Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(24), 13339; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182413339
The climate crisis threatens to exacerbate numerous climate-sensitive health risks, including heatwave mortality, malnutrition from reduced crop yields, water- and vector-borne infectious diseases, and... respiratory illness from smog, ozone, allergenic pollen, and wildfires. Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stress the urgent need for action to mitigate climate change, underscoring the need for more scientific assessment of the benefits of climate action for health and wellbeing.
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In 2015, 26% of the deaths of 5.9 million children who died before reaching their fifth birthday could have been prevented
through addressing environmental risks – a shocking missed opportunity. The prenatal and early childhood period represents
a window of particular vulnerability, where enviro...nmental hazards can lead to premature birth and other complications,
and increase lifelong disease risk including for respiratory disorders, cardiovascular disease and cancers. The environment
thus represents a major factor in children’s health, as well as a major opportunity for improvement, with effects seen in every
region of the world.
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To support countries in adapting their response to different COVID-19 scenarios, the World Health Organization (WHO) Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health and Ageing commissioned this scoping review of published and grey literature. The objective was to identify interventions ...implemented to maintain the provision and use of essential services for MNCAAH during disruptive events and to summarize lessons learned during these interventions. The review included outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (EVD), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Zika virus disease (ZVD), the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies that caused disruption to services, transport and other activities.
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OpenWHO is an interactive, web-based, knowledge-transfer platform offering free online courses to improve the response to health emergencies. In summary, OpenWHO currently offers courses covering the following topics and languages to support the response to COVID-19:
A general introduction to ...emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses (available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Hungarian, Indian Sign Language, Indonesian, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish and Vietnamese);
Clinical care SARI (available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese and Vietnamese);
Health and safety briefing for respiratory diseases – ePROTECT (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian and Portuguese);
IPC for COVID-19 (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Serbian and Turkish);
COVID-19 operational planning guidelines and partners platform to support country preparedness and response (available in Chinese, English, French, Russian and Portuguese);
SARI treatment facility design (available in Arabic, English and Portuguese);
An introduction to Go.Data (available in English and in additional languages); and
How to put on and remove PPE for COVID-19 (available in English and in additional languages).
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Policy Brief | April 2015 | This brief accompanies the data sheet, Addressing Risk Factors for Noncommunicable Diseases Among Young People in Africa: Key to Prevention and Sustainable Development, and its data appendix, which provide all available country-specific data on four key NCD risk factors a...mong young people in Africa since 2004. These publications extend an earlier publication, Noncommunicable Disease Risk Factors Among Young People in Africa: Data Availability and Sources. All are available at www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2015/ncd-risk-youth-africa.aspx.
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Public Health and the Environment | Geneva 2009
Pneumonia kills more children than any other illness – more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Over 2 million children die from pneumonia each year, accounting for almost 1 in 5 under five deaths worldwide. Yet, little attention is paid to this disease. This joint UNICEF/WHO report examines ...the epidemiological evidence on the burden and distribution of pneumonia and assesses current levels of treatment and prevention. It is a call to action to reduce pneumonia mortality, a key step towards the achievement of the millennium development goal on child mortality.
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The combined effects from ambient (outdoor) air pollution and indoor (household, in particular) air pollution cause approximately 7 million premature deaths every year, largely as a result of increased mortality from stroke, IHD, COPD, lung cancer and acute respiratory infections (1). Air pollution ...can occur in both the outdoor and indoor environments. Cook-stoves in homes, motor vehicles, industrial facilities and forest fires are common sources of air pollution. Air pollutants with the strongest evidence for adverse health outcomes include particulate matter (PM; both PM 2.5 (i.e. particles with an aerodynamic diameter
equal to or less than 2.5 μm) and PM10 (i.e. particles with an aerodynamic diameter equal to or less than 10 μm), ozone (O 3), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and carbon monoxide (CO). Air pollution is however composed of many more pollutants (1).
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Quality clinical care is at the heart of a robust, effective response to outbreaks. Frontline health workers need evidence-based tools and training to provide safe, effective and quality clinical care.
The Clinical Management channel includes videos on a range of diseases, such as Ebola, diphther...ia and influenza. The channel also hosts a full course series on COVID-19 which covers a holistic pathway of care of a patient, from screening and triage to rehabilitation and palliative care.
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Drawing on lessons from recent events, WHO launched ‘PRET - Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats’ to support countries in updating their pandemic plans. Building on the current global momentum, PRET applies a “mode of transmission lens.”
The first PRET module focuses on preparin...g for respiratory pathogens. Future modules will focus on other pathogen groups such as arthropod-borne viruses.
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These guidelines are designed for settings with limited resources to provide inexpensive and effective control strategies for prevention of TB transmission in health care workers (HCW).
9th edition; 4th English edition 2020
Clinical Guidelines. Diagnosis and Treatment Manual.
This diagnostic and treatment manual is designed for use by medical professionals involved in curative care at the dispensary and hospital levels. We have tried to respond in the simplest and most practical way possible to the questions and problems faced by field medical staff, using the accumulate...d field experience of Médecins Sans Frontières, the recommendations of reference organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and specialized works in each field.
Available in English, French, Spanish and Arabic
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The clinical guidelines and protocols for the practice of emergency medicine presented in this document are designed to be a useful resource not only for those wishing to become emergency medicine specialists, but also for general practitioners and other healthcare providers tasked with caring for p...atients in hospital emergency departments. Healthcare providers using this Emergency Medicine Clinical Guideline (EMCG) are provided with fundamental concepts and principles essential to emergency medicine and the management of patients with undifferentiated emergency conditions.
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This checklist is an operational tool to help national authorities develop or revise national respiratory pathogen (inclusive of influenza and coronaviruses) pandemic preparedness plans.