Hum Resour Health 20, 37 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-022-00735-y.
For countries to achieve universal health coverage, they need to have well-functioning and resilient health systems. Achieving this requires a sufficient number of qualified health workers and this necessitates the importa...nce of investments in producing and regulating health workers. It is projected that by 2030, Africa would need additional 6.1 million doctors, nurses, and midwives. However, based on the current trajectory, only 3.1 million would be trained and ready for service delivery. To reduce current shortages of the health workforce, Africa needs to educate and train 3.0 million additional health workers by 2030. This study was conducted to describe the distribution and ownership of the health training institutions, production of health workers, and the availability of accreditation mechanisms for training programmes in the WHO African Region.
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This paper summarizes the evidence about the health effects of air pollution from particulate matter and their implications for policy-makers, with the aim of stimulating the development of more effective strategies to reduce
air pollution and its health effects in the countries of eastern Europe,... the Caucasus and central Asia.
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In 2014, the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) reported that the highest prevalence of symptoms of severe asthma was found in the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including Nigeria. While exposure to biomass fuel use may be an important risk factor in the deve...lopment of asthma, its association with asthma symptoms severity has not been well-established. The aim of this study is to extend the spectrum of environmental risk factors that may be contributing towards increasing asthma morbidity, especially asthma symptoms severity in rural schoolchildren in Nigeria and to examine possible asthma underdiagnosis among this population.
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The indicators and questions in this document are designed for use by national AIDS programmes and partners to assess the state of a country’s HIV and AIDS response, and to measure progress towards achieving national HIV targets. Countries are encouraged to integrate these indicators and questions... into their ongoing monitoring efforts and to report comprehensive national data through the Global AIDS Monitoring (GAM) process. In this way they will contribute to improving understanding of the global response to the HIV epidemic, including progress that has been made towards achieving the commitments and global targets set out in the new United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS: Ending Inequalities and Getting on Track to End AIDS by 2030, adopted in June 2021, and the linked Sustainable Development Goals.
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The One UN Climate Change Learning Partnership, also known as UN CC:Learn, is a collaborative initiative of 36 multilateral organizations working together to help countries build the knowledge and skills they need to take action on climate change. These include better climate literacy and other cruc...ial skills to tackle this challenge.
UN CC:Learn provides guidance and quality learning resources to support people, governments and businesses to understand, adapt, and build resilience to climate change.
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These guidelines deal specifically with water, sanitation and hygiene, and are designed to be used in schools in low-cost settings in low- and medium-resource countries to:
• assess prevailing situations and plan for required improvements;
• develop and reach essential safety standards as a f...irst goal; and
• support the development and application of national policies.
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The effective vaccine management (EVM) workshop, jointly organized by WHO and UNICEF, was attended by participants from 13 countries, who reviewed the various EVM benchmarks, identified the gaps in policies, guidelines, SOPs and job aids, and developed respective country action plans to fill these g...aps. This meeting report outlines the proceedings and outcomes of the workshop conducted in Bangkok, Thailand, in December 2024
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Significant progress has been made in the eradication of three priority diseases in the African Region, as a result of extensive collaboration between the Regional Office, WHO country offices and countries. For example, in August 2020, the region was certified free of wild poliovirus. In the area of... neglected tropical diseases, Guinea worm disease is on the verge of eradication, and 12 member states are within reach of being certified as having eradicated yaws by the end of this year.
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Senegal’s substantial and sustained progress against malaria is an inspiring public health success story, and a source of potential lessons for other countries on the path to elimination. This case study describes three major success factors—(1) outstanding leadership and partner engagement, (2)... the achievement and maintenance of high intervention coverage levels, and (3) a thriving data culture—and explores several exciting new opportunities to consolidate and expand upon Senegal’s two decades of impact.
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Int J Tuberc Lung Dis. 2019 Jul 1;23(7):858–864.Namibia ranks among the 30 high TB burden countries worldwide. Here, we report results of the second nationwide anti-TB drug resistance survey. To assess the prevalence and trends of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) in Namibia.
From 2014 to 2015, pat...ients with presumptive TB in all regions of Namibia had sputum subjected to mycobacterial culture and phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (DST) for rifampicin, isoniazid, ethambutol and streptomycin if positive on smear microscopy and/or Xpert MTB/RIF.
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The "Global mapping report on multisectoral actions to strengthen the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and mental health conditions" by the WHO provides insights into how different countries are implementing multisectoral approaches to address NCDs and mental health issues. ...It highlights the importance of collaboration across sectors—such as health, education, finance, and urban planning—to tackle risk factors like tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and harmful alcohol use. The report categorizes actions into four pillars: governance, leadership, operational practices, and resources. It showcases examples from various countries and calls for improved multisectoral efforts to reduce the global burden of NCDs and enhance mental health outcomes.
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The third report in the series Resources for Results published by the UN Office of the Special Envoy on Ebola provides an overview of resources announced and disbursed to countries and agencies as of 31 January 2015. This report is a next step towards more transparency allowing all, especially the g...overnments in the affected countries, to effectively manage and better utilize the available resources
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The WHO website titled "Malaria" provides a comprehensive overview of malaria, a potentially fatal disease caused by Plasmodium parasites and primarily transmitted through mosquito bites in tropical countries. It offers information on symptoms, at-risk groups, preventive measures, and treatment opti...ons. The site also presents recent statistics: in 2023, an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 deaths occurred in 83 countries, with the African region being the most affected—accounting for 94% of cases and 95% of deaths. Children under the age of five made up approximately 76% of the deaths in this region.
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The WHO website titled "Malaria" provides a comprehensive overview of malaria, a potentially fatal disease caused by Plasmodium parasites and primarily transmitted through mosquito bites in tropical countries. It offers information on symptoms, at-risk groups, preventive measures, and treatment opti...ons. The site also presents recent statistics: in 2023, an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 deaths occurred in 83 countries, with the African region being the most affected—accounting for 94% of cases and 95% of deaths. Children under the age of five made up approximately 76% of the deaths in this region.
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The WHO website titled "Malaria" provides a comprehensive overview of malaria, a potentially fatal disease caused by Plasmodium parasites and primarily transmitted through mosquito bites in tropical countries. It offers information on symptoms, at-risk groups, preventive measures, and treatment opti...ons. The site also presents recent statistics: in 2023, an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597,000 deaths occurred in 83 countries, with the African region being the most affected—accounting for 94% of cases and 95% of deaths. Children under the age of five made up approximately 76% of the deaths in this region.
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The "Regional Action Plan 2017–2030: Towards a Malaria-Free South-East Asia Region" by the World Health Organization (WHO) outlines a strategic framework to eliminate malaria in the 11 countries of the WHO South-East Asia Region by 2030. It focuses on reducing transmission, particularly of Plasmod...ium falciparum and P. vivax, addressing multidrug resistance, improving surveillance, and ensuring universal access to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The plan sets clear objectives and milestones and emphasizes strong governance, cross-border collaboration, community involvement, and sustainable financing to achieve and maintain a malaria-free status across the region.
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The Global Health Expenditure Report delves into the intricate landscape of global economies and health systems. This year, it focuses on health spending in 2022, the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how countries around the world responded to the health and economic shocks of the pande...mic from a financial perspective. It also considers what the future may hold as countries emerge from the pandemic. Although it is still too early to gauge whether the COVID-19 pandemic has altered long-term trends in health spending, spending appears to have peaked and is now at or below its long-term rising trend in most country income groups. Additionally, to mark the 25th anniversary of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health Expenditure Tracking Program, the report reviews the program’s achievements and envisions a path forward. As the program’s lead technical agency, WHO is committed to working closely with partners to support countries in tracking health spending and sustaining the Global Health Expenditure Database and the Global Health Expenditure Report as global public goods.
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We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set of ...interacted variables. Variation over
time results from indicators that measure the availability of funding in a given year. Cross-sectional variation results from a sub-national region’s “probability to receive aid.” Controlled for this probability in tandem with fixed effects for country-years and provinces, the interactions of these variables form powerful and excludable instruments. Our results show that Chinese aid increases infant mortality at sub-national scales, but decreases mortality at the countrylevel. In several tests, we show that this stark contrast likely results from aid being fungible within recipient countries.
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The faltering of progress towards malaria elimination follows a plateauing in international financing since 2010. Despite calls for increased international financing, this will be hard to achieve. Both developed country donors and developing countries with malaria face severe fiscal constraints in e...xpanding malaria funding in the next few years. Simply exhorting countries to spend more is unlikely to be successful, just as the Abuja declaration was not, and the developing countries with most malaria burden suffer from weaker economic growth and less capacity to increase domestic financing.
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