The 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in western Africa was the longest and most deadly Ebola epidemic in history, resulting in 28,616 cases and 11,310 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The Ebola virus has been known since 1976, when two separate outbreaks were identified in the Democratic Repub...lic of Congo (then Zaire) and South Sudan (then Sudan). However, because all Ebola outbreaks prior to that in West Africa in 2014–2015 were relatively isolated and of short duration, little was known about how to best manage patients to improve survival, and there were no approved therapeutics or vaccines. When the World Heath Organization declared the 2014-2015 epidemic a public health emergency of international concern in August 2014, several teams began conducting formal clinical trials in the Ebola affected countries during the outbreak.
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Irresponsible pharmaceutical companies fuel the proliferation of superbugs through supply chain pollution, the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) reports. The advocacy group uncovered lapses such as dirty production and inadequate waste disposal in the production of antimicrobials in China and I...ndia, which supplies most of the antimicrobials consumed in Europe. In a briefing detailing the pollution, the EPHA urges major purchasers of antibiotics to blacklist irresponsible pharmaceutical companies, demand that the industry clean up its supply chain, introduce greater transparency on the origin of antibiotics, and review and revise procurement policies from an ethics perspective.
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By 2100, new UN figures show that 4 of today’s 10 most populous nations will be replaced by African countries.
Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia and Mexico—where populations are projected to stagnate or decline—will drop out. In their place: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania and E...gypt. All 4 are projected to more double in population.
Top 10 rankings in population growth by 2100 include only 2 non-African nations—Pakistan and the US.
c1China will shrink by 374 million fewer people—more than the entire US population.
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Comprehensive public health action on population ageing is urgently needed. This will require fundamental shifts, not just in the things we do, but in how we think about ageing itself. The World report on ageing and health outlines a framework for action to foster Healthy Ageing built around the new... concept of functional ability. Making these investments will have valuable social and economic returns, both in terms of health and wellbeing of older people and in enabling their on-going participation in society
Executive summaries : Arabic; Chinese; English; French; German; Japanese; Portuguese; Russian; Spanish
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Over the period 2015 to 2019, scaling up a package of selected nutrition-specific and nutrition sensitive interventions to cover 90 per cent of Sudan would:
- Reduce the under-five mortality rate to 49/1,000 live births
- Reduce the prevalence of stunting to 25 per cent
- Reduce the ...prevalence of wasting (global acute malnutrition – GAM) to 6 per cent
- Increase exclusive breastfeeding to 63 per cent
- Reduce iron deficiency anaemia among pregnant women to 26 per cent.
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Top 10 hungriest countries contribute just 0.08% of global CO2.
-Climate & Food Vulnerability Index shows 10 most food insecure countries emit less than half a tonne of CO2 per person
-Burundi is the world's most food insecure and smallest per capita emitter
-The average Briton gener...ates as much CO2 as 212 Burundians
-IPCC blockers Russia, USA and Saudi some of the worst offenders
As scientists of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meet in Geneva this week to publish their Special Report on Climate Change and Land (August 8), a new report by the development charity Christian Aid shows that climate change is having a disproportionate impact on the food systems of the country’s least responsible for causing the climate crisis.
The IPCC is expected to show how climate change will affect global food supply, spiking prices and reducing nutrition. It is also likely to recommend that countries will need to drastically cut emissions if global food security is to be protected.
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The spread of COVID-19 poses a challenge for emerging markets such as those in Africa and Latin America. While governments around the world are suffering from a shortage of ventilators, hospital beds, and personal protective equipment, availability of these items is already extremely limited in some... countries. In Africa, countries including Mali, Liberia, and Burkina Faso have only a few ventilators available to aid their populations, and there is also a lack of reliable oxygen supplies, ICUs, and healthcare workers to treat the sick. Additionally, many countries in Africa are already suffering from food insecurity and weak economies, which will worsen the long-term effects of coronavirus.
Keeping these factors in mind, GeoPoll conducted a remote study in 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa on the effects coronavirus is already having on people throughout the region.
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World Report 2021, Human Rights Watch’s 31st annual review of human rights practices and trends around the globe, reviews developments in more than 100 countries.
In his introductory essay, Executive Director Kenneth Roth calls on the incoming US administration to more deeply embed respect for ...human rights as an element of domestic and foreign policy to counter the “wild oscillations in human rights policy” that in recent decades have come with each new resident of the White House. Roth emphasizes that even as the Trump administration mostly abandoned the protection of human rights, joined by China, Russia and others, other governments—typically working in coalition and some new to the cause—stepped forward to champion rights. As it works to entrench rights protections, the Biden administration should seek to join, not supplant, this new collective effort.
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The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, echoed the concerns of people and organisations around the world when he recently referred to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on schooling as a
‘generational catastrophe’.
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24 Nov. 2021
Action against gender-based violence being pushed to the outlying margins of the global COVID-19 response
A new Oxfam report shows an undeniable increase in gender-based violence (GBV) during the COVID-19 pandemic around the world to which too many governments and donors are not doi...ng enough to tackle.
The report, The Ignored Pandemic: The Dual Crisis of Gender-Based Violence and COVID-19, showed the number of calls made by survivors to domestic violence hotlines in ten countries during the first months of lockdown. The data reveals a 25 – 111 percentage surge; in Argentina (25%), Colombia (79%), Tunisia (43%), China (50%), Somalia (50%), South Africa (69%), UK (25%), Cyprus (39%), Italy (73%) and the largest increase in Malaysia where calls surged by over 111%.
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Lancet Public health 2022 January 6, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2468-2667(21)00249-8
Growth in the number of individuals living with dementia underscores the need for public health planning efforts and policy to address the needs of this group. Country-level estimates can be used to inform nati...onal planning efforts and decisions. Multifaceted approaches, including scaling up interventions to address modifiable risk factors and investing in research on biological mechanisms, will be key in addressing the expected increases in the number of individuals affected by dementia.
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The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health recognises that climate change
is an existential threat to the health and wellbeing of children and young people.
In October 2020, we joined national health and academic alliances to declare
climate change an emergency requiring accelerated col...laborative actions. This
position statement summarises our recommendations and activity about
mitigation and adaptation against the impact of climate change on children and
young people around the world.
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PHARMA’S RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 VACCINES CRISIS. Update Feb., 14, 2022. In September 2021, Amnesty International published A Double Dose of Inequality, which assessed the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry was restricting access to Covid-19 vaccines. This report updates that assessment ...of five leading vaccine manufacturers, AstraZeneca plc, BioNTech SE, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Inc., and Pfizer Inc. It also includes for the first time an assessment of the two largest Chinese vaccine producers, China National Pharmaceutical Group Co., Ltd. (Sinopharm) and Sinovac Biotech Ltd. (Sinovac).
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The Planetary Health Education Framework is a project of the Planetary Health Alliance (planetaryhealthalliance.org). The Planetary Health Alliance is a consortium of over 250 partners from around the world committed to understanding and addressing the human health impacts of global environmental ch...ange
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As the war in Ukraine pushes food, fuel and fertilizer prices toward record levels putting food security in many of the world’s poorest countries at risk, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) today launched a Crisis Response Initiative to ensure that small-scale farmer...s in high-risk countries can produce food over the next few months to feed their families and communities while reducing the threat to future harvests.
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More than three months since the start of the war in Ukraine, people globally are facing a cost-of-living crisis not seen in more than a generation, with escalating price shocks in the global food, energy and fertilizer markets - in a world already grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and climate ch...ange.
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Nurses are key players in health promotion and disease prevention and the backbone of health care systems worldwide. Nurses work on the front lines of disease prevention, health promotion, and health management and are often the unsung heroes in health care facilities and emergency response. Despite... the critical role they play in health care, there is a nursing shortage across the world that will affect the delivery of competent nursing care. This document highlights key action points for targeted investment in the nursing workforce and calls on Member States to strengthen nursing within the context of their own country efforts.
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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Georgetown University, and the United Nations University have today launched new guidelines to provide the first-ever global policy framework that will help protect, include, and empower children on the ...move in the context of climate change.
The Guiding Principles for Children on the Move in the Context of Climate Change provides a set of 9 principles that address the unique and layered vulnerabilities of children on the move both internally and across borders as a result of the adverse impacts of climate change. Currently, most child-related migration policies do not consider climate and environmental factors, while most climate change policies overlook the unique needs of children.
The guidelines note that climate change is intersecting with existing environmental, social, political, economic, and demographic conditions contributing to people’s decisions to move. In 2020 alone, nearly 10 million children were displaced in the aftermath of weather-related shocks. With around one billion children – nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children – living in 33 countries at high risk of the impacts of climate change, millions more children could be on the move in the coming years.
Developed in collaboration with young climate and migration activists, academics, experts, policymakers, practitioners, and UN agencies, the guiding principles are based on the globally ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child and are further informed by existing operational guidelines and frameworks.
Recommendations for safeguarding the rights and well-being of children regardless of their location or migration status.
The guiding principles provide national and local governments, international organizations and civil society groups with a foundation to build policies that protect children’s rights. The organizations and institutions are calling on governments, local and regional actors, international organizations, and civil society groups to embrace the guiding principles to help protect, include, and empower children on the move in the context of climate change.
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This report makes clear that there is a path to end AIDS. Taking that path will help ensure preparedness to address other pandemic challenges, and advance progress across the Sustainable Development Goals. The data and real-world examples in the report make it very clear what that path is. It is not... a mystery. It is a choice. Some leaders are already following the path—and succeeding. It is inspiring to note that Botswana, Eswatini, Rwanda, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zimbabwe have already achieved the 95–95–95 targets, and at least 16 other countries (including eight in sub-Saharan Africa) are close to doing so.
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In 2019, the Global Fund’s 6th Replenishment raised more than $USD14 billion to fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Just two years later, the world has changed significantly. Put simply: COVID-19 devastated prevention and treatment programs. For the first time since the Global Fund’s founding, ...in 2020 the world lost ground in the fight against HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The Global Fund moved quickly to support countries to respond to COVID-19 and its impact on the three diseases, repurposing and leveraging additional funding to support urgent needs and adapt programs. Despite those efforts, the need for action to resume progress in the fight against HIV, TB and malaria has never been greater.
The world faces a choice.
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