential. WHO recommends the use of multimodal improvement strategies to implement IPC interventions. These include each item of standard and transm...ission-based precautions according to national guidelines or standard operating procedures and under the coordination of the national IPC focal point (or team, if existing). This publication consists of three focused improvement tools, called “aide-memoires”, which focus on 1) respiratory and hand hygiene, 2) personal protective equipment, and 3) environmental cleaning, waste and linen management, all elements of standard, droplet/contact and airborne precautions.
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WHO’s antiretroviral treatment (ART) clinic-based acquired drug resistance survey method yields robust estimates of HIV viral suppression and acquired HIV drug resistance in adults, children and adolescents taking both dolutegravir and non-dolutegravir based regimens.
Results are used to inform A...RT programme decision making regarding optimal ART regimens and support evaluation of programme quality with respect to maximizing viral load suppression and minimizing emergence of resistance in people taking ART.
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his guidance provides interim guidance for the integration of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virologic and genomic surveillance, from sentinel site case enrolment and sampling to the eventual sharing of the virus sequence data, a process known as end-to-end surveillance. This guidance builds on experience...s and lessons learned as countries adapted their influenza surveillance systems in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and reviews new evidence to provide guidance on end-to-end surveillance. The guidance includes new algorithms and strategies to adapt sentinel systems to make them resilient and agile for addressing global and national surveillance needs for influenza and COVID-19.covid-
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This report presents an analysis of antibacterial agents in preclinical (third annual review) and clinical (fifth annual review) development. The analysis covers traditional (direct-acting small molecules) and non-traditional antibacterial agents in development worldwide. It evaluates to what extent... the present pipeline addresses infections caused by WHO Priority Pathogens, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Clostridioides difficile. The report also provides an assessment of the traditional agents with respect to whether they meet a set of predefined criteria for innovation, namely absence of known cross-resistance, new target, mode of action and/or class. It also includes an overview of the agents that obtained authorization since 1 July 2017.
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The pandemic has emphasized the high risk of avoidable harm to patients, health workers, and the general public, and has identified a range of safety gaps across all core components of health systems at all levels.
The rapid review ‘Implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for patient safety’ ex...plores impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic did have on patient safety in terms of risks and avoidable harm, specifically in terms of diagnostic, treatment and care management related issues as well as highlights the main patterns of these implications within the broader health system context.
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These guidelines provide updated evidence-based recommendations on the priority HCV-related topics from the 2018 WHO Guidelines for the care and treatment of persons diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C infection and the 2017 WHO Guidelines on hepatitis B and C testing. These priority areas are:
... direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatment of adolescents and children ages ≥3 years of age
simplified HCV service delivery (decentralization, integration and task sharing)
HCV diagnostics – use of point-of-care (POC) HCV ribonucleic acid (RNA) assays and reflex HCV RNA testing.
These guidelines also update existing chapters without new recommendations, such as the inclusion of new manufacturers’ protocols on the use of dried blood spot (DBS) for HCV RNA testing and new data to inform the limit of detection for HCV RNA assays as a test of cure, in addition to their use for diagnosis.
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