Pregnancy and childbirth during adolescence profoundly affects the lives of millions of girls worldwide, and is a leading cause of maternal mortality and morbidity, and infant and child mortality. Every year, an estimated 21 million girls aged 15–19 years old in low- and middle-income countries be...come pregnant, and approximately 12 million give birth.
For many adolescent girls, the ability to control their sexual lives remains limited. Long-standing gender inequalities and discrimination, marginalization, harmful social and gender norms, and denial of rights, compounded by poverty and violence, render them vulnerable to early pregnancy, HIV and other health threats. Lack of age-appropriate sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) information and services create additional barriers to care and support; as a result, adolescent girls who become pregnant are much more likely to go on to have rapid repeated births.
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Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) is advancing the global fight against acute malnutrition in children under 5 with the launch of its new guideline on the prevention and management of wasting and nutritional oedema (acute malnutrition). This milestone is a crucial response to the persistent... global issue of acute malnutrition, which affects millions of children worldwide.
In 2015, the world committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the ambitious target of eliminating malnutrition in all of its forms by 2030. However, despite these commitments, the proportion of children with acute malnutrition has persisted at a worrying level, affecting an estimated 45 million children under five worldwide in 2022.
In 2022, approximately 7.3 million children received treatment for severe acute malnutrition (SAM). Although treatment coverage has increased, children with SAM in many of the worst affected countries are still unable to access the full necessary care for them to recover.
The Global Action Plan (GAP) on child wasting recognized the need for updated normative guidance to support governments in the prevention and management of acute malnutrition. WHO answered this call to action and developed a comprehensive guideline that provides evidence-based recommendations and good practice statements and will be followed by guidance and tools for implementation.
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To better understand the global response to HIV/AIDS, this study tracked
development assistance for HIV/AIDS at a granular, program level.
In In recent years, China has increased its international engagement in health. Nonetheless, the lack
of data on contributions has limited efforts to examine contributions from China. Existing estimates that track
development assistance for health (DAH) from China have relied primarily on one data...set. Furthermore, little is known
about the disbursing agencies especially the multilaterals through which contributions are disbursed and how these
are changing across time. In this study, we generated estimates of DAH from China from 2007 through 2017 and
disaggregated those estimates by disbursing agency and health focus area.
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The Water and Sanitation for Health Facility Improvement Tool (WASH FIT) presents a framework and acts as a guide to support multisectoral action to improve water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in health care. Central to the WASH FIT methodology is training and incremental improvements.
Implementat...ion of WASH FIT requires six preparatory steps at the national level, one of which is conducting national sensitization and training of trainers, followed by facility-level training. At the facility level, step 1 (of five) involves establishing and training a WASH FIT team.
The WASH FIT methodology is outlined in WASH FIT: A practical guide for improving quality of care through water, sanitation and hygiene in health care facilities. Second edition. (the WASH FIT guide), which includes a set of templates designed to help users with each phase of the improvement cycle.
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Past quantitative research on health financing has focused mostly on the level and distribution of total expenditure, with little emphasis on the specific role of public funds, despite their known importance for universal health coverage (UHC). Health Accounts data do not disaggregate public expendi...ture on health by source of funding. Achieving a better understanding of public financing for health in the context of the macro-fiscal and health financing environment is of fundamental importance to the development of future health financing policy, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
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Access to safe blood and blood products is recognized as one of the key requirements for delivery of modern health care in the journey towards health for all. The foundation of safe and sustainable blood supplies depends on the collection of blood from voluntary non-remunerated and low-risk donors. ...Data from the WHO Global Database for Blood Safety (GDBS) brings out several inadequacies related to the supply and safety of blood and blood products. These inadequacies include a number of variations in safe blood practices across the world, including the quantity of blood donated (voluntary and replacement types), quality and adequate testing of the donated blood (immunohaematology [IH] and transfusion-transmitted infections [TTIs]), rational use of blood and blood components such as appropriate patient blood management protocols. These variations are very high in countries of the South-East Asian Region and most of them are either low- or middle-income countries (LMICs).
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While there has been real progress in addressing the burden of disease in the WHO African region, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the link between health, economics and security, as the region saw decades of progress threatened, including positive trends in decreasing inequality. In the Africa...n Region the momentum towards achieving the 2030 SDG disease burden reduction targets (SDG targets 3.3, 3.4 and 3B) has stalled.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also a major threat to gains made, such as the eradication of polio in the region, declared in 2020; reduced numbers of new HIV infections in 2021 compared to 2010; and passing the 2020 milestone of the End TB Strategy, with a 22% reduction in new cases compared with 2015. However, the pandemic also disrupted essential health services in 92% of countries globally, 22.7 million children missed basic immunization, there was an increase in malaria and TB, and global deaths from TB rose for the first time since 2015.
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The world is off track to make significant progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) (SDG target 3.8) by 2030 as improvements to health services coverage have stagnated since 2015, and the proportion of the population that faced catastrophic levels of out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending has i...ncreased.
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Developmental disabilities are common. Yet, children with developmental disabilities have been neglected in health systems planning and policy provisions for health and continue to experience stigmatization, institutionalization, barriers to access health care and inequalities in health and educatio...n outcomes.
Using findings from research and practice and guided by the tenets of international human rights conventions, this WHO-UNICEF Global Report on children with developmental disabilities provides principles and approaches to intentionally include the needs and aspirations of children and young people with developmental disabilities in policy, programming and public health monitoring. It makes the case for greater accountability and proposes 10 priority actions to accelerate changes towards inclusive environments and responsive multisectoral care systems for children with developmental disabilities.
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This report analyses the intersection of HIV, COVID-19 and public debt in developing countries. The collision between COVID-19 and a crippling debt crisis have reversed decades of progress - putting present and future investments in health and HIV at risk. Pragmatic options to address the pandemic t...riad are proposed.
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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global human, animal, plant and environment health threat that needs to be addressed by every country. The impacts of AMR are wide-ranging in terms of human health, animal health, food security and safety, environmental effects on ecosystems and biodiversity, and ...socioeconomic development. Just like the climate crisis, AMR poses a significant threat to the delivery of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The response to the AMR crisis has been spearheaded through the global action plan on antimicrobial resistance (GAP-AMR), developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015, in close collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), and formally endorsed by the three organizations’ governing bodies and by the Political Declaration of the high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on AMR in 2016. In 2022, the three organizations officially became the Quadripartite by welcoming the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) into the alliance “to accelerate coordination strategy on human, animal and ecosystem health”.
The aim of the GAP-AMR is to ensure the continuity of successful treatment with effective and safe medicines.
Its strategic objectives include:
• improving the awareness and understanding of AMR;
• strengthening the knowledge and evidence base through surveillance and research;
• reducing the incidence of infection through effective sanitation, hygiene and infection prevention measures; optimizing the use of antimicrobial medicines in human and animal health; and
• developing the economic case for sustainable investment that takes account of the needs of all countries and increasing investment in new medicines, diagnostic tools, vaccines and other interventions.
With the adoption of the GAP-AMR, countries agreed to develop national action plans (NAPs) aligned with the GAP-AMR to mainstream AMR interventions nationally. Individually, the Quadripartite took action to advance AMR interventions in their respective sectors. FAO adopted a resolution on AMR recognizing that it poses an increasingly serious threat to public health and sustainable food production, and developed an AMR action plan to support the resolution’s implementation. For its part, WOAH developed a strategy on AMR aligned with the GAP-AMR, acknowledging the importance of a One Health approach to AMR. Similarly, more recently, UNEP’s governing body, the United Nations Environment Assembly, recognized that AMR is a current and increasing threat and a challenge to global health, food security and the sustainable development of all countries, and welcomed the GAP-AMR and the NAPs developed in accordance with its five overarching strategic objectives
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This manual and its Excel tool are under revision. The revised edition will be published soon.
The waves of yellow fever transmission in the Region of the Americas in 2016–2018 involved the largest number of human and epizootic cases to be reported in several decades. Yellow fever is a serious viral hemorrhagic disease that poses a challenge for health professionals. It requires early recog...nition of signs and symptoms, which are often nonspecific, and it can mimic other acute febrile syndromes. Early detection of suspected or confirmed cases, monitoring of vital signs, life support measures, and treatment of acute kidney failure continue to be the recommended strategies for case management. This report is the result of discussions among experienced specialists in the Americas on the clinical management of yellow fever patients, especially during outbreaks and epidemics, in the context of current medical and scientific evidence and taking into account the technical guidelines already available in the countries of the Region. It includes flowcharts for initially addressing patients with clinical suspicion of yellow fever and proposes a minimum package of laboratory tests that may be useful in contexts where resources are limited. In addition, it considers aspects of health system organization for dealing with yellow fever outbreaks and epidemics.
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Pathogen genomic surveillance has become a priority for public health systems in recent years. Genomic sequencing is increasingly being used to characterize pathogens and monitor important public health priorities (e.g. poliovirus, influenza virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Vibrio cholerae, ant...imicrobial resistance (AMR)). The decrease in cost and time of sequencing and the exponential development of bioinformatic pipelines have played a critical role in integrating pathogen genomics into routine public health surveillance. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the role that sequencing plays in the surveillance of infectious diseases. Sequencing facilitates earlier detection, more accurate investigation of outbreaks, closer real-time monitoring of pathogen evolution and tailored development and evaluation of interventions to inform local to global public health decision-making and action. However, there remains a need to coordinate efforts, leverage and link existing surveillance and laboratory networks and capabilities, and systematically integrate genetic sequence data (GSD) with clinical and epidemiological data to strengthen its utility.
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This publication provides an overview of UN Women’s commitments to the humanitarian community guided by the “UN Women strategic plan 2022–2025”. It highlights areas where UN Women has a unique advantage in advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls across the humanitari...an–development–peace nexus, and in contributing to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee priorities, including localization and accountability to affected people.
The strategy adopts a two-pronged approach:
strengthening accountability towards gender commitments in coordination and implementation of UN-led humanitarian and refugee responses, and
strengthening comprehensive protection and livelihoods support to crisis-affected women and girls.
While taking these approaches, UN Women prioritizes amplifying women’s voices, leadership, and agency as a critical and enabling cross-cutting area.
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Cholera epidemics continue to be a major public health problem in many countries around the
world. When epidemics strike, they can spread rapidly. The disease can also evolve quickly;
patients with severe disease can die of dehydration hours after showing the first symptoms of
cholera.
Cholera is a major health risk in many parts of the world, affecting millions of people every year. Since mid-2021, the world has been facing an acute upsurge of the 7th cholera pandemic, which is characterized by the number, size and concurrence of multiple outbreaks, the spread to areas that had b...een free of cholera for decades and alarmingly high mortality rates. The mortality associated with these outbreaks is of particular concern as many countries have reported higher case fatality ratios (CFR) than in previous years
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To support the achievement of health equity in the Region, the regional inter-agency movement Every Woman Every Child Latin America and the Caribbean (EWEC-LAC) advocates for and supports the use of equity and evidence-based policies, strategies and interventions to accelerate equitable progress in ...the health of women, children and adolescents. Although progress has been made, great inequities persist. Women from the LAC region’s poorest countries are almost four times more likely to die due to complications during childbirth than those living in the wealthiest countries. Through the years, several tools, instruments and methods (TIMs) have been developed by global, regional and country partners that can be used to conduct systematic equity-based analyses and/or re-designs of health systems, programs, strategies and interventions. The main purpose of this document is to present an overview of existing TIMs that can be used by policymakers, program managers, development partners, nongovernmental organizations, academia and civil society partners to strengthen systematic identification, analysis and responding to social inequities in the health of women, children and adolescents in LAC. The TIMs included were identified through a systematic search process
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