Joint EUAA, IOM and OECD report provides new insights on displacement from and within Ukraine
The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have published a Joint Report on profil...es, experiences, and aspirations of forcibly displaced people by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Joint Report provides an in-depth study of the scale of displacement to EU countries and people seeking protection there, by building on initial findings derived from a June EUAA-OECD Survey.
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The protracted humanitarian situation in northeastern Nigeria, particularly in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe (BAY) States, remains a concern due to ongoing insecurity, displacement, food insecurity, disease outbreaks, and climate-related shocks. To address these complex challenges, the health sector has ...developed a comprehensive humanitarian response strategy aligned with the three States Development plans, Durable Solutions for the Population Displacement Plan, and the Humanitarian Need Response Plan for 2025. This strategy aims to reduce morbidity and mortality among crisisaffected populations by ensuring timely, equitable, and effective delivery of lifesaving health services, while strengthen the resilience of health system and enhancing local and national capacities for sustainable health response in protracted emergency.
Supported by an in-depth analysis of the ongoing health humanitarian response using the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) methodology, the strategy is guided by three key objectives:
1. Provide access to lifesaving interventions and sustain an effective response to the prolonged health emergency.
2. Prevent, mitigate, and prepare for health risks from all hazards and respond to all health emergencies.
3. Advance the primary health care approach and essential health system capacities for universal health coverage.
To achieve these objectives, the strategy employs the “Five C” framework which refers to:
• Collaborative Surveillance: Enhancing collaborative efforts for effective monitoring.
• Community Protection: Implementing community-based protection measures.
• Safe and Scalable Care: Ensuring care that is both secure and scalable.
• Access to Countermeasures: Facilitating access to necessary countermeasures.
• Emergency Coordination: Coordinating emergency responses efficiently.
These proactive approaches are designed to be more anticipatory and preemptive rather than reactive, aiming to meet the needs of the crisis-affected population by providing lifesaving interventions, enhancing preventive and anticipatory actions, and ensuring the resilience of the health system. All actions are guided by International Humanitarian Standards and the Humanitarian Principles.
The implementation of the health humanitarian response strategy will involve collaboration with local authorities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations. The strategy emphasizes localization and resource mobilization, efficient logistics and supply chain management, mainstreaming protection, and the deployment and training of healthcare workers. Continuous monitoring and periodic evaluation will ensure the effectiveness of the response. Cross-sector collaboration with sectors such as WASH, Nutrition, Education, and Protection will be crucial to enhance the quality and reach of health interventions. Additionally, sustainability and transition approaches will ensure long-term health outcomes and benefits, bridging the gap from humanitarian to development efforts.
By adopting this comprehensive approach, the humanitarian response in northeastern Nigeria, particularly in BAY States, can be effectively guided, ultimately reducing the suffering of affected populations.
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As a public good, antimicrobial medicines require rational use if their effectiveness is to be preserved. However, up to 50% of antibiotic use is inappropriate, adding considerable costs to patient care, and increasing morbidity and mortality. In addition, there is compelling evidence that antimicro...bial resistance is driven by the volume of antimicrobial agents used. High rates of antimicrobial resistance to common treatments are currently reported all over the world, both in health care settings and in the community. For over two decades, the Region of the Americas has been a pioneer in confronting antimicrobial resistance from a public health perspective. However, those efforts need to be stepped up if we are to have an impact on antimicrobial resistance and want to quantify said impact.
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PLoS Negl Trop Dis 15(8): e0009697. Chagas disease (CD), caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, affects ~6–7 million people worldwide. Significant limitations still exist in our understanding of CD. Harnessing individual participant data (IPD) from studies could support more in-depth analyses t...o address the many outstanding research questions. This systematic review aims to describe the characteristics and treatment practices of clinical studies in CD and assess the breadth and availability of research data for the potential establishment of a data-sharing platform.
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The booklet starts with a general overview of how illicit drugs and the environment are linked within the bigger picture of the Sustainable Development Goals, climate change and environmental sustainability. It highlights direct and indirect linkages and gives examples of the significant local and i...ndividual-level impact that drugs can have on the environment. This is followed by a more in-depth overview of the latest scientific evidence for plant-based drugs and for synthetic drugs. For plant-based drugs, for example, this includes an analysis of the relationship between illicit crop cultivation and deforestation. For synthetic drugs, it includes an analysis of waste composition, volumes, and dumping and discharge, as well as the relation with wastewater treatment.
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MEDBOX Issue Brief 26. Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by eating or drinking food or water that is contaminated with the
bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Cholera remains a global threat to public health and is an indicator of inequity and lack of
social development. Researchers have esti...mated that every year, there are 1.3 to 4.0 million cases of cholera, and 21
000 to 143 000 deaths worldwide due to the infection.
However, cholera remains a neglected and underreported disease. Many cases are not recorded due to limitations in
surveillance systems and fears of potential impact on trade or tourism.
Today cholera affects 47 countries across the globe. Almost every developing country faces cholera outbreaks or
the threat of cholera. Major ongoing outbreaks are being reported from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Nigeria. Major outbreaks are currently in Syria and Haiti.
Therefore, MEDBOX decided to produce issue briefs on cholera and available resources in Arabic, English and
French.
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The extensive use of antimicrobials in human and veterinary medicine in recent years has accelerated the emergence and spread of resistant microorganisms. This situation has been worsened by the lack of investment in developing new effective antibiotics. The severity of the consequences is clear to ...see: it is estimated that each year, drug-resistant infections result in at least 25 000 patient deaths and cost the EU EUR 1,5 billion in healthcare costs and through loss of productivity
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The WHO continuously reviews available data on SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. For this version, the global epidemiological
situation of the COVID-19 pandemic as of 21 January 2022 – at a time when the Omicron VOC had been identified in 171
countries across all six WHO Regions and was rapidly re...placing Delta worldwide – was considered Omicron has a substantial growth advantage, higher secondary attack rates and a higher observed reproduction number than Delta.
There is now significant evidence that immune evasion contributes to the rapid spread of Omicron. Other factors may be a shorter
serial interval (by about 0.8 to 1.2 days compared to Delta) and potential increased intrinsic transmission fitness . There is
growing evidence that with Omicron, there is lower vaccine effectiveness (VE) against infection and symptomatic disease soon after vaccination compared to Delta. There is also evidence of accelerated waning of VE over time of the primary series against infection and symptomatic disease for the studied vaccines. Further studies are required to better understand the drivers of transmission and declining incidence in various settings. These factors include the intrinsic transmission fitness properties of the virus, degree of immune evasion, vaccination coverage and level of vaccine-derived and post-infection immunity, levels of social mixing and degree of application of public health and social measures (PHSM).
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PlosOne December 10, 2014 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111913
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we re...port an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world's oceans from 24 expeditions (2007–2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, costal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N = 680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N = 891). Using an oceanographic model of floating debris dispersal calibrated by our data, and correcting for wind-driven vertical mixing, we estimate a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons. When comparing between four size classes, two microplastic <4.75 mm and meso- and macroplastic >4.75 mm, a tremendous loss of microplastics is observed from the sea surface compared to expected rates of fragmentation, suggesting there are mechanisms at play that remove <4.75 mm plastic particles from the ocean surface.
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Bonchial asthma is the most common chronic respiratory disease in the world. In Kenya, it has been estimated that about 7.5% of the Kenyan population, nearly 4 million people, are currently living with asthma. Many cases tend to be underdiagnosed and undertreated which leads to high levels of morbid...ity and avoidable deaths. The consequences of poorly controlled asthma, including physical, mental, social, and economic impacts, are magnified in the poor on account of poor access to asthma services and sub-optimal quality of those services. With these guidelines, Kenya's Ministry of Health aims to work towards embedding asthma care in Universal Health Care (UHC) to ensure that quality asthma services are available in primary care settings with
referral networks strengthened for those who may require secondary and tertiary care. These national asthma guidelines will also ensure that treatment for asthma is standardized in both the public and the non-state health care sector.
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Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change pp 47–66
This chapter reviews the emerging importance of pollen allergies in relation to ongoing climate change. Allergic diseases have been increasing in prevalence over the last decades, partly as the result of the impact of climate change. ...Increased sensitisation rates and more severe symptoms have been the partial outcome of: increased pollen production of wind-pollinated plants resulting in long-term increased abundance of pollen in the air we breathe; earlier shifts of airborne pollen seasons making occurrence of allergic symptoms harder to predict and deal with efficiently; increased allergenicity of pollen causing more severe health effects in allergic individuals; introduction of new, invasive allergenic plant species causing new sensitisations; environment-environment interactions, such as plants and hosted microorganisms, i.e. fungi and bacteria, which comprise a complex and dynamic system, with additive, presently unforeseeable influences on human health; environment-human interactions, as the consequence of a combination of environmental factors, like air pollution, global warming, urbanisation and microclimatic variability, which create a multi-resolution spatiotemporal system that requires new processing technologies and huge data inflow in order to be thoroughly investigated. We suggest that novel, real-time, personalised pollen information services, like mobile-app risk alerts, must be developed to provide the optimum first line of allergy management.
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(African Development Bank policy research document 1)
The report examines financing in the battle against malaria, focusing on the role of foreign aid. It analyzes whether or not a disease such as malaria can be controlled or eliminated in Africa without health aid. It also presents a theoretic...al model of the economics of malaria and shows how health aid can help avoid the “disease trap.” While calling for increased funding from international sources to fight malaria, it also recommends that African countries step up their own efforts, including on domestic resource mobilization. In 2016, governments of endemic countries contributed 31% of the estimated total of US $ 2.7 billion.
Between 2000 and 2014, malaria control efforts were scaled up and worldwide deaths were cut in half. But declining health aid and deprioritized vertical aid (as for malaria), despite its potentially great efficiency, have led to rising numbers of cases. In 2016, 216 million cases of malaria were reported, up from 211 million in 2015. Africa was home to 90% of all malaria cases and 91% of malaria deaths in 2016. Progress appears to have stalled in the global fight against the disease.
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Working towards better COVID-19 outcomes in the WHO European Region.From the first COVID-19 cases in Europe reported on
24 January 2020, the pandemic reached 1 million cases
within 3 months, 10 million cases within 8 months, and
100 million cases in Europe alone within 2 years. Over
the course o...f its two years, COVID-19 has claimed over
1.6 million lives across Europe and Central Asia. The
World Health Organization (WHO) European Region has
accounted for close to a third of the cumulative global
COVID-19 cases and deaths.
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DHS Further Analysis Reports No. 109 - This report documents trends in key child nutrition indicators in Rwanda. Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 2005, 2010, and 2014-15 were analyzed, disaggregated by selected equity-related variables, and tested for trends. Over the survey per...iod, Rwanda had high rates of exclusive breastfeeding, with regional variation. Rates of continued breastfeeding were also high but generally decreased as mother’s education and household wealth increased in all survey years. Complementary feeding practices varied by region, mother’s education, household wealth, urban-rural residence, and sex of the child.
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Indicators for monitoring the 2016 United Nations Political Declaration on Ending AIDS
UNAIDS supports countries to collect information on their national HIV responses through the Global AIDS Monitoring (GAM) framework—an annual collection of 72 indicators on the response to HIV in a country.... These data form part of the data set used to report back to the General Assembly.
Different from the HIV epidemiological estimates that countries produce for data on the state of the epidemic in a country—that is, data for making estimates on the number of people living with HIV, AIDS-related deaths, etc.—GAM collects information on HIV programmes, including the number of people living with HIV who know their HIV status and people on HIV treatment, and on stigma and discrimination. A full list of the indicators is given in the GAM guidelines.
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This study provides information about vulnerabilities within the targeted population and contributes to reflection within UNHCR on how to interpret their multisectorial Home Visit assessments. By exploring relationships between vulnerability indicators and other data collected, the report outlines k...ey trends and relationships. The report details predefined VAF indicators and then provides an in-depth descriptive analysis for each sector
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The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) declared a Yellow Fever (YF) outbreak and activated a multi-sectoral Emergency Operations Centre for coordination of Yellow Fever response on 12 November 2020. The outbreak, which mainly affected three states of Delta, Enugu and Bauchi, already recorded ...a total of 222 suspected cases 19 confirmed cases and 76 deaths between 1 and 11 November 2020.
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This country cooperation strategy (CCS) outlines how the World Health Organization (WHO) will work with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic over the next five years (2024–2028), supporting the implementation of the five-year health sector development plans and the Health Sector Reform Strategy ...2021–2030 to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic experienced substantial economic growth in the 30 years prior to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, contributing to reduced poverty and significant progress toward the SDGs. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought this development to a halt. It was anticipated that the COVID-19 recovery and the tremendous population growth in recent years would provide opportunities for a shift toward more sustainable and inclusive development in the years ahead. In 2023, however, the contrary was the case. Rural residents, including many ethnic minorities, continued to face marginalization because of limited access to education, health care and economic opportunities.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and other disease outbreaks, the country has made significant improvements in health. Nonetheless, progress has been uneven and not everyone has benefited from these achievements. In the mountainous region, many people lack access to quality health care because of the unequal distribution of well-trained health-care workers. Preventable deaths due to poor-quality health care for children and newborns, infants and mothers remain a concern, as do communicable diseases such as sexually transmitted infections and tuberculosis. The increasing burden of noncommunicable diseases and the health impact of worsening climate change further heighten the need for strengthened and resilient health systems, which are at risk due to an underfunded health sector and weak economy.
This CCS aims to address remaining and future challenges as well as health needs while creating an impact that is sustainable. It identifies three strategic priorities and nine deliverables (Table 1) to support the attainment of the national vision of Health for all by all, as articulated in the 9th Health Sector Development Plan 2021–2025. It contributes to the country’s goals to achieve universal health coverage, graduate from least developed country status by 2026 and attain SDGs by 2030.
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Rabies is a fatal viral zoonosis and serious public health problem.1 All mammals are believed to be susceptible to the disease, and for the purposes of this document, use of the term animal refers to mammals. The disease is an acute, progressive encephalitis caused by viruses in the genus Lyssavirus....
2 Rabies virus is the most important lyssavirus globally. In the
United States, multiple rabies virus variants are maintained in wild mammalian reservoir populations such as raccoons, skunks, foxes, and bats. Although the United States has been declared free from transmission of canine rabies virus variants, there is always a risk of reintroduction of these variants.The rabies virus is usually transmitted from animal to animal through bites. The incubation period is
highly variable. In domestic animals, it is generally 3 to 12 weeks, but can range from several days to months, exceeding 6 months.8 Rabies is communicable during the period of salivary shedding of rabies virus. Experimental and historic evidence documents that dogs, cats, and ferrets shed the virus for a few days prior to the onset of clinical signs and during illness. Clinical signs of rabies are variable and include inappetance, dysphagia, cranial nerve deficits, abnormal behavior, ataxia, paralysis, altered vocalization, and seizures. Progression to death is rapid. There are currently no known effective rabies antiviral drugs.
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Humanitarian crises exacerbate nutritional risks and often lead to an increase in acute malnutrition. Emergencies include both manmade (conflict) and natural disasters (floods, drought, cyclones, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.). Complex emergencies are combinations of both manmade a...nd natural disasters, often of a protracted nature. Millions of people are affected by humanitarian crises every year. The increasing frequency and scale of emergencies requires nutrition to be addressed in all phases of a response.
Crisis situations, whether acute or protracted, impact on a range of factors that can increase the risk of undernutrition, morbidity, and mortality. They may involve: the large-scale destruction of property and infrastructure; the erosion of livelihood strategies and purchasing power; a breakdown of and reduced access to essential services, including health services, water supply, and sanitation; and the displacement of large numbers of people. Emergencies can also disrupt social systems and the quality of care/feeding practices. Household access to food may be negatively affected and people may find themselves in overcrowded settlements with their families divided. As a result, at the individual level, there is often an increased risk of deteriorating health and nutritional status, resulting in a greater likelihood of death.
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