In 2012, all Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed a historical target to reduce premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases
(NCD). This commitment was echoed in 2015 by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which included a target to reduce premature morta...lity (the
measure of unfulfilled life expectancy and deaths between the ages of 30 and 70 years) from NCD by 30% by the year 2030. The Sustainable Development Goals are especially relevant to cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death globally, with increasing prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC).
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Debt has become a substantial burden for developing countries due to limited access to financing, rising borrowing costs, currency devaluations and sluggish growth. These factors compromise the countries’ ability to react to emergencies, tackle climate change and invest in their people and the fut...ure. The latest report, A World of Debt, discusses the actions needed to unleash the resources needed to build a more prosperous, inclusive, and sustainable world.
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The COVID-19 pandemic’s immediate costs, measured in lives lost and damaged, have been appalling and continue to rise. In addition, its effects on individuals’ livelihoods and economies around the world have been deep and are likely to be long lasting. While saving lives was the near-exclusive f...ocus during the first phase of the crisis, governments are now trying to strike a delicate balance between preventing further economic damage by reopening parts of their economies, while managing the obvious health risks of doing so.
In the international mobility and migration arenas—policy areas enormously affected by the health and economic effects of the pandemic—this reflection considers both how these fields have fared thus far and the challenges that lay ahead
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The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Georgetown University, and the United Nations University have today launched new guidelines to provide the first-ever global policy framework that will help protect, include, and empower children on the ...move in the context of climate change.
The Guiding Principles for Children on the Move in the Context of Climate Change provides a set of 9 principles that address the unique and layered vulnerabilities of children on the move both internally and across borders as a result of the adverse impacts of climate change. Currently, most child-related migration policies do not consider climate and environmental factors, while most climate change policies overlook the unique needs of children.
The guidelines note that climate change is intersecting with existing environmental, social, political, economic, and demographic conditions contributing to people’s decisions to move. In 2020 alone, nearly 10 million children were displaced in the aftermath of weather-related shocks. With around one billion children – nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children – living in 33 countries at high risk of the impacts of climate change, millions more children could be on the move in the coming years.
Developed in collaboration with young climate and migration activists, academics, experts, policymakers, practitioners, and UN agencies, the guiding principles are based on the globally ratified Convention on the Rights of the Child and are further informed by existing operational guidelines and frameworks.
Recommendations for safeguarding the rights and well-being of children regardless of their location or migration status.
The guiding principles provide national and local governments, international organizations and civil society groups with a foundation to build policies that protect children’s rights. The organizations and institutions are calling on governments, local and regional actors, international organizations, and civil society groups to embrace the guiding principles to help protect, include, and empower children on the move in the context of climate change.
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The spread of COVID-19 poses a challenge for emerging markets such as those in Africa and Latin America. While governments around the world are suffering from a shortage of ventilators, hospital beds, and personal protective equipment, availability of these items is already extremely limited in some... countries. In Africa, countries including Mali, Liberia, and Burkina Faso have only a few ventilators available to aid their populations, and there is also a lack of reliable oxygen supplies, ICUs, and healthcare workers to treat the sick. Additionally, many countries in Africa are already suffering from food insecurity and weak economies, which will worsen the long-term effects of coronavirus.
Keeping these factors in mind, GeoPoll conducted a remote study in 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa on the effects coronavirus is already having on people throughout the region.
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Trachoma causes more vision loss and blindness than any other infection in the world. This disease is caused by Chlamydia trachomatis bacteria. Other variants or strains of these bacteria can cause a sexually transmitted infection (chlamydia) and disease in lymph nodes.
This is photomicrograph ...of a conjunctival smear that revealed the presence of what are known as, intracytoplasmic inclusions Trachoma is easily spread through direct personal contact such as from fingers, through shared towels and clothes, and through flies that have been in contact with the eyes or nose of an infected person. When left untreated, repeated Chlamydia trachomatis infections in the eye can cause severe scarring on the inside of the eyelid. This can cause the eyelashes to scratch the cornea (trichiasis). In addition to causing pain, trichiasis permanently damages the cornea and can lead to irreversible blindness.
Chlamydia trachomatis infections spread in areas that lack access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation systems. Trachoma affects the most resource-limited communities in the world. Globally, almost 1.9 million people have vision loss because of trachoma, and it causes 1.4% of all blindness worldwide.1 In 2021, 136 million people lived in trachoma-endemic areas and were at risk of trachoma blindness.
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Comprehensive public health action on population ageing is urgently needed. This will require fundamental shifts, not just in the things we do, but in how we think about ageing itself. The World report on ageing and health outlines a framework for action to foster Healthy Ageing built around the new... concept of functional ability. Making these investments will have valuable social and economic returns, both in terms of health and wellbeing of older people and in enabling their on-going participation in society
Executive summaries : Arabic; Chinese; English; French; German; Japanese; Portuguese; Russian; Spanish
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The Planetary Health Education Framework is a project of the Planetary Health Alliance (planetaryhealthalliance.org). The Planetary Health Alliance is a consortium of over 250 partners from around the world committed to understanding and addressing the human health impacts of global environmental ch...ange
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24 Nov. 2021
Action against gender-based violence being pushed to the outlying margins of the global COVID-19 response
A new Oxfam report shows an undeniable increase in gender-based violence (GBV) during the COVID-19 pandemic around the world to which too many governments and donors are not doi...ng enough to tackle.
The report, The Ignored Pandemic: The Dual Crisis of Gender-Based Violence and COVID-19, showed the number of calls made by survivors to domestic violence hotlines in ten countries during the first months of lockdown. The data reveals a 25 – 111 percentage surge; in Argentina (25%), Colombia (79%), Tunisia (43%), China (50%), Somalia (50%), South Africa (69%), UK (25%), Cyprus (39%), Italy (73%) and the largest increase in Malaysia where calls surged by over 111%.
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The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, echoed the concerns of people and organisations around the world when he recently referred to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on schooling as a
‘generational catastrophe’.
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PLoS Negl Trop Dis 14(1): e0007999. January 30, 2020 is the first-ever World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day (World NTD Day), a day when we celebrate the achievements made towards control of the world’s NTDs, yet recognize the daunting challenges we face in the control and elimination of these con...ditions.
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This report makes clear that there is a path to end AIDS. Taking that path will help ensure preparedness to address other pandemic challenges, and advance progress across the Sustainable Development Goals. The data and real-world examples in the report make it very clear what that path is. It is not... a mystery. It is a choice. Some leaders are already following the path—and succeeding. It is inspiring to note that Botswana, Eswatini, Rwanda, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zimbabwe have already achieved the 95–95–95 targets, and at least 16 other countries (including eight in sub-Saharan Africa) are close to doing so.
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Diabetes is a serious, chronic disease that occurs either when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin (a hormone that regulates blood sugar, or glucose), or when the body cannot effectively use the insulin it produces. Diabetes is an important public health problem, one of four priority noncom...municable diseases (NCDs) targeted for action by world leaders. Both the number of cases and the prevalence of diabetes have been steadily increasing over the past few decades
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Over the period 2015 to 2019, scaling up a package of selected nutrition-specific and nutrition sensitive interventions to cover 90 per cent of Sudan would:
- Reduce the under-five mortality rate to 49/1,000 live births
- Reduce the prevalence of stunting to 25 per cent
- Reduce the ...prevalence of wasting (global acute malnutrition – GAM) to 6 per cent
- Increase exclusive breastfeeding to 63 per cent
- Reduce iron deficiency anaemia among pregnant women to 26 per cent.
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One approach to development assistance for health, or health aid, emphasizes the ex ante selection of cost-effective health interventions, an approach that began with the World Development Report (1993) on Investing in Health and has since been adopted by the Effective Altruism community. But just h...ow much of health aid is cost-effective? In this paper, we examine projects in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Creditor Reporting System, the standard dataset that measures and characterizes development assistance for health, for the
years 2019 to 2021, and count the number of projects that refer to interventions from a list of highly cost-effective interventions as defined by the Disease Control Priorities Project, third edition. This exploratory quantitative analysis indicates that 61% of projects used a key word/phrase of a costeffective intervention. There were 11.9 interventions mapped per project on average. There is little evidence that donors tailor the set of interventions to country income levels by cost-effectiveness.
Policymakers may benefit from reviewing the full portfolio of interventions covered by domestic and external resources.
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For this report, the Task Force commissioned
additional background papers on health taxes to
update the evidence, assess short-term revenue
potential, and understand the role of health taxes
in the current era of multiple crises. We find that
health taxes continue to be underutilized despite th...e
powerful impact they have in reducing preventable
death and disease — a particularly glaring act of
neglect in a world that has experienced a massive
pandemic.
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It is widely understood that the food insecurity crisis in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa is one of the world’s fastest growing and most neglected crises. It lacks sufficient global focus, resources and urgency. As in so many crises, women and girls are disproportionately affected and shoulder t...he consequences of protracted neglect, with unconscionable impacts on their safety, life chances and agency.
Gaining a holistic view of the gendered drivers, risks and impacts of food insecurity in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa is difficult. This is due to a lack of data and prioritization, and the large geographical and socioeconomic terrain covered by both regions. However, what we do know about this crisis is more than enough to urgently address the needs of women and girls.
An OCHA discussion paper on this topic (which will be published imminently, and from which this policy brief is drawn) found that there is:
A strong risk of profound regression in gender equality gains made to date in the countries of concern, including on education, sexual and reproductive health, and the economic independence of women and girls (with knock-on effects on broader humanitarian and development outcomes).
An increasing challenge to reverse what must be recognized as a protracted and growing gender-based violence (GBV) emergency in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
The food insecurity crisis in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa is protracted, multidimensional and highly gendered, with spiralling impacts on gender equality and food security outcomes. It is driven by interwoven and overlapping factors, including climate change, political instability, conflict, socioeconomic conditions, migration and displacement and, more recently, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. Interlinked with these factors are gendered structural drivers of food insecurity, including deeply entrenched gender inequalities and harmful social norms. Gendered risks and impacts of food insecurity include alarming limitations on access to education, sexual and reproductive health rights, women’s agency and participation, and dramatic increases in different existing forms of GBV and the emergence of new ones. Recognition of such gendered dimensions of food insecurity and of the need for a multisectoral approach in the response is key to addressing the crisis, along-side sustained commitment and adequate allocation of resources. This policy brief draws out key findings from the OCHA discussion paper on this topic, which includes a desk review of studies, assessments and reports, and interviews with local women’s organizations on the front lines of the food insecurity crisis in communities across both regions.
Below are the most pressing gendered drivers, risks and impacts of food insecurity (not in order of priority), as well as key gaps in the current humanitarian response to food insecurity, and recommendations to take forward.
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Policy Brief 2 June 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is a health and human crisis threatening the food security and nutrition of millions of people around the world. Hundreds of millions of people were already suffering from hunger and malnutrition before the virus hit and, unless immediate action is tak...en, we could see a global food emergency. In the longer term, the combined effects of COVID-19 itself, as well as corresponding mitigation measures and the emerging global recession could, without large-scale coordinated action, disrupt the functioning of food systems. Such disruption can result in consequences for health and nutrition of a severity and scale unseen for more than half a century.
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Ocean plastic pollution has reached crisis level: every minute, more than an entire garbage truck of plastic makes its way into the world’s oceans—roughly 11 million metric tons annually. While plastic waste presents an immediate threat to marine wildlife and ecosystems, this global challenge al...so has implications for major industries such as fishing and tourism, impacting the livelihoods of millions of people. The drivers and impacts of ocean plastic pollution also contribute to global challenges in food security, human health, and climate change.
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In the last five years, i.e. how old turned the Campaign “Indifesa” (Defenceless) in 2016, that was launched by Terre des Hommes in 2012, the world has become smaller. One can actually say that the derangements following the Arab Spring in 2011 reshuffled what is stable and what produces instabi...lity; between those, who live in a peaceful world, and those, who try to survive in areas affected by violence. All that significantly reduced the distance between those, who live there, along the Mediterranean cost, and those, who live here. Such deep disorder made even more acute, visible and tangible also for the so called developed world all the serious violations of the human rights suffered by little girls and girls: on the one hand the widespread political instability and violence made even more precarious the little girls and young women’s conditions on the Mediterranean southern coast, where they were already fragile; and on the other hand the migration flows further worsened them, matching at the same time the conditions of those young and very young migrants to those of the European girls of the same age.
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