The World Health Organization’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has urged countries to increase their COVID-19 sequencing efforts and share data with the global community in order to detect and track the emergence and spread of new variants. The Director-General stated that despite the progress made in the fight against the pandemic, such as the development of vaccines, the number of sequences being shared has dropped by over 90% since the peak of the Omicron wave and the number of countries
While the COVID-19 pandemic has declined significantly in 2022, there are still many gaps and uncertainties that prevent the World Health Organization (WHO) from declaring the pandemic over. Addressing journalists recently, WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that gaps in surveillance, testing, vaccination, treatment, and health systems are preventing the ending of the pandemic. Gaps in surveillance, testing and sequencing mean we do not understand well enough how the virus is changing; Gaps in vaccination mean that millions
Only 27% of health workers in Africa have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, leaving the bulk of the workforce on the frontlines against the pandemic unprotected, a preliminary analysis by World Health Organization (WHO) shows. Analysis of data reported from 25 countries finds that since March 2021, 1.3 million health workers were fully vaccinated, with just six countries reaching more than 90%, while nine countries have fully vaccinated less than 40%. In sharp contrast, a recent WHO global study of 22
As the COVAX Facility is forced to slash planned COVID-19 vaccine deliveries to Africa by around 150 million this year, the continent faces almost 500 million doses short of the global year-end target of fully vaccinating 40% of its population. This shortfall comes as Africa tops 8 million COVID-19 cases this week. With the cutback COVAX is now expected to deliver 470 million doses to Africa this year. These will be enough to vaccinate just 17% of the population, far
The Federal Government has launched the second phase of the COVID-19 vaccination on 16 August 2021 in Abuja; A continuous effort towards curbing the spread of the disease in the country. Citizens can now register online by clicking here to book a vaccination appointment at their preferred and nearest vaccination site. At a symbolic event to flag- off the second phase at the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Abuja, the Chairman of the Presidential Steering Committee (PSC)
A coalition of global health experts today called on the Group of Seven (G7) leaders to share at least 1 billion, and aim for 2 billion, vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of this year, and more urgently help countries distribute and deliver vaccines quickly and equitably across their populations, striving to achieve at least 60%, and ideally 70%, vaccination coverage in every country in 2022. President Biden and his G7 counterparts will meet at their annual
To facilitate early detection of new strains and variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) is now conducting genomic sequencing of all positive samples from travellers arriving Nigeria. This development was highlighted in the center’s Weekly Epidemiological Report for Week 15. From South Africa to Egypt, England and India, new strains of the virus are being identified with potential implications on virulence and vaccine effectiveness. Last week, the World Health Organisation
A new report has provided insights into the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on tuberculosis prevention and control measures. According to the report released by the Stop TB Partnership, nine of the countries with the most tuberculosis (TB) cases—representing 60% of the global TB burden—saw a drastic decline in diagnosis and treatment of TB infections in 2020, ranging from 16%-41% (with an average of 23%). The drop brought the overall number of people diagnosed and treated for TB
As government officials in Nigeria continue to promise citizens that doses of COVID-19 vaccines will soon become available in the country, Ghana has become the first to receive COVID-19 vaccine on the continent through the Gavi and WHO-led COVAX platform. The vaccines arrived on a flight from Mumbai, via Dubai, where the flight also collected a shipment of syringes from a Gavi-funded stockpile at UNICEF’s regional Supply Hub. In a statement, COVAX today announced that 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a “profound” impact on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer around the world, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, before highlighting that breast cancer has become the most common type of the disease. More than a year since the new coronavirus crisis began, its impact on cancer care has been stark, with “50 per cent of governments (having) cancer services partially or completely disrupted because of the pandemic”, said Dr. André Ilbawi, from WHO’s Department of
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