Handbook on pregnancy, childbirth, childhood illnesses, child development and the care of children. The handbook, Facts for Life, provides vital messages and information for mothers, fathers, other family members and caregivers and communities to use in changing behaviours and practices that can sav...e and protect the lives of children and help them grow and develop to their full potential.
This version of Facts for Life builds on the three previous editions, which have been helping families and communities around the world since 1989. Newborn Health has been added to the Safe Motherhood chapter, giving attention to child survival from the first stage of life. A new chapter, Child Protection, has been included, focusing attention on the actions needed to ensure children grow up in protective environments.
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This guidance is intended for use in developing standalone TB strategic plans, or TB interventions as part of multidisease or health sector plans. It describes key considerations and steps for strategic planning for TB in line with the World Health Organization’s End TB strategy, and the proposed ...structure of the NSP. The target audience of this publication are all stakeholders involved in national strategic planning for TB (e.g., ministry of health, other government ministries, private sector, civil society, affected communities, academic and research institutions, and technical and funding partners).
The current document is an update to the 2015 Toolkit to develop a national strategic plan for TB prevention, care and control.
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TNew data from the World Health Organization reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted malaria services, leading to a marked increase in cases and deaths.
According to WHO’s latest World malaria report, there were an estimated 241 million malaria cases and 627 000 malaria deaths worldwide i...n 2020. This represents about 14 million more cases in 2020 compared to 2019, and 69 000 more deaths. Approximately two-thirds of these additional deaths (47 000) were linked to disruptions in the provision of malaria prevention, diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic.
As in past years, the report provides an up-to-date assessment of the burden of malaria at global, regional and country levels. It tracks investments in malaria programmes and research as well as progress across all intervention areas. This latest report draws on data from 87 countries and territories with ongoing malaria transmission.
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Notable progress has also been made on other key health indicators such as reducing maternal, infant and child deaths and malnutrition, increasing immunization coverage, eliminating infectious diseases such as polio and reducing the incidence of malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhoeal diseases.
But ...despite such substantial progress, the country now faces new and emerging new challenges such as the rising burden of noncommunicable diseases, increased risks associated with disasters, environmental threats and health emergencies during disease outbreaks including the COVID-19 pandemic that is a serious public health threat to Bangladesh. To establish a resilience system for future potential pandemics, the national capacity for emergency preparedness and early response to health emergencies needs to be bolstered considerably.
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This rapid communication outlines the main outcomes of a WHO convened Guideline Development Group (GDG) meeting, held in May-June 2021 on the topic of the management of TB in children and adolescents. The rapid communication aims to inform staff from ministries of health and care providers across p...ublic and private sectors, technical partners and other stakeholders about the key findings, considerations and changes related to the diagnosis, treatment and care of TB for children and adolescents, in order to allow for planning at the country level ahead of the release of updated guidelines and an associated operational handbook. WHO will publish the guidelines and operational handbook in the coming months.
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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 primary audience for these recommendations includes health professionals who are responsible for developing national and local health-care guidelines and protocols and health workers involved in the provision of care to women and their newborns during pregnancy, labour and childbirth; this inclu...des midwives, nurses, general medical practitioners and obstetricians. The primary audience also includes managers of maternal and child health programmes, and relevant staff in ministries of health and educational and training institutions, in all settings.
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The primary audience for these recommendations includes health professionals who are responsible for developing national and local health-care guidelines and protocols and health workers involved in the provision of care to women and their newborns during pregnancy, labour and childbirth; this inclu...des midwives, nurses, general medical practitioners and obstetricians. The primary audience also includes managers of maternal and child health programmes, and relevant staff in ministries of health and educational and training institutions, in all settings.
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The primary audience for these recommendations includes health professionals who are responsible for developing national and local health-care guidelines and protocols and health workers involved in the provision of care to women and their newborns during pregnancy, labour and childbirth; this inclu...des midwives, nurses, general medical practitioners and obstetricians. The primary audience also includes managers of maternal and child health programmes, and relevant staff in ministries of health and educational and training institutions, in all settings.
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This Guideline, the first for the country, draws from national health sector reforms and integration agenda as outlined in the key national strategic documents. The Guide applies lessons learnt from the SRH/HIV Linkages project and its scale-up; other national experiences and from regional and globa...l evidence and guidance on high-impact interventions that promote sustainable, equitable and effective delivery of health services to achieve Universal Health coverage.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting of the Technical Advisory Group on Buruli ulcer at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland on 25 to 27 March 2019
Joint EUAA, IOM and OECD report provides new insights on displacement from and within Ukraine
The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have published a Joint Report on profil...es, experiences, and aspirations of forcibly displaced people by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Joint Report provides an in-depth study of the scale of displacement to EU countries and people seeking protection there, by building on initial findings derived from a June EUAA-OECD Survey.
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In 1997, the Fiftieth World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA50.29 on the elimination of
lymphatic 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 El...iminate 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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Atlas of African Health Statistics 2022: Health situation analysis of the WHO African Region
Since 2019, we have been implementing Phase 2 of the regional Transformation Agenda, which informs and aligns with the global WHO Transformation, to ensure WHO is accountable, driven by re- sults and provid...ing value for money in the pursuit of better health. Our global priority in this period is to contribute to delivering on the triple billion targets of expanding universal health coverage, protecting people from emergencies, and promoting health and well-being for people across the Region.
This year’s Atlas of African Health Statistics is being produced in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that we have been expe- riencing for over two years. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic, together with other health emergencies in the WHO African Re- gion, is yet again testing the strength and resilience of our health systems. Indeed, the impact of COVID-19 is visible in the disruption of services. The report also presents the latest data for more than 50 health-related indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals and WHO’s “triple billion” targets and provides comprehensive country-level statistics using the results chain of the AFRO frame- work of actions for strengthening health systems to achieve UHC and the health-related SDGs.
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What are the FP and CAC competencies?
Through the clear articulation of the family planning and comprehensive abortion care (FP and CAC) competencies for the primary health care workforce, the aim is to advance improvements in FP and CAC service delivery by aligning health worker education approach...es with population health needs and health system demands.
This document, which describes these competencies in detail, is intended to:
be a foundational tool to be adopted and adapted by educators and regulators for FP and CAC providers (students) with a pre-service training pathway of at least 12 months;
describe competencies that are relevant to current and future health practice;
enable widespread use of the competencies not only for curriculum development for pre-service education, but also for in-service education, regulation, qualifications, quality assurance, personal development, performance evaluation, recruitment, management and career progression;
focus on the core functions of FP and CAC providers within broader efforts towards achieving universal health coverage
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This document, Programme and curriculum development guide, presents a systematic approach to developing programmes and curricula for implementation of the family planning (FP) and comprehensive abortion care (CAC) competencies,and the theory behind the approach. Specifically, the aim is for effectiv...e implementation of these competencies in the context of pre-service education and training, post-graduate studies and continuing professional development (CPD). This guide is designed for programme and curriculum developers who are preparing or revising formal education and training programmes and curricula for the FP and CAC workforce.
This guide proposes a new FP and CAC Educational Design Model for programme and curriculum development. This model can support competency-based education (CBE) for current and future FP and CAC services, with a pre-service training pathway of at least 12 months, and can also support in-service training. CBE provides the most effective means to orient educational programmes and curricula towards effective health services that meet population health needs, and this Educational Design Model provides a guide for linking the competencies required to provide a range of health services
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The COVID-19 pandemic has raised profound ethical challenges on an unprecedented global scale. These challenges include how to allocate scarce resources (especially vaccines and therapeutics), both within and between countries, whether and when to mandate vaccines and/or masks, whether and how to co...nduct public health surveillance, whether to issue vaccine passports, and how to address stark international and intranational inequities. In addition, there have been ethical concerns about the conduct of COVID-19 research, such as the appropriateness of challenge studies.
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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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Communicable diseases are a major cause of suffering, disability and death in the world. The World Health
Organization’s Programme on Communicable Diseases provides technical guidance and support to national governments to organize and implement programmes aimed at setting up or strengthening ong...oing control of common diseases, reducing transmission, mortality, morbidity and human suffering, and gradually eliminating these diseases so that they cease to be a public health problem. In some cases, the aim may also be to eradicate selected communicable diseases
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Burden of T. solium: Neurocysticercosis is a disease induced by T. solium larvae penetrating human tissues, especially the nervous system. Neurocysticercosis burdens economies, societies and individuals because of the impact of epilepsy on wages, health costs and social stigmatization of sufferers. ...Health systems are also burdened as treatments must be tailored to individual needs.
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