GO VIRAL! helps protect you against COVID-19 misinformation. You’ll learn about some of the most common ways false and misleading information about the virus are spread. Understanding these tricks allows you to resist them the next time you come across them online. Scientists who worked with us on... the development of GO VIRAL! found that playing the game significantly improves people’s ability to spot misinformation about COVID-19.
The recommended age for GO VIRAL! is 15+. Although the game has received a PEGI-age rating of 3 (i.e., the game has been deemed suitable for persons age 3 and up), the game does include some themes that may be interpreted as sensitive, especially to people under the age of 15. If you are unsure, always ask for parental consent.
Spread the word – fight the spread of misinformation by challenging your friends and family to GO VIRAL!
Available in different languages
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This activity book has been designed, written and illustrated to bring children and young people closer to the world of plant protection; the science that deals with plant health. Although addressed to an age group between eight and twelve years, this book can also be useful for older kids and educa...tors. It can be considered as first, simple plant protection manual, designed on the occasion of the International Year of Plant Health 2020.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all aspects of our lives. With schools closed and lockdowns imposed, many children and young people are spending all their time at home. Much of that time may be spent online, often for much longer than is usual.
Being able to connect online provides valuable op...portunities to learn, play and socialize with friends and peers and access information and support. It is therefore extremely important for children and young people. However, spending time online comes with risks
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age- and sex-disaggregated data May 2021; Global COVID-19 data on the number of cases and deaths among children and adolescents are limited, which makes it challenging to understand the many ways in which children and young people are being affected by the pandemic. To shed light on the situation, t...his dashboard presents age- and sex-disaggregated confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths based on the COVerAGE database.
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Food environments are usually defined as the settings with all the different types of
food made available and accessible to people as they go about their daily lives.
That is, the range of food in supermarkets, small retail outlets, wet markets, street
food stalls, coffee shops, tea houses, s...chool canteens, restaurants, and all the other
venues where people buy and eat food. These environments differ enormously depending on the context. They can be extensive and diverse, with a seemingly endless array of options and price ranges, or they can be sparse, with very few options on offer. Because they determine what food consumers can access at a given moment in time, at what price, and with what degree of convenience, food environments both constrain and prompt the consumer’s choice.Food environments are influenced by the food systems which supply them, and vice versa. Food systems encompass the entire range of activities, people and institutions involved in the production, processing,
marketing, consumption and disposal of food (FAO, 2013). They include but are not limited to food supply chains. Making food systems nutrition-sensitive can contribute to addressing all forms of malnutrition, as food systems determine whether the food needed for good nutrition are available, affordable, acceptable and of adequate
quantity and quality. How closely food systems and food environments are interrelated and interdependent, and the degree to which external factors affect nutrition outcomes, varies from setting to setting.Many of today’s food systems
and food environments are challenged in supporting consumer choices that are
consistent with healthy diets and good nutrition. Consumers are not making choices based on nutrition and health, and poor diet is now the number one risk factor for death and disability worldwide (GBD, 2015). Food systems that do not enable healthy diets are increasingly recognized as an underlying cause of malnutrition (GLOPAN, 2016), and malnutrition, irrespective of form, has a huge cost. Economic costs associated with undernutrition are estimated at $1-2 trillion per year, about 2-3% of global GDP (FAO, 2013); the global economic cost of obesity and associated diet-related non-communicable diseases is estimated at $2 trillion per year, about 2.8% of global GDP (McKinsey, 2014). Influencing food environments for promoting healthy diets is an emerging strategy to address today’s nutrition challenges.
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UNFPA supports the Youth Health Line (YHL), launched in 2012, as a nationwide, youth friendly health service to provide information and counseling for adolescents and youth on issues related to their health and reproductive health. The YHL is providing a vital service to young people around the coun...try who are dialing the toll-free number ‘120’ from any phone to speak to a professionally trained youth health counselor. These conversations are confidential, free of judgment, and do not require parental consent. The average reach of the YHL per year is 120,000 adolescents and youth served by full-time male and female counselors.
This Standard Operating Procedure for YHL provides a critical resource for the administration and day-to-day management. The SOP is designed to provide direction to all staff responsible for carrying out the administrative and managerial functions of the YHL. The SOP is intended to guide UNFPA Implementing Partners in running the YHL with a consistent approach to ensure improved access and quality of services provided to adolescents and youth in Afghanistan.
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The well-being of children in sub-Saharan Africa is under siege from all directions since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The region is now suffering its first-ever economic recession, pushing about 50 million people into extreme poverty, a majority of whom are children.
Reporting period: January 2014 – December 2014
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic in Myanmar is concentrated among men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drugs (PWID) and female sex workers (FSW). HIV prevalence in the adult population aged 15 years and older was esti...mated at 0.54% in 2014. But data from HIV Sentinel Sero-Surveillance (HSS) indicates higher prevalence in 2014 among key populations: FSW 6.3%, MSM 6.6% and PWID 23.1%. Compared to 2012 data, the prevalence has declined from 7.1% in FSW and 8.9% in MSM, but has increased from 18% in PWID.
Epidemiological modelling suggests that in 2014 there were around 212,000 people living with HIV (PLHIV) in Myanmar, 34% of whom were females. Nearly 11,000 people died of HIV-related illnesses, compared to approximately 15,000 in 2011. An estimated 9,000 new infections occurred in 2014.
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Every two minutes, a child under the age of 5 dies from malaria. Under-five children accounted for 67 per cent of all malaria deaths worldwide in 2018. Most of them occurred in sub-Saharan Africa where an estimated 24 million children were infected with its deadliest form. In addition to being the t...hird-deadliest infectious disease for children, malaria infection and the costs of treatment traps families in a cycle of illness, suffering and poverty.This year’s World Malaria Day is marred by the emergence of the COVID-19 outbreak, which further threatens people’s lives and well-being. Public health officials are taking precautionary and often aggressive measures to limit transmission of this virus, including reductions in social movement, physical distancing, hand-washing and recommending the use of personal protection equipment in high-risk settings. However, while focusing on combating this disease, the world cannot afford to ignore other diseases, such as malaria.
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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched a new Framework for Environmental and Social Management (FESM) to ensure that both people and the environment are protected from any potential impacts of FAO programmes and projects.
“This Framework ensures that our proj...ects do both “no harm” and support the transformation to more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable agrifood systems by upholding the highest international standards for risk management,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu explained during a virtual event.
The Framework, which includes key elements of a people-centered approach and establishes environmental and social performance requirements for FAO programming, is also intended to ensure that all stakeholders, including local and indigenous communities, have ample opportunities to actively participate in projects’ activities and to voice their concerns about them.
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Climate change is one of the most urgent challenges for people and ecosystems worldwide. The recently published sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stresses the occurrence of widespread adverse impacts of climate change. Increased frequency and inten...sity of extreme weather events, as well as slow-onset processes cause enormous losses and damages to human and natural systems. Marginalized groups and people in vulnerable situations are often disproportionally affected. While the impacts of climate change already become more tangible and threatening, action for addressing them remains insufficient. Adaptation to climate change is, thus, becoming a necessity for governments, companies, and private citizens.
To provide practical and scientifically sound guidance on how to conduct vulnerability assessments, GIZ published its Vulnerability Sourcebook in 2014. The Vulnerability Sourcebook was used in over twenty different GIZ partner countries and provides a step-by-step guidance for designing and implementing a vulnerability assessment. It is also one of the methodological foundations for the ISO 14091:2021 standard on vulnerability, impacts and risk assessment for climate change adaptation.
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As the number of transboundary pest and animal and foodborne disease outbreaks rises, so does the number of people who are chronically hungry due to these and other factors. The correlation can be explained by the link between our health and that of the planet. We rely on land and sea for the produc...tion of safe and quality foods for our daily nourishment. Pests and disease epidemics negatively impact the quality, quantity and safety of our food sources, and cripple economic growth and efficiencies in production. Furthermore, the epidemic and endemic levels of the pathogens and disease vectors can be difficult to control. This is why FAO stresses and promotes the special efforts required for cost-effective preventive measures rather than the more expensive control, disinfestation, treatment and disposal measures. When preventive measures are late or difficult, preparedness and contingency plans must be in place to enable rapid response. Early warning systems, based on close monitoring, surveillance, and timely reporting are fundamental to warn and empower communities to safeguard their livelihoods and assets by enhancing disease and pest prevention measures and for government services to take immediate measures to protect communities and national economies.
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This guidance note is intended primarily for health actors working in emergency and disaster risk management (hereafter 'emergency risk management') at the local, national or international level, and in governmental or nongovernmental agencies. People with disabilities, those... working in the disability sector and those working in other sectors that contribute to improved health outcomes related to emergency risk management, may also find this guidance note useful.
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The survey is representative of the Union Territory, its states and regions and urban and rural areas. It was conducted in all the districts and in 296 of the 330 townships of Myanmar. A total of 13,730 households were interviewed. It collects data on the occupations of people, how much income they ...earn, and how they use this to meet the food, housing, health, education and other needs of their families. The main focus of the survey is to produce estimates of poverty and living conditions, to provide core data inputs into the System of National Accounts and the Consumer Price Index and to support monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals.
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A practitioner’s guide to the principles of COVID-19 vaccine communications.
The factors that lead people to make choices to take vaccines are nuanced and affected by how they see the world, their perceptions of the choices people like them will make, who they trust, their perceptions of risk,... consistency of message and convenience of actually getting the vaccine.
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On Global Handwashing Day, WHO and UNICEF have released the first-ever global Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Community Settings to support governments and practitioners in promoting effective hand hygiene outside health care – across households, public spaces and institutions. Framing hand hygiene ...as a public good and a government responsibility, the Guidelines translate evidence into ready-to-adopt actions that enable sustainable access to effective hygiene services. This will reduce diarrhoeal disease, acute respiratory infections and other preventable illnesses, strengthening routine public health where people live, work, visit and study, and emergency preparedness, including outbreaks like cholera.
Despite clear benefits, 1.7 billion people still lacked basic hand hygiene services at home in 2024, including 611 million with no facility at all. Meeting the 2030 target will require accelerated progress – about a doubling in the global rate, and much faster in specific settings (up to 11-fold in least-developed countries and 8-fold in fragile contexts). Hand hygiene remains one of the most cost-effective health investments, reducing diarrhoea by 30% and acute respiratory infections by 17%, with large, measurable gains for population health.
“Clean hands save lives, but results at scale require policy, financing and accountability,” said Dr Ruediger Krech, Director a.i, Department of Environment, Climate Change, One Health & Migration at the World Health Organization. “These Guidelines help countries move beyond fragmented projects to government-led systems that make soap, water, and conditions conducive to everyday hand hygiene the norm.”
“Children and young people pay the highest price when basic hygiene is out of reach,” said Cecilia Scharp, Director, Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Team, Programme Group, UNICEF. “These Guidelines provide practical steps to ensure facilities are accessible when they need to be – in homes, schools, markets, and transport hubs – so every child can learn, play and thrive with dignity.”
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The One Health (OH) High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP) of the Quadripartite Organizations defined OH as an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.”
It recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plan...ts, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent [1]. The Tripartite which comprised the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) later became the Quadripartite organizations when the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) joined the OH alliance in 2022. There are Global and Regional Quadripartite Secretariats consisting of officials of headquarters and regional offices, respectively.
Over the years, the Tripartite/Quadripartite organizations and other partner agencies have developed several OH assessment and operational tools to support Member States in assessing their core capacities to achieve compliance with the requirements of international standards such as the International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR), WOAH’s Terrestrial and Aquatic Animal Health Codes, World Trade Organization’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (WTO-SPS), FAO/WHO Codex standards, etc. Technical areas that the existing tools currently support include progress monitoring, coordination and collaboration mechanisms, and capacity building for prevention, detection, preparedness, and response to health threats emerging at human-animal-environment interface. More OH B operational tools are in the pipeline.
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A study set out to investigate the factors affecting the prevalence of the practice among cross-border communities in East Africa and the Horn of Africa and the extent to which people cross borders to practise or undergo FGM and the effects of the practice on the women and girls in those communities.... Changes were found in social norms in the cross-border communities investigated, indicating that the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) can be eradicated. Effective interventions to end FGM need to be tailored to communities’ belief systems if they are to be “owned” by and mobilize the communities to change their culture. This report summarises the findings.
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Imagine a child- friendly and resilient community in Malawi. A happy child, healthy parents, a latrine behind the house, livestock somewhere in the backyard, no-one panics when clouds come because people are prepared for the rain.
At UNICEF, we are working with the Government and civil society of M...alawi to create child-friendly, resilient communities where
children and adolescents can grow, go to school and play- free from violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect.
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How kids can help beat the virus - This comic strip provides young people between the ages of 10 and 14 with information about the coronavirus and other preventative hygiene measures.
Although children and adolescents are not likely to become seriously ill with COVID-19, they are nevertheless massi...vely affected by the pandemic. Instead of playing outside, going to school, participating in sports and meeting friends, many are now trapped in confined spaces with their parents all day long. On top of that, they are worried about family, friends and themselves. Among those children stuck at home are Amina, Oliver, Tara and Akachi.
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