Tanzania has confirmed its first-ever cases of Marburg Virus Disease, after laboratory tests were carried out following reports of cases and deaths in the country’s north-west Kagera region. According to the country’s National Public Health Laboratory, eight people developed symptoms including fever, vomiting, bleeding and renal failure. Five of the eight cases, including a health worker, have died, and the remaining three are receiving treatment. A total of 161 contacts have been identified and are being monitored. In response to the
Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its latest progress report on the fight against Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) entitled “Global report on neglected tropical diseases 2023.” The report highlights the progress and challenges of delivering NTD care around the world, against a backdrop of COVID-19-related disruptions. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, says, “Around the world, millions of people have been liberated from the burden of neglected tropical diseases, which keep people trapped in cycles of poverty and stigma.”
According to a new status report from the World Health Organization (WHO), five billion people globally remain unprotected from harmful trans fat, increasing their risk of heart disease and death. Despite the global goal for its total elimination in 2023, progress towards this target has been slow, with only 43 countries having implemented best-practice policies for tackling trans fat in food, protecting 2.8 billion people globally. Industrially produced trans fat is commonly found in packaged foods, baked goods, cooking oils and
The Central Public Health Laboratory (CPHL) in Lagos, Nigeria has achieved full laboratory accreditation status from the World Health Organization (WHO) for its contribution to the fight against measles and rubella in the country. The CPHL is one of the laboratories under the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Measles and Rubella laboratory network. “WHO full accreditation status attained by the laboratory is a great achievement for Nigeria as quality laboratory is critical to understanding the impact of a country’s vaccination
An estimated 7 million children in Africa died before their fifth birthday, according to the latest estimates released by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME). The group also found that 1.9 million babies were stillborn in the same period. Many of these deaths could have been prevented with equitable access and high-quality maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health care. “Every day, far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes even before
Health authorities in Uganda have admitted that even though the country’s latest Ebola outbreak is over, the source of the outbreak still remains unknown. In her remarks at the event marking the official declaration of the end of the outbreak, Dr. Aceng Jane Ruth Ocero, Uganda’s Minister for Health, said the health ministry is working with its local and international partners to identify the source of the outbreak in addition to factors suggesting possible seasonal occurrences. “The source of this outbreak,
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
Uganda has declared the end of an Ebola outbreak caused by Sudan ebolavirus, just four months after the first case was confirmed in the country’s central Mubende district on September 20, 2022. The country’s Minister of Health, Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng Acero, praised the swift response to the outbreak, which included surveillance, contact tracing, and infection prevention and control measures. In total, there were 164 cases of the disease (142 confirmed and 22 probable), with 55 confirmed deaths and 87
The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a statement in The Lancet Public Health stating that there is no safe amount of alcohol that does not affect health. Alcohol, classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common types such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. The statement clarifies that currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the
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