The control and elimination of schistosomiasis have over the last two decades involved several strategies, with the current strategy by the World Health Organization (WHO) focusing mainly on treatment with praziquantel during mass drug administration (MDA). However, the disease context is complex wi...th an interplay of social, economic, political, and cultural factors that may affect achieving the goals of the Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) 2021-2030 Roadmap. There is a need to revisit the current top-down and reactive approach to schistosomiasis control among sub-Saharan African countries and advocate for a dynamic and diversified approach.
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In 2014, an estimated 40 million women of reproductive age were infected with Schistosoma haematobium, S. japonicum and/or S. mansoni. In both 2003 and 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended that all schistosome-infected pregnant and breastfeeding women be offered treatment, with praz...iquantel, either individually or during treatment campaigns. In 2006, WHO also stated the need for randomized controlled trials to assess the safety and efficacy of such treatment. Some countries have yet to follow the recommendation on treatment and many programme managers and pregnant women in other countries remain reluctant to follow the recommended approach.
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Member States have requested WHO policy guidance on how to facilitate the implementation of national AMS activities in an integrated and programmatic approach. This policy guidance responds to that demand from Member States and is anchored in public health guiding principles in the human health sect...or. It provides evidence-based and pragmatic recommendations to drive comprehensive and integrated AMS activities under the purview of a central national coordination unit, National AMR steering or coordinating committees or other equivalent national authorities.
Please note that this course is part of a training package, so please register for the complementary course Antimicrobial stewardship programmes in health-care facilities in low- and middle-income countries: a WHO practical toolkit so that you can complete your learning journey.
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Children are at high risk of dog bites and contracting rabies. Forty percent of reported rabies cases worldwide are children under the age of fifteen. In our project areas, the proportion of children dying is often even higher. Rabies most often persists in poor communities and rural regions of deve...loping countries in Africa and Asia. If the risks are widely understood and appropriate dog bite treatment is well known – rabies is 100% preventable.
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To eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF) by 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a campaign against the disease. Since the launch in 2000, significant progress has been made to achieve this ambitious goal. In this article we review the progress and status of the LF programme in Afric...a through the WHO neglected
tropical diseases preventive chemotherapy databank, the Expanded Special Project for Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases (ESPEN) portal and other publications. In the African Region there are 35 countries endemic for LF. The Gambia was reclassified as not requiring preventive chemotherapy in 2015, while Togo and Malawi eliminated LF as a public health problem in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Cameroon discontinued mass drug administration (MDA) and transitioned to post-MDA surveillance to validate elimination. The trajectory of coverage continues to accelerate; treatment coverage increased from 0.1% in 2000 to 62.1% in 2018. Geographical coverage has also significantly increased, from 62.7% in 2015 to 78.5% in 2018. In 2019, 23 of 31 countries requiring MDA achieved 100% geographic coverage. Although much remains to be done, morbidity management and disability prevention services have steadily increased in recent years. Vector control interventions conducted by other programmes, particularly malaria vector control, have had a profound effect in stopping transmission in some endemic countries in the region. In conclusion, significant progress has been made in the LF programme
in the region while we identify the key remaining challenges in achieving an Africa free of LF.
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As of 12 December 2022, over 645 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19, with over 6.6 million deaths (4).
The Omicron variant, which emerged in late November 2021, and its subvariants, are now the dominant circulating viruses, contributing to the ongoing surge in several countr...ies (4). Vaccination has substantially reduced case numbers and hospitalizations in many countries,but limitations in global access to vaccines mean that many populations, including those in low- and middle-income countries, remain vulnerable. Even in vaccinated individuals, uncertainties remain about duration of protection and efficacy, and the degree of crossprotection with new variants.
There remains a need for more effective treatment and management for those affected by COVID-19. The pandemic – and the
explosion of both research and misinformation – has highlighted the need for trustworthy, accessible and regularly updated living
guidelines to place emerging findings into context and provide clear recommendations for clinical practice
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Making sure that people with disabilities get the right health care to do with their bodies, sex, relationships and having children during COVID-19
About this information
This information is about health care for people with disabilities to do with their bodies, sex, relationships and having c...hildren.
For example, the health care might help people to give birth or have safer sex and relationships.
This information is about making sure that people with disabilities can get this health care during COVID-19.
And when other big problems happen in the world.
People with disabilities have a right to get this healthcare like everyone else.
But they are often left out.
And COVID-19 has made things worse.
This information is about what countries and organizations should do now for people with disabilities.
We found out what many people with disabilities thought first.
People in this document means women and girls, men, and boys with disabilities.
It also means people with disabilities who are not the gender that people said they were when they were born.
For example, someone may be told they are a boy because of how their body looks.
But that is not who they really are. They might be a girl. Or they might not be a boy or girl.
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Yaws is a non-venereal endemic treponemal infection caused by Treponema pallidum sub-species pertenue, a bacterium closely related to Treponema pallidum ssp. pallidum, the agent of venereal syphilis. Yaws predominantly affects children living in tropical regions of the world. It causes lesions of th...e skin, mucous membranes and bones which, without treatment, can become chronic and destructive. There is no widely available test to distinguish yaws from syphilis. Thus, migration of people from yaws-endemic areas to developed countries may present clinicians with diagnostic dilemmas. The other endemic treponemal infections are bejel (endemic syphilis) caused by Treponema pallidum ssp. endemicum and pinta caused by Treponema carateum.
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With some 134,073,166 people living in endemic communities at risk of infection, Nigeria is the most endemic country in Africa and requires preventive chemotherapy (PC) for a total of 26.3 million persons. The National Schistosomiasis Elimination Programme (NSCHEP), with the support of international... partners, has been implementing PC in Nigeria since 2009 and most recently will need to revise its current strategy (Additional file 1). For example, the new World Health Organization (WHO) guideline has six key recommendations that will dramatically change the implementation of schistosomiasis elimination in endemic countries [3]. However, its impact and programmatic implications will vary from country to country, hence the need for a country-specific analysis. This article discusses these recommendations with specific reference to the challenges and opportunities in Nigeria. We summarise the key pointers in Additional file 1: Box 1 against the six recommendations of the WHO 2022 guideline.
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Dracunculiasis, also known as Guinea-worm disease is a parasitic disease caused by the nematode Dracunculus medinensis. The infection is transmitted to humans by drinking water contaminated with the small crustacean copepods (Cyclops) which contain the larvae of D. medinensis. Humans are the princip...al definitive host and Cyclops being the intermediate host. The disease is endemic to the rural and poorer areas of the world and is most common in African countries like Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Mali. Efforts are underway towards global eradication of this disease. Due to its rarity in developed countries, this activity describes the interprofessional team's role in the assessment and treatment of patients with this condition.
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As a conflict between two major agricultural powers, the Russia–Ukraine war has various negative socioeconomic impacts that are now being felt internationally and might worsen, notably, for global food security. If the war deepens, the food crisis will worsen, posing a challenge to many countries,... especially those that rely on food imports, such as those in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Simultaneously, the war came at a bad time for global food markets because food prices were already high due to disruptions in the supply chain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, strong global demand, and poor harvests in some countries. Understanding how conflict-related disruptions in global food and fertilizer markets might affect price and availability is critical for understanding the overall impact on global food security. Further, four months into the war, its implications for food security suggest that this review is timely, urgent, and highly needed.
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About six to seven million people worldwide, mostly in Latin America, are estimated to be infected with
Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease (WHO data from 2021). Chagas disease is
found mainly in endemic areas of 21 Latin American countries. Chagas disease was once entirely
...
confined to rural areas but in the last decades, due to population movements, most infected people live
in urban settings and the disease has spread to other continents. The burden of disease is due to its
chronic progression with people still suffering years later after initial infection.
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DNDi is now striving to make fexinidazole available to the majority of people who have T.b. gambiense sleeping sickness. We are supporting a three-year access and pharmacovigilance study that began in 2020 and have so far carried out in-country training of relevant staff in 250 hospitals and... health centres in T.b. gambiense-endemic countries; and updated national treatment and pharmacovigilance guidelines in Angola, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, and Chad.
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Anopheles stephensi, a highly competent vector of Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax, is considered an efficient vector of urban malaria. Until 2011, the reported distribution of An. stephensi was confined to certain countries of South Asia and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Since then, the vector ...has been collected in Djibouti (2012), Ethiopia (2016), Sudan (2016), Sri Lanka (2017), Somalia (2019), and most recently Nigeria (2020) and Yemen (2021). WHO considers the spread of An. stephensi to be a major potential threat to malaria control and elimination in Africa and southern Asia and has recently launched an initiative against the spread of this vector in Africa.
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Climate change presents the single biggest threat to human development, and its widespread impacts disproportionately burden the poorest and most vulnerable households in fragile and rural developing contexts – particularly women and children.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate C...hange’s (IPCC) latest report, ‘between 2010 and 2020, droughts, floods and storms killed 15 times as many people in highly vulnerable countries, particularly in Africa — which is responsible for less than 3 percent of global emissions – than in the wealthiest countries’.
Recognising environmental degradation and climate change are key accelerators of extreme child vulnerability, World Vision (WV) approved the Environmental Stewardship Management Policy (‘the Policy’) and Guidelines (‘the Guidelines’) in 2021.
To support the implementation of the Policy and Guidelines, WV has developed this Environmental Stewardship and Climate Action Handbook (‘the Handbook’) to help offices across the WV Partnership implement best practice environmental management strategies both in the field and in our operations and facilities.
Integrating environmental stewardship and climate action into all our work – whether that be in our Area Programmes, grant projects, responses to disasters or advocacy – is critical to achieving WV’s strategy.
As a Christian organisation we are compelled to follow the ways of Jesus Christ, calling us to care for the ‘least of these’ (Matthew 25:40) – the vulnerable children who are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Our response to the degradation of the environment is not motivated by political expediency or funding – but because we are called to steward God’s creation (Genesis 1:28).
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Schistosomiasis, commonly known as bilharzia, is an acute and chronic tropical disease caused by trematodes of the genus Schistosoma. The schistosome parasite is transmitted through a snail intermediate host with the human being the definitive host. Worldwide, schistosomiasis continues to cause a pu...blic health problem with 779 million people exposed to the infection. The disease is present in 78 countries and endemic in 52 of those countries where an estimated 90% of people need treatment. Schistosomiasis has been successfully controlled in many countries but its burden remains high in Africa, particularly in sub-Saharan countries.
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These guidelines have been compiled for education ministries or other educational leaders (including development partners, non-governmental or private organizations working with schools or directly with caregivers) who want to adapt and adopt resources to support the marginalized caregivers of child...ren with disabilities.
The guidance presented in this document was developed by a team of international and national experts following a proof-of-concept pilot4 of the resources in two countries. The work was carried out between February 2021 and January 2022. The pilots demonstrated that principles and activities described in the resources could be carried out, in practical terms, in line with existing government programmes supporting the implementation of disability-inclusive education.
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Schistosomiasis, which is the second most important parasitic infection after malaria in terms of its socioeconomic impact, is responsible for the loss of an estimated 4.5 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) worldwide. Schistosomiasis, including both intestinal and urinary forms of the di...sease, occurs in 78 countries across the globe. An estimated 240 million people are infected, with more than 779 million living at risk globally. The majority of those infected and those at risk for infection live in low-income countries, and approximately 80% of the morbidity occurs in impoverished communities and households in sub-Saharan Africa. Within Uganda, 91 of the 134 districts are endemic for intestinal schistosomiasis caused by Schistosoma mansoni, and the eastern region, especially along Lake Victoria, has one of the highest S. mansoni burdens worldwide. Schistosoma haematobium is only endemic in the five districts of the Lango region in northern Uganda.
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PLoS Neglected Tropical diseases August 16, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0009697
Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, is a neglected tropical disease transmitted by triatomine insects, first identified in 1909. Chagas disease affects approximately 6–7 million peop...le globally and is highly prevalent in Latin America where most cases are reported. However, there is increasing evidence that Chagas disease is now an important public health issue outside the “classical” endemic countries due to population migration. Our understanding of Chagas disease, including its pathologies and factors relating to progression, remains to date limited, and is also challenged by lack of diagnosis and highly effective treatment. This systematic review aims to describe studies with Chagas patients receiving antiparasitic treatment. Databases were searched for relevant studies published after 1997, and the results of these searches were screened.
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Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine 2022:13 25–40
Chagas disease (CD) or American trypanosomiasis is a neglected parasitic disease associated with significant mortality and morbidity that includes long-term disability, social stigma and a mental health toll. Perceived as a disease of the ve...ry poor, this infection, once limited to rural areas of Latin America (LA), has now spread via migration to non-endemic areas and countries, where transmission is maintained via non-vectorial routes.
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