From raising awareness to building capacity
Meeting Report
World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland 16 -18 September 2013
Findings from the People Living with HIV Stigma Index
A guide for developing a hygiene promotion program to increase handwashing with soap
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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J Fungi (Basel) . 2019 Aug 16;5(3):75. doi: 10.3390/jof5030075 . Namibia is a sub-Saharan country with one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Although care and support services are available that cater for opportunistic infections related to HIV, the main focus is narrow and predominan...tly aimed at tuberculosis. We aimed to estimate the burden of serious fungal infections in Namibia, currently unknown, based on the size of the population at risk and available epidemiological data. Data were obtained from the World Health Organization (WHO), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and published reports.
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Available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Portugues
To realize Agenda 2030, aid agencies, private philanthropies, and their partners in the Global South need better data to monitor how official development finance (ODF) dollars advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and avoid missing the mark. In this report, we summarize the results of a n...ovel effort to tag and analyze 2.7 million ODF projects between 2010-2021 using machine learning to understand their contributions to the SDG thematic areas at a goal
and target level. This time frame is instructive: it compares the last six years of the Millennium Development Goals era and the first six years of the new SDG age, from early optimism to later uncertainty about the resilience of the agenda to drive collective commitments amid unanticipated global shocks.
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In the last three decades, health financialization has surged in
several creative ways, yet this growing phenomenon remains surprisingly
unknown, and neglected, in the global health arena. Financialization in the
health domain could be described as the uncontrolled expansion of finance along vari...ous lines of healthcare provision. Health has been intentionally transformed into a commodity as private for-profit actors have been allowed freedom to operate - and ultimately play with people’s fundamental right to health - for their vested financial interests, nationally and internationally. Health financialization is thrivingly pursued today for example through the institutionalization of medical knowledge monopolies, the expansion of markets and of financial techniques applied to healthcare insurance schemes, the soaring digitalization of global health interventions and the booming data industry.
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For this report, the Task Force commissioned
additional background papers on health taxes to
update the evidence, assess short-term revenue
potential, and understand the role of health taxes
in the current era of multiple crises. We find that
health taxes continue to be underutilized despite th...e
powerful impact they have in reducing preventable
death and disease — a particularly glaring act of
neglect in a world that has experienced a massive
pandemic.
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This toolkit is a comprehensive set of practical tools and resources designed to support country-level risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) practitioners, decision-makers, and partners to plan and implement readiness and response activities for yellow fever outbreaks. The toolkit conta...ins: information about yellow fever; RCCE considerations for how to approach key issues during yellow fever outbreaks; tools for understanding the context in which yellow fever outbreaks occur; methods for collecting data to inform strategy development and bring evidence into planning and implementation of activities; guidance to support vector control and immunization campaigns; and links to existing RCCE tools and training. It is one of a suite of toolkits on RCCE readiness and response to a range of disease and response areas.
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Plos Neglected Tropical Diseases 8(11): e3229 (20 November 2014)
The context of the Ebola epidemic presented extreme challenges for Oxfam, as it did for many organisations. At the onset of the epidemic, there was a general lack of understanding of the disease and how to respond to it effectively and safely. A pervasive and persistent climate of fear, coupled with... changing predictions about the likely evolution of the epidemic, influenced analysis and response at all levels. There was strong pressure to treat the epidemic as a medical emergency requiring a medical response – organised through topdown processes – rather than standard humanitarian coordination
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