This is the first global report on epilepsy summarizing the available evidence on the burden of epilepsy and the public health response required at global, regional and national levels.
The reports highlights major gaps in awareness, diagnosis, treatment, and health policies through a series of a...ppalling numbers. With around 50 million people affected worldwide, epilepsy is one of the most common and serious brain disorders. Nearly 80% of people with epilepsy live in low-income and middle-income countries
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The skin of a patient is the first and most visible structure of the body that any health-care worker encounters during the course of an examination. To the patient, it is also highly visible, and any disease that affects it is noticeable and will have an impact on personal and social well-being. Th...e skin is therefore an important entry point for both diagnosis and management. Many diseases of humans are associated with changes to the skin, ranging from symptoms such as itching to changes in colour, feel and appearance.
This training guide explains how to identify the signs and symptoms of neglected tropical diseases of the skin through their visible characteristics. It also contains information on how to diagnose and manage common skin problems that front-line health workers may encounter.
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This module is part of the WHO series The Immunological Basis for Immunization, which was initially developed in 1993 as a set of eight modules, comprising one module on general immunology and seven modules each devoted to one of the vaccines recommended for the Expanded Programme on Immunization, i....e. vaccines against diphtheria, measles, pertussis, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis and yellow fever. Since then, this series has been updated and extended to include other vaccines of international importance. The main purpose of the modules is to provide national immunization managers and vaccination professionals with an overview of the scientific basis of vaccination against a range of important infectious diseases. The modules developed since 1993 continue to be vaccine-specific, reflecting the biological differences in immune responses to the individual pathogens and the differing strategies employed to create the best possible level of protection that can be provided by vaccination. The modules also serve as a record of the immunological basis for the WHO recommendations on vaccine use, published in the WHO vaccine position papers.*
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By almost any measure, human health is better now than at any time in history. Life expectancy has soared from 47 years in 1950–1955, to 69 years in 2005–2010, and death rates in children younger than 5 years of age have decreased substantially, from 214 per thousand live births in 1950–1955, ...to 59 in 2005–2010. But these gains in human health have come at a high price: the degradation of nature’s ecological systems on a scale never seen in human history. A growing body of evidence shows that the health of humanity is intrinsically linked to the health of the environment, but by its actions humanity now threatens to destabilise the Earth’s key life-support systems.
As a Commission, we conclude that the continuing degradation of natural systems threatens to reverse the health gains seen over the last century. In short, we have mortgaged the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present.
Despite present limitations, the Sustainable Development Goals provide a great opportunity to integrate health and sustainability through the judicious selection of relevant indicators relevant to human wellbeing, the enabling infrastructure for development, and the supporting natural systems, together with the need for strong governance.
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Grounded in the foundations of child centered community development, the success of this strategy will be measured by how individual countries contribute to their child protection systems and partner at various levels to combat violence against children. This strategy is a result of a highly consult...ative process that reached children and youth, Plan International staff, external specialists globally and the paper has been put in place with the joint efforts of the global child protection programming reference group.
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Notable progress has also been made on other key health indicators such as reducing maternal, infant and child deaths and malnutrition, increasing immunization coverage, eliminating infectious diseases such as polio and reducing the incidence of malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhoeal diseases.
But ...despite such substantial progress, the country now faces new and emerging new challenges such as the rising burden of noncommunicable diseases, increased risks associated with disasters, environmental threats and health emergencies during disease outbreaks including the COVID-19 pandemic that is a serious public health threat to Bangladesh. To establish a resilience system for future potential pandemics, the national capacity for emergency preparedness and early response to health emergencies needs to be bolstered considerably.
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Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases and their risk factors are an increasing public health and development challenge in Kazakhstan. This report provides evidence through three analyses that NCDs reduce economic output and ...discusses potential options in response, outlining details of their relative returns on investment. An economic burden analysis shows that economic losses from NCDs (direct and indirect costs) comprise 2.3 trillion tenge, equivalent to 4.5% of gross domestic product in 2017. An intervention costing analysis provides an estimate of the funding required to implement a set of policy interventions for prevention and clinical interventions. A cost–benefit analysis compares these implementation costs with the estimated health gains and identifies which policy packages would give the greatest returns on investment. For example, the salt policy package achieved a benefit-to-cost ratio of 118.4 over 15 years, a return of more than 118 tenge for every 1 tenge invested.
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There is a broad consensus nowadays that the Earth is warming up as a result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by anthropogenic activities. It is also clear that current trends in the fields of energy, development and population growth will lead to continuous and ever more dramatic climate change. ...This is bound to affect the fundamental prerequisites for maintaining good health: clean air and water, sufficient food and adequate housing. The planet will warm up gradually, but the consequences of the extreme weather conditions such as frequent
storms, floods, droughts and heat-waves will have sudden onset and acute repercussions. It is widely accepted that climate change will have an impact on the spread of infectious diseases in Europe, which is likely to bring about new public health risks in the majority of cases. Transmission of infectious diseases depends on a number of factors, including climate and environmental elements. Foodborne and waterborne diseases, for instance, are associated with high temperatures. Disease-transmitting vectors (e.g. mosquitoes, sandflies and ticks) are highly sensitive to climate conditions, including temperature and humidity; their geographical distribution will widen as climate conditions change, potentially allowing them to spread into regions where they are not currently able to live.
The primary purpose of this manual on climate change and infectious diseases is to raise the awareness and the level of knowledge of health workers at national, regional and local levels in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on the health risks associated with climate change and infectious diseases. This manual was devel-
oped as part of the WHO Regional Office for Europe project, Protecting health from climate change: a seven–country initiative, implemented with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.
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The WHO guidelines for malaria bring together the Organization’s most up-to-date recommendations for malaria in one user-friendly and easy-to-navigate online platform.
The WHO guidelines for malaria bring together the Organization’s most up-to-date recommendations for malaria in one user-frie...ndly and easy-to-navigate online platform. The Guidelines supersedes 2 previous WHO publications: the Guidelines for the treatment of malaria, third edition and the Guidelines for malaria vector control. Recommendations on malaria will continue to be reviewed and, where appropriate, updated based on the latest available evidence. Any updated recommendations will always display the date of the most recent revision in the MAGICapp platform. With each update, a new PDF version of the consolidated guidelines will also be available for download on the WHO website.
This version of the Guidelines includes an updated recommendation for malaria vaccines, new recommendations on the use of near-patients qualitative and semiquantitative G6PD tests to guide anti-relapse treatment of P. vivax and P. ovale, updated recommendations on primaquine and the recommendation on the use of tafenoquine. It replaces the versions published on 16 February 2021, 13 July 2021, 18 February 2022, 31 March 2022, 3 June 2022, 25 November 2022, 14 March 2023 and 16 October 2023.
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Thailand is exposed to flooding, landslides, drought, earthquakes, tsunamis, heat waves, forest fires, and epidemics. Thailand is also exposed to technological hazards such as chemical accidents. Flooding is the natural hazard with the most significant impact on human life, livelihoods, and the econ...omy for the country. The occurrence of droughts has increased in recent years due to the effects of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, which brings drier-than-average rainfall conditions. Drought has adversely impacted the country’s agriculture sector, which employs around one third of the country’s workforce.
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This manual is a resource for Health Counselors working in Family Physician Clinics (FPC) as part of the MANAS program. This program is for common mental disorders like depression and anxiety seen in primary health care facilitieslike the FPC; since depression is the common...est disorder within this group of stress related mental health problems, in the manual we refer to these problems simply as ‘Depression’. The aim of the MANAS program is to integrate the recognition and treatment of Depression into routine primary health care.In the MANAS program, a range of effective treatments will be provided for patients with Depression. These treatments are matched to the individual requirements of patients to both improve the effectiveness of the treatments and to use the limited resources efficiently.
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Sudan recorded the first COVID-19 case on 13 March 2020 and, at the beginning of July, the Federal Ministry of Health had confirmed that nearly 10,000 people had contracted the virus, including over 600 who died from the disease across the country. Although more than 70 per cent of the confirmed cas...es are in the Khartoum area, COVID-19 has spread throughout the country, with the highest numbers recorded in the central and eastern states. With extremely low testing capacity — around 800 samples per day, the lowest in the region — the official figures of confirmed cases likely underestimate the extent of the pandemic and the actual situation is unknown.
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This compendium collates current tools and resources on quality improvement developed by the WHO Service Delivery and Safety Department and provides examples of how the tools and resources have been applied in country settings. The target audience for this document are ministries of health, facility... quality improvement teams, researchers and development agencies. WHO technical programmes, regional and country offices can also use the document in their technical cooperation work with the identified audience. Those working to improve the quality of health service delivery can also make good use of this resource
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BMJ Glob Health 2019;4:e001272. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001272
Trust is an essential component of successful cooperative endeavours. The global health response to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak confronted historically tenuous regional relationships of trust. Challenging sociopolitical co...ntexts and initially inappropriate communication strategies impeded trustworthy relationships between communities and responders during the epidemic. Social scientists affiliated with the Ebola 100-Institut Pasteur project interviewed approximately 160 local, national and international responders holding a wide variety of roles during the epidemic
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This document sets out Rwanda's Maternal, Neonatal Child Health (MNCH) national strategy (July 2013- June 2018). The MNCH strategy provides a framework for addressing maternal, neonatal and child health challenges currently facing Rwanda. It is an overarching strategy for scale up of the national re...sponse to reduce the current levels of maternal, neonatal and child mortality and morbidity in line with the
MDG health related targets and HSSP III targets. The life cycle approach and continuum of care concept, starting with care from the home environment to health facility, guided the development of this roadmap. It aims also to maintain and expand the coverage of cost effective and high impact interventions for maternal, neonatal and child survival in order to achieve national and international targets.
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The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases detected and reported in each country is influenced by
many factors including limited access and/or utilization of healthcare and COVID-19 testing, limited
surveillance, lack of knowledge amongst the population about when to seek testing, an asymptomatic pres...entation, and other unknown issues. This is true in all countries of the world, and not Africa specific, however there are factors unique to Africa which may also affect the way the virus behaves there. COVID-19 prevalence data are critical for planning effective mitigation strategies and understandingthe true impact of the disease and relevant intervention measures in Africa, which might be quite different from regions with a different population age distribution or risk factor profile.
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The State of the world’s nursing 2020 report provides the latest, most up-to-date evidence on and policy options for the global nursing workforce. It also presents a compelling case for considerable – yet feasible – investment in nursing education, jobs, and leadership.
The primary chapters... of the report outline the role and contributions of nurses with respect to the WHO “triple billion” targets; the health labour market and workforce policy levers to address the challenges to nurses working to their full potential; the findings from analysis of National Health Workforce Account (NHWA) data from 191 Member States and progress in relation to the projected shortfall of nurses by 2030; and forward-looking policy options for an agenda to strengthen the nursing workforce to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, improve health for all, and strengthen the primary health care workforce on our journey towards universal health coverage.
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‘Psychosocial Support of Children in Emergencies’ is a reference document for humanitarian workers who want to increase their understanding of the experiences of children in emergency situations and how to support them in mitigating the negative effects of these experiences and how to prevent fu...rther harm. While the book is not designed to be a day-to-day programming tool, it outlines UNICEF’s orientation to the psychosocial principles integral to any work with children and provides a number of examples from field work of how these principles can be turned into concrete actions.
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WHO’s Ambition and Action in Nutrition 2016-2025 is anchored in the six global targets for improving maternal, infant and young child nutrition and the global diet-related NCD targets.
In support of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly SDG2 and SDG3, and in concert w...ith the 2016-2025 UN Decade of Action on Nutrition, WHO’s Ambition and Action in Nutrition 2016-2025 aims for “A world free from all forms of malnutrition where all people achieve health and well-being”. It defines the unique value of WHO for advancing nutrition: the provision of leadership, guidance and monitoring and proposes a theory of change. Finally, following a set of guiding principles, it proposes priority actions for WHO, the delivery model and a clear allocation of roles across the Organization.
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These guidelines are informed by evidence of ‘what works’ and lessons learned in the field. They are designed to accelerate UNICEF regional and country offices’ programming on social service workforce strengthening, and support work to better plan, develop and support the social services workf...orce with national and regional partners.
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