The latest update (28 January 2021) includes the following addition and revision:
biosafety aspects for working with antigen-detecting rapid diagnostic test;
handling new variants of SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory;
updated assay decontamination before disposal;
personal protectiv...e equipment (PPE) for specimen collection;
addressing chemical hazards and their safe disposal; and
the fourth edition of the WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual (LBM4) is now available and the terminology in this guidance was aligned with the LBM4.
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Will COVID-19 vaccines be safe? Will all the COVID-19 candidate vaccines be successful? What are the different phases a vaccine must go through to be approved? This document provides responses to the most frequently asked questions about candidate vaccines and access to COVID-19 vaccination.
MEDBOX Issue Brief no. 7, Dec. 2020
Die Impfung gegen die Ausbreitung des SARS-CoV-2-Virus stellt einen Meilenstein in der Bekämpfung der Pandemie dar. Für den Erfolg der Impfung unabdingbar ist eine gute Kommunikation und Aufklärung der Bevölkerung. Im Folgenden sind einige Informationen zur I...mpfstrategie, Durchführung der Impfung, ethische Überlegungen, sowie Aufklärungsmaterialien in deutscher und englischer Sprache aufgelistet
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A non-exhaustive repository of COVID-19 related scientific publications undertaken by LSHTM researchers since the beginning of the outbreak.
This compendium represents a curated, pragmatic and non-prescriptive collection of tools and resources to support the implementation of interventions to improve quality of care in such contexts. Relevant tools and resources are listed under five areas: Ensuring access and basic infrastructure for qu...ality; shaping the system environment; reducing harm; improving clinical care; and engaging and empowering patients, families and communities.
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The Platform has functionality for country-level users, such as uploading theNational Deployment and Vaccination Planon the Info tab by the WCO vaccine expert, followed by validation by a government official. The Platform has functionality for regional users, such as Reviewingof National Deployment ...and Vaccination Plan(NDVP) on the Action Checklist tabor uploading a summary of the review of the NDVP on the Info tab and within the NDVP folder.
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In the past ten years, the number of forcibly displaced people has nearly doubled. In 2019, the number of people forced to flee (inside and beyond the borders) grew to 79.5 million – the highest ever recorded. Refugee situations continue to increase in scope, scale and complexity, whereas durable ...solutions provided to refugees are at levels that fall well below needs.
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17 February 2021
During the second joint meeting of African ministers responsible for health, ICT and transport on the rollout of the Africa Against COVID-19: Saving Lives, Economies and Livelihoods campaign, a call was made to African countries to work together towards harmonizing travel entry and... exit requirements, and to increase mutual recognition and cross-border information exchange for enhanced surveillance
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The purpose of the review was to assign a cause of death, to ascertain the fac-tors that contributed to the death and to identify any systemic issues that could be addressed to prevent future similar deaths. The perinatal mortality audit process in 2019 provided important insights and evidence-based... recommendations that can be used both to address system errors and barriers and to identify and praise points of strength. The aim is to pro-vide recommendations for better care for mothers and their infants during pregnancy, childbirth and the neonatal period and improve the quality of care provided throughout the health system.
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This publication provides managers with guidance on how to create basic HIV prevention cascades as a starting point to enhance their ability to monitor and improve their programming and to facilitate comparisons of programme effectiveness across sites.
Nursing Times [online]; 117: 11, 18-21.
Climate change and health vulnerability and adaptation assessment
In 2013 the World Health Organization (WHO) published the report Protecting health from climate change:
vulnerability and adaptation assessment. The aim was to provide basic and flexible guidance on conducting national or subnati...onal assessments of current and future vulnerability (the susceptibility of a population or region to harm) to the health risks of climate change, and of policies and programmes that could increase resilience, taking into account the multiple determinants of climate-sensitive health outcomes.
That guidance has been a very useful tool, applied to more than 50 countries and settings, and has helped countries to prepare their health contributions to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change national adaptation plans.
Since the launch of the guidance, WHO, technical partners such as Health Canada, and countries have learned much in terms of its applicability in different countries, at national and local levels.
At the same time, knowledge on climate change and health has increased.
WHO, the Pan American Health Organization and Health Canada have produced this updated version, which aims to better support countries in their assessments by proposing a simpler tool that incorporates all lessons learned.
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The frequency of infectious disease epidemics is increasing, and the role of the health sector in the management of epidemics is crucial in terms of response. In the context of infectious disease epidemics, the use of climate-informed early warning systems (EWS) has the potential to increase the eff...ectiveness of disease control by intervening before or at the beginning of the epidemic curve, instead of during the downward slope.
Currently, the initiation of interventions is heavily reliant on routine disease surveillance systems – data that often arrive too late for preventative response. However, forecasting of disease outbreaks using surveillance and weather information shows promising potential – there also remains further scope to examine seasonal climate forecasts. By combining these elements in new EWS based on computational models, it will be possible to improve both the timeliness and impact of disease control. The World Health Organization (WHO) is strengthening existing surveillance systems for infectious diseases to enable the development of more robust and timely EWS, which has resulted in the rapid development and innovation of EWS for disease outbreaks.
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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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English Analysis on World about Climate Change and Environment, Health and Epidemic; published on 03 Nov 2021 by World Bank