Theodor Bilharz, a German professor of anatomy and chief of surgery at the Kasr El Ani Hospital of Cairo from 1850, first identified an infective organism, Distomum hematobium in 1851, which was renamed Schistosoma haematobium in 1858. It arose from a cestode worm, Hymenoleptis nana, lying in the sm...all colon of an Egyptian patient. He also discovered a trematode worm at the same time from an autopsy, thought to be the cause of urinary Schistosomiasis. Bilharz died from typhoid fever in 1862 at the age of 37. The Theodor Bilharz Research Institute in Giza, Egypt, stands as a tribute to him today. F. Milton published the first recorded peer-reviewed article report on Schistosomiasis in 1914.
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Epidemiological Update
Dengue
7 February 2020
Situation summary
In the Region of the Americas, between epidemiological week (EW) 1 and EW 521 of 2019, a total of 3,139,335 cases of dengue have been reported (321.58 cases per 100,000 population), including 1,538 deaths. Of the total cases, 1,367,...353 (43.6%) were laboratory-confirmed and 28,169 (0.9%) were classified as severe dengue. The case-fatality rate was 0.049%.
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The aim of this toolkit is to guide countries on how to best estimate their current burden of dengue by combining existing data from dengue surveillance systems with on-going research efforts to measure the community burden
of dengue.
La sécurité du traitement hospitalier et la réalité des soins sont des
préoccupations majeures dans les systèmes de santé. La transfusion sanguine a fait l’objet de procédures juridiques et d’études
au Canada, en Angleterre, en France, en Irlande et dans d’autres
pays. Il conviendr...ait que les hôpitaux soient à même de montrer
que leurs méthodes de transfusion sanguine sont sûres, cliniquement effectives et efficaces. En voici les raisons.
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Conflicts and disasters, including pandemics, affect women and men in all their diversity differently, and women and girls often suffer the most. Crisis-related hardships combine and compound pre-existing disadvantages, for example, they often cause women’s working conditions to worsen while incre...asing their overall workload and care responsibilities. At the same time, crises can give rise to changes that enable women to take up roles that were previously available only to men, and crises can open opportunities to address existing gender-based discrimination and violations of rights.
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Human schistosomiasis, a parasitic and often chronic illness, is one of the major neglected tropical diseases worldwide. It is estimated that 240 million people suffer from schistosomiasis, with more than 200000 fatalities recorded each year. Schistosomiasis is caused by an infection of the blood fl...uke Schistosoma and is transmitted to humans through direct contact with infected water.
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Food security, human health and wellbeing largely depend on biodiversity. Biodiversity supports agriculture through ecosystem services such as pollination and water purification, and provides access to natural medicines,
which are the primary source of health care for 4 billion people worldwide
Leishmaniasis is a climate-sensitive disease. Changes in temperature, rainfall, and humidity can have strong impacts on
the sandfly vector, altering their distribution and influencing their survival and population sizes. Increased temperatures shorten vector development time, reduce Leishmania para...site incubation time, and increase vector biting rates, allowing transmission
in areas not previously endemic for the disease. Poor and
marginalized communities will be hit disproportionately harder by
the effects of climate change, and droughts, famines, and floods
can also lead to displacement and migration of immunologically
naive people to areas where leishmaniasis is endemic, posing a
threat of leishmaniasis outbreaks.
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Over the past twenty years, huge efforts made by a broad coalition of stakeholders curbed the last epidemic and brought the disease to the brink of elimination. In this paper, the latest figures on disease occurrence, geographical distribution and control activities are presented. Strong evidence in...dicates that the elimination of sleeping sickness ‘as a public health problem’ by 2020 is well within reach. In particular, fewer than one thousand new cases were reported in 2018, and the area where the risk of infection is estimated as moderate, high or very high has shrunk to less than 200,000 km2. More than half of this area is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The interruption of transmission of the gambiense form, targeted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for 2030, will require renewed efforts to tackle a range of expected and unexpected challenges. The rhodesiense form of the disease represents a small part of the overall HAT burden. For this form, the problem of under detection is on the rise and, because of an important animal reservoir, the elimination of disease transmission is not envisioned at this stage.
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Sleeping sickness is controlled by case detection and treatment but this often only reaches less than 75% of the population. Vector control is capable of completely interrupting HAT transmission but is not used because of expense. We conducted a full scale field trial of a refined vector control tec...hnology. From preliminary trials we determined the number of insecticidal tiny targets required to control tsetse populations by more than 90%. We then carried out a full scale, 500 km2 field trial covering two HAT foci in Northern Uganda (overall target density 5.7/km2). In 12 months tsetse populations declined by more than 90%. A mathematical model suggested that a 72% reduction in tsetse population is required to stop transmission in those settings. The Ugandan census suggests population density in the HAT foci is approximately 500 per km2. The estimated cost for a single round of active case detection (excluding treatment), covering 80% of the population, is US$433,333 (WHO figures). One year of vector control organised within country, which can completely stop HAT transmission, would cost US$42,700. The case for adding this new method of vector control to case detection and treatment is strong. We outline how such a component could be organised.
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Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) has been an alarming global public health issue. The disease affects mainly poor and marginalized people in low-resource settings and is caused by two subspecies of haemoflagellate parasite, Trypanosoma brucei and transmitted by tsetse flies. Progress made in HAT ...control during the past decade has prompted increasing global dialogue on its elimination and eradication. The disease is targeted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for elimination as a public health problem by 2020 and to terminate its transmission globally by 2030, along-side other Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD). Several methods have been used to control tsetse flies and the disease transmitted by them. Old and new tools to control the disease are available with constraints.
Currently, there are no vaccines available. Efforts towards intervention to control the disease over the past decade have seen considerable progress and remarkable success with incidence dropping progressively, reversing the upward trend of reported cases. This gives credence in a real progress in its elimination. This study reviews various control measures, progress and a highlight of control issues, vector and parasite barriers that may have been hindering progress towards its elimination.
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A 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck at 04:17 local time on 6 February 2023, with its epicentre located in Pazarcık district
in Kahramanmaraş province, Türkiye. Over 1200 aftershocks have since been reported. These are Türkiye’ s most powerful
earthquakes since 1939
Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) published a clinical case definition of post COVID-19
condition, by a Delphi consensus, on 6 October 2021. That process concluded that a separate definition
may be applicable for children. It is important to understand the frequency, characteristics ...and risk factors
that lead to post COVID-19 condition, along with its impact on everyday functioning and development of
children and adolescents. Long-term outcomes of the condition are currently unknown and need to be
studied. For these reasons, a globally standardized clinical case definition is needed.
Aim: To develop a globally relevant standardized clinical case definition for children and adolescents by
building on the WHO clinical case definition for post COVID-19 condition in adults.
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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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Onchocerciasis used to be an important public health problem in Africa, with over 37 million people infected and millions suffering from debilitating skin disease, terrible itching, impaired vision and
blindness. But the epidemiological situation has improved dramatically over the last two decades.... Community directed treatment with ivermectin has effectively brought the disease under control in most endemic areas where onchocerciasis is no longer a public health risk.
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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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This brochure presents a summary of the situation of health systems and services in the Americas as they progress toward the achievement of universal access to health and universal health coverage (universal health). The information provided presents an overview of the situation before the COVID-19 ...pandemic, how the pandemic has impacted health systems, and recommendations to address current and future challenges for building resilient health systems to advance toward universal health in the Americas.
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En este folleto se resume la situación de los sistemas y servicios de salud en la Región de las Américas en su progreso hacia el acceso universal a la salud y la cobertura universal de salud (la “salud universal”). Se presenta la situación previa a la pandemia de COVID-19, el efecto que ha t...enido en los sistemas de salud y las recomendaciones para encarar los retos actuales y futuros en la construcción de sistemas de salud resilientes que permitan seguir avanzando hacia la salud universal en la Región.
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This is an e-learning module with the objective of providing education for health professionals and pregnant women using published results and studies based on COVID-19 surveillance data, which have indicated an increased risk among pregnant women of presenting with severe forms of COVID-19 and, the...refore, of being hospitalized and admitted to intensive care units.
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Despite a historical association with poor tolerability, a comprehensive review on safety of antileishmanial chemotherapies is lacking. We carried out an update of a previous systematic review of all published clinical trials in visceral leishmaniasis (VL) from 1980 to 2019 to document any reported ...serious adverse events (SAEs).
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