The ninth WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic tracks the progress made by countries in tobacco control since 2008 and, marks 15 years since the introduction of the MPOWER technical package which is designed to help countries implement the demand-reduction measures of the WHO Framework Conventi...on on Tobacco Control. The report shows that many countries continue to make progress in the fight against tobacco, but efforts must be accelerated to protect people from the harms of tobacco and second-hand smoke.
more
There are indigenous communities at high risk in every country of the region. At stake are the lives of 45 million people who belong to more than 800 indigenous peoples. Of these, some 100 are spread across several countries, around 200 maintain voluntary isolation or are in initial contact, and nea...rly 500 are at risk of disappearing due to their reduced numbers. Due to their lower immune resistance, their lack of access to hospital care and the increasing penetration of extractive activities in their territories, indigenous communities in voluntary isolation or in initial contact are cause for particular concern.
Far from hospitals and the news cameras, indigenous people in Latin American become ill and die without access to the means needed to protect themselves. They face the pandemic in conditions of social exclusion, racism and discrimination, which highlights historical inequalities and extreme precariousness in basic and health services.
more
dos Santos et al. BMC Public Health 2014, 14:80 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/14/80
Unfortunately, current data available on SDG financing are not sufficient to quantify the distribution of financing for the SDGs.
AidData’s methodology for measuring financing to the SDGs attempts to fill this gap by analyzing development project documentation to estimate project-level contributi...ons to the SDGs (and their associated targets). This methodology lets us see where development financing is targeted, allowing comparisons among SDG goals and individual SDG targets.
This methodology note describes two iterations of AidData’s methodology. The first, based on a crosswalk with existing aid reporting schemes, was employed for AidData’s 2017 flagship report Realizing Agenda 2030: Will donor dollars and country priorities align with global goals? and our brief Financing the SDGs in Colombia. The second iteration of the methodology employs a direct coding scheme, linking development projects directly to the SDGs through analysis and coding of project descriptions rather than through an intermediary classification system. This method was employed for our 2019 brief Financing the SDGs: Evidence in Four Countries.
more
Aviation plays an important role in humanitarian operations around the world, especially in countries where overland transport is difficult or impossible due to insecurity, damaged or inadequate infrastructure, and challenging climatic conditions. Aviation allows the transport of humanitarian aid wo...rkers and humanitarian cargo to communities in some of the world’s most inaccessible places.
more
Leishmaniasis is a climate-sensitive disease. Changes in temperature, rainfall, and humidity can have strong impacts on
the sandfly vector, altering their distribution and influencing their survival and population sizes. Increased temperatures shorten vector development time, reduce Leishmania para...site incubation time, and increase vector biting rates, allowing transmission
in areas not previously endemic for the disease. Poor and
marginalized communities will be hit disproportionately harder by
the effects of climate change, and droughts, famines, and floods
can also lead to displacement and migration of immunologically
naive people to areas where leishmaniasis is endemic, posing a
threat of leishmaniasis outbreaks.
more
Rabies is a disease of animals but too often the outcome is gauged in terms of human suffering and
death. Despite this, in areas of the world where rabies is endemic there is often a lack of communication between veterinary and medical professionals, to the extent that the disease continues to thri...ve and potential victims are not treated. The problem is partly
exacerbated by a lack of awareness and experience of the disease and of what to do when confronted by suspect cases. In these technologically advanced days, although it is possible to learn “all there is to know” about almost any subject, it is sometimes difficult to distil the essence.
more
Lateral-flow rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) continue to play a vital role in global health in the management and diagnosis of infectious diseases, including malaria, HIV and COVID-19. Visually interpreted RDTs, more than any other class of diagnostics, fulfil WHO’s ASSURED criteria,1 enabling their... use at the lowest levels of health care and in self-testing.2 Their utility is, however, compromised every time a test is incorrectly performed or interpreted or its result is not available in a timely manner for clinical decisionmaking and surveillance.
more
Supplement Article
www.jaids.com J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 78, Supplement 1, August 15, 2018
About one fourth of the world’s population is estimated to have been infected with the tuberculosis (TB) bacilli, and about 5–10% of those infected develop TB disease in their lifetime. The risk for TB disease after infection depends on several factors, the most important being the person’s im...munological status. TB preventive treatment (TPT) given to people at highest risk of progressing from TB infection to disease remains a critical element to achieve the global targets of the End TB Strategy, as reiterated by the second UN High Level Meeting on TB in 2023. Delivering TPT effectively and safely necessitates a programmatic approach to implement a comprehensive package of interventions along a cascade of care: identifying individuals at highest risk, screening for TB and ruling out TB disease, testing for TB infection, and choosing the preventive treatment option that is best suited to an individual, managing adverse events, supporting medication adherence and monitoring programmatic performance.
more
Taking the whole of Africa approach to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic has and will continue to require coordinated efforts from multiple stakeholders from across the continent. Africa CDC would like to acknowledge the deep partnership and continued support of AUDA-NEPAD, AVAREF, WHO AFRO, the Bill a...nd Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mastercard Foundation. These partners have helped to shape and drive the continent’s strategic response to the COVID-19 pandemic and have offered support to ensure the continent receives a fair and equitable share of the COVID-19 vaccine without delay.
We look forward to continuing and deepening our partnership for the benefit of the public health of Africa.
more
I examine the effectiveness of donors in targeting the highest burden of malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo when health information structure is fragmented. I exploit local variations in the burden of malaria induced by mining activities as well as financial and epidemiological data from he...alth facilities to estimate how local aid is matching local health needs. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find significant but quantitatively small variations in aid to health facilities located within mining areas. Comparing local aid with the additional cost of treatment and prevention associated with the increased risk of malaria transmission, I find suggestive evidence that local populations with the highest burden of the disease receive a proportionately lower share of aid compared to neighbouring areas with reduced exposure to malaria infection. The evidence of disparities in the allocation of aid for malaria supports the view that donors may have inaccurate information about local population needs.
more
Miscellaneous
Chapter J.5
A Snapshot of European Collection Schemes
Adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) remain disproportionately affected by HIV in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), with 26 per cent of new infections attributed to this population. AGYW face many personal, social and structural barriers to access, uptake and use of traditional HIV prevention me...thods. Oral Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is proven to be highly effective as an additional prevention choice for reducing the risk of HIV acquisition, including for AGYW. Successful uptake and adherence to PrEP is critical in its effectiveness as an HIV prevention method, however, the current demand for PrEP by AGYW is low with suboptimal adherence.
Within the ESA region, there is currently great impetus to address these challenges and scale up PrEP for AGYW. A critical aspect of this is to leverage the learnings and evidence from implementation of how to improve the demand and quality of PrEP programming for this population. Improving the Quality of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis Implementation for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Eastern and Southern Africa examines the current efforts in the region to accelerate and scale up evidence-based PrEP delivery platforms. The implementation brief provides current knowledge and builds on WHO guidance to provide key considerations for implementation, including driving demand and improving quality, as well as focus on wider combination prevention and integration agendas.
more
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.
more
This report addresses the future of basic education, ICT use in deprived locations, and the use of ICTs in primary school learning in 2020 and 2025, especially in deprived contexts. It draws on research evidence from the literature, the authors’ experiences of ICT use in education initiatives, int...erviews with practitioners and academics, a workshop, and consultations with Save the Children staff from many different countries, mostly conducted in August 2017
more
These guidelines provide updated evidence-based recommendations on the priority HCV-related topics from the 2018 WHO Guidelines for the care and treatment of persons diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C infection and the 2017 WHO Guidelines on hepatitis B and C testing. These priority areas are:
... direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatment of adolescents and children ages ≥3 years of age
simplified HCV service delivery (decentralization, integration and task sharing)
HCV diagnostics – use of point-of-care (POC) HCV ribonucleic acid (RNA) assays and reflex HCV RNA testing.
These guidelines also update existing chapters without new recommendations, such as the inclusion of new manufacturers’ protocols on the use of dried blood spot (DBS) for HCV RNA testing and new data to inform the limit of detection for HCV RNA assays as a test of cure, in addition to their use for diagnosis.
more