The health and socioeconomic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the countries 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 politica...l 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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The new treatment recommendations that extend the 2018 treat all recommendation for adults with chronic HCV infection to include adolescents and children down to 3 years, and to align the existing recommended pangenotypic direct-acting antiviral (DAA) regimens (SOF/DCV, SOF/VEL and G/P) for adults, ...to those for adolescents and children. This alignment is expected to simplify procurement, promote access to treatment among children in low- and middle-income countries and contribute to global efforts to eliminate the disease
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Policy Brief. 24 June 2022. This policy brief, one of two on the updated hepatitis C (HCV) guidelines, focuses on the new recommendations on simplified service delivery for a public health approach to HCV testing, care and treatment. These recommendations include decentralization, integration and ta...sk-sharing, in addition to the use of point-of-care (POC) HCV viral load assays and reflex viral load testing.
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2nd edition. These guidelines include several notable changes from the first edition. For cutaneous leishmaniasis, ketoconazole has been removed from the list of treatment options; the number of Leishmania species for which there is strong evidence for the efficacy of miltefosine has increased from ...two to four; and the recommendation for intralesional antimonials is now strong. For mucosal leishmaniasis there is now a strong recommendation for use of pentavalent antimonials with or without oral pentoxifylline. For visceral leishmaniasis, the strong recommendations for use of pentavalent antimonials and amphotericin B deoxycholate are now conditional.
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Tis first edition describes the standard operating procedures for health products for NTDs amenable to preventive chemotherapy and the medicines donated to treat them. These include albendazole for lymphatic filariasis and soil-transmitted helminthiases; azithromycin for trachoma and yaws; diethylca...rbamazine citrate for lymphatic filariasis; ivermectin for onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis; mebendazole for soil-transmitted helminthiases; praziquantel for schistosomiasis; and triclabendazole for foodborne trematodiases. Standard operating procedures for diseases amenable to case management will be covered in subsequent editions, including the application process for requesting medicines (Chapter 1). In the meantime, the procedures described in the rest of the document apply for both case management and preventive chemotherapy NTD health products.
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Ensuring mental health and well-being has become a worldwide imperative and an important target of the Sustainable Development Goals. But in all countries around the world, our response has been woefully insufficient, and we have made
little progress to advance mental health as a fundamental human ...right.
One in ten people are affected by a mental health condition, up to 200 million people have an intellectual disability and an estimated 50 million people have dementia. Many persons with mental health conditions, or psychosocial, intellectual, or cognitive disabilities lack access to quality mental health services that respond to their needs and respect their rights and dignity.
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Fact Sheet Global Atlas of medical devices
This report presents the findings from a ‘deep dive’ undertaken by UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific Regional Office to consider the experiences in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and the Pacific. The target audience for this report ...includes OPDs and humanitarian actors at global, regional, and country levels.
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The war in Ukraine has had devasting impact on women and girls
worldwide, widening gender gaps and increasing rates of food insecurity, malnutrition and energy poverty. This brief reviews the available evidence of that impact, recommending urgent attention to its consequences for women and girls. I...ts findings underline the global impacts on gender equality and women’s rights that have been compounded by climate change, environmental degradation and the COVID-19 pandemic,
demonstrating further entrenched inequalities and human rights violations.
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Ensuring mental health and well-being has become a worldwide imperative and an important target
of the Sustainable Development Goals.
But in all countries around the world, our response has been woefully insufficient, and we have made
little progress to advance mental health as a fundamental huma...n right.
One in ten people are affected by a mental health condition, up to 200 million people have an
intellectual disability and an estimated 50 million people have dementia. Many persons with mental
health conditions, or psychosocial, intellectual, or cognitive disabilities lack access to quality mental
health services that respond to their needs and respect their rights and dignity.
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The QualityRights training and orientation modules have been developed to enhance the knowledge, skills and understanding of key stakeholders on how to promote the rights of people with psychosocial, intellectual or cognitive disabilities, improve the quality of services and support provided in the ...field of mental health and related areas, in line with international human rights standards, in particular the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the recovery approach.
mental health and related fields, in accordance with international human rights standards, in particular the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the recovery approach.
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Since the first edition of the CDAC snapshot of communication, community engagement and accountability (CCEA) across the Ukraine response was published in May 2022, a conscious effort has been made by international, national and local responders to ramp up CCEA action. Progress has been made in esta...blishing coordination mechanisms and launching activities, particularly around accountability to affected people (AAP). As CCEA work continues to scale up on the ground, a greater focus and more effort are still needed on community-facing information and two-way communication; this should be accorded a higher priority than at present.
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The World Health Organization's fourth Country Cooperation Strategy 2022-2026 is an outcome of a consultative process with inputs from the Ministry of Health, various agencies in the health sector, and other relevant stakeholders. It has been developed to provide strategic direction and support towa...rd achieving the priorities of the Government of the Kingdom of Eswatini.
It is designed to support the strengthening of health systems and services toward the attainment of Universal Health
Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals targets. The CCS 2022-2026 also presents the collaborative
agenda between the Kingdom of Eswatini and the three levels of WHO, aligns with the strategic priorities of WHO’s
13th General Programme of Work (2019 – 2025), as well as Eswatini’s United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) 2021-2025
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This Mpox SPRP Global Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Framework, also referred to as the Framework, aims to monitor and report on global progress towards these objectives, including information about country-level response efforts and WHO support to Member States. Regular collection and analysis of da...ta on these objectives, alongside the ongoing tracking of the epidemiological situation, are key to informing decision-making, operational adjustments, as well as ensuring transparency and accountability for achieving the goal to stop the Mpox outbreak. This document suggests reporting indicators for monitoring of the global response to the Mpox PHEIC as articulated in the Mpox SPRP and Operational Planning Guidelines for countries.
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This document outlines the working structure and guiding principles for collaboration of COVAX, the Vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A). The working structure of COVAX continues to adapt to emerging needs and the changing trajectory of the pandemic. Some components of... the pandemic response capabilities united under COVAX may eventually be integrated into regional, national and sub national health systems, routine immunization programmes and future global pandemic preparedness and response (PPR) structures. Therefore, the working structures outlined in this document continue to evolve and the document provides a snapshot of the COVAX ways of working in the first half of 2022.
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The Practical manual on laboratory strengthening, 2022 update provides practical guidance on implementation of WHO recommendations and best practices for TB laboratory strengthening. It is an updated version of the GLI Practical Guide to Laboratory Strengthening published in 2017 and provides the la...test practical guidance on use of newly recommended diagnostics as well as guidance in key technical areas, including quality assurance and quality management systems, specimen collection and registration, procurement and supply-chain management, diagnostic connectivity, biosafety, data management, human resources, strategic planning, and model algorithms. The key changes are:
inclusion of recent or updated WHO recommendations for tests to diagnose TB and detect drug resistance;
alignment with the latest WHO critical concentrations for phenotypic drug-susceptibility testing (DST) and the new definitions of pre-XDR-TB and XDR-TB;
updated information on building quality-assured TB testing and management capacity using the Stepwise Laboratory Quality Improvement Process Towards Accreditation (SLIPTA) approach (Score-TB package1);
updated information on assessing, analysing and optimising TB diagnostic networks; and
updated information on the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) to detect mutations associated with drug resistance for surveillance purposes.
The document also provides references to resources and tools relevant for work on laboratory strengthening.
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Cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) is a neglected infectious endemic disease that is transmitted through the bite of a vector insect (sandfly) of the Lutzomyia genus,typical of rural geographical territories, and causes disfiguring skin ulcers and disabilities. It is estimated that CL affects between 600 ...000 and 1 000 000 people a year around the world, mainly in the America s, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and Central Asia. Eighteen of the 21 countries that make up the Latin American (LA) region are considered endemic areas for this neglected tropical disease. Colombia is one of the countries that reports the majority of global cases with 6161 in 2020 and has the second highest number of cases in the Americas, after Brazil.
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In response to the recent publication “Is onchocerciasis elimination in Africa feasible by 2025: a perspective based on lessons learnt from the African control programmes” by Dadzie et al., it is important to clarify and highlight the positive and unequivocal research and operational contributio...ns from the American experience towards the worldwide elimination of human onchocerciasis (river blindness).
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