Category Archives: Global health

Pandemic potentially a ‘death sentence’ for many prison inmates, experts warn

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Lack of space and funding combined with often limited access to medical support increases vulnerability of prisoners, says study

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    • Chronic overcrowding and underfunding have left prisons around the world vulnerable to being ravaged by coronavirus, criminal justice experts have warned.

    The challenges of a record global prison population of 11 million have been brought to light in a report published by Penal Reform International (PRI) which found that 102 countries have prison occupancy levels of more than 110%.

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    Pandemic could ‘turn back the clock’ 20 years on malaria deaths, warns WHO

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    Deaths in sub-Saharan African countries could double to more than 700,000 this year if Covid-19 crisis disrupts programmes

    Deaths from malaria could double across sub-Saharan Africa this year if work to prevent the disease is disrupted by Covid-19, the World Health Organization has warned.

    The UN’s global health agency said that if countries failed to maintain delivery of insecticide-treated nets and access to antimalarial medicines, up to 769,000 people could die of malaria this year. That figure, which would be more than double the number of deaths in 2018, would mark a return to mortality levels last seen 20 years ago.

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    Snapshots of a world in lockdown: ‘The crisis has crossed a new threshold’

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    At noon on 4 April 2020, the day Covid-19 cases passed 1m globally, photojournalist Lucien Lung used webcams from Antarctica to Argentina to capture images of the global shutdown

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    • Photographer Lucien Lung had been trying to unique find a way to cover the coronavirus pandemic despite being unable to leave his Paris flat. Using webcams, he captured the planet in lockdown at a specific time on a symbolic date: 4 April, the day Covid-19 cases exceeded 1m across the globe.

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    Refugees among hundreds of overseas medics to respond to NHS call

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    Scheme allowing doctors to join as medical support workers is welcomed but calls to ‘permit doctors to work as doctors’ persist

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    • Hundreds of foreign-born doctors, including refugees, have signed up to become medical support workers as part of a new scheme aimed at helping the NHS tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

    NHS England launched the initiative for international medical graduates and doctors after calls to fast track the accreditation of overseas medics.

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    Photographing poverty’s pandemic: ‘It’s a different beast in South Africa’

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    In the first of a series focusing on the work of photographers during the coronavirus crisis, Jerome Delay trains his lens on South Africa

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    • We’ve become used to the images of western cities around quarantine. In the empty streets of industrial and post-industrial societies tightly connected by globalisation, absence has become one of the most powerful metaphors of the coronavirus.

    It’s a very different story in countries where inequality and poverty are much more acute; where access to a safe and distanced space in which to isolate is limited by poverty, social status and economics, and intimate social connections have a different importance.

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    Foreigners targeted in Central African Republic as coronavirus fears grow

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    Peacekeeping and aid operations face disruption as outsiders are scapegoated in one of Africa’s most vulnerable countries

    A backlash against foreigners in Central African Republic threatens to disrupt peacekeeping and aid supplies in one of Africa’s most fragile countries.

    Since an Italian missionary was identified as CAR’s first coronavirus case last month, xenophobia has been on the rise. Unfounded stories widely published in the country’s newspapers and on social media have portrayed foreigners as unwelcome importers of a disease that could further impoverish the country.

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    Doctors sue Zimbabwe government over lack of Covid-19 protective equipment

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    Court application warns ‘many lives will be lost’ without urgent action to provide face masks

    The Zimbabwean government has been taken to court over its failure to provide doctors working on the frontline of the Covid-19 pandemic with masks.

    The Zimbabwe Association for Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) is seeking to compel the authorities urgently to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical practitioners, warning that medics in the country’s troubled health sector will otherwise die.

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    Coronavirus could turn back the clock 30 years on global poverty

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    Economic impact of global shutdown could push half a billion people into privation, researchers warn

    Half a billion people could be pushed into poverty as economies around the world shrink because of the coronavirus outbreak, a new study has warned.

    Poverty levels in developing countries could be set back by up to 30 years, research released by the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research warned on Thursday.

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    Bangladesh sends food aid to sex workers as industry goes into lockdown

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    Up to 100,000 women could be left unable to support families as brothels are closed amid fears of Covid-19 outbreak

    The government of Bangladesh has started sending emergency food and aid to the tens of thousands of women working in the country’s commercial sex industry as brothels across the country close.

    To try to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the authorities have ordered the lockdown of the sex industry, closing the country’s biggest brothel in Goalanda in the Rajbari District of Dhaka until 5 April along with many others across the country.

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    Brazil coronavirus: medics fear official tally ignores ‘a mountain of deaths’

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    Lack of testing and failure to report on cases means scale of outbreak could be far greater than thought, doctors warn

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    • Brazil is bracing for a surge in coronavirus cases as doctors and researchers warn that underreporting and a lack of testing mean nobody knows the real scale of Covid-19’s spread.

    “What’s happening is enormous underreporting,” said Isabella Rêllo, a doctor working in emergency and intensive care in Rio de Janeiro hospitals, in a widely shared Facebook post challenging official numbers. “There are MANY more,” she wrote.

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    ‘If it comes, it will overwhelm us’: Malawi braces for coronavirus

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    Concern is growing that a woefully inadequate health system will leave Malawi unable to cope when Covid-19 arrives

    When the overcrowded, long-distance bus from Johannesburg arrived at the Malawian border post of Mwanza last week, one passenger was dead. Fearing he had picked up Covid-19 in South Africa and infected all his fellow travellers, the guards sent everyone to a hastily built quarantine centre for 14 days.

    The man had died of other causes but Malawi, which is well used to devastating diseases like HIV and Aids, cholera and malaria, is taking no chances. Along with São Tomé, Comoros, South Sudan, Burundi, and Sierra Leone in Africa, it is one of the last countries in the world not to have confirmed a single Covid-19 case yet.

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    Coronavirus crisis may deny 9.5 million women access to family planning

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    Charity warns loss of services caused by lockdowns could result in millions of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions

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    • Up to 9.5 million women and girls could miss out on vital family planning services this year because of Covid-19, potentially resulting in thousands of deaths.

    Marie Stopes International warned on Friday that travel restrictions and lockdowns could have a devastating affect on women as they struggle to collect contraceptives and access other reproductive healthcare services, such as safe abortions, across the 37 countries in which it works.

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    Back poor countries fighting Covid-19 with trillions or face disaster, G20 told

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    Experts warn leaders of huge social and economic consequences of failing to support developing states against ‘unprecedented threat’

    Economists and global health experts have called on G20 leaders to provide trillions of dollars to poorer countries to shore up ailing healthcare systems and economies, or face a disaster that will rebound on wealthier states through migration and health crises.

    Twenty experts, among them four Nobel prizewinners, including Joseph Stiglitz, Lord Nicholas Stern and seven chief economists of the World Bank and other development banks, have written to G20 leaders to warn of “unimaginable health and social impacts” as coronavirus rips through the developing world, taking overburdened healthcare systems beyond breaking point, and causing economic and social devastation.

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    Bosnia crams thousands of migrants into tent camp to ‘halt Covid-19 spread’

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    Move to makeshift facility in remote village sparks fears over social distancing and access to water, heat and power

    Authorities in Bosnia have ordered the transfer of thousands of migrants to a remote camp in Lipa, a village about 25 kilometres from the border with Croatia, due to the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

    In a document seen by the Guardian, the Bihać city civil defence headquarters asked that the move be carried out “in order to take urgent measures to prevent the onset of the disease caused by Covid-19”.

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    Covid-19 presents people in the crosshairs of conflict with a terrifying new threat

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    As the Red Cross launches an emergency appeal, its president calls for the world to pull together

    If the first casualty of war is truth, the second may very well be something the entire world values highly right now: healthcare.

    Families fleeing conflict, or currently in its crosshairs, know that medical assistance is a rare and precious privilege in war zones. Amid the terror of bombs and bullets, a functioning medical facility is a life-saving oasis, but it’s a near certainty medical staff will be overworked and short on supplies.

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    Coronavirus threatens to turn aid crises into ‘humanitarian catastrophes’

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    Restrictions on movement prevent food and medicine from reaching people in adversity, experts warn

    Stringent new international restrictions on movement introduced because of the coronavirus pandemic are threatening the lives of millions of people across the world already caught up in humanitarian emergencies.

    UN agencies, aid groups and international experts have warned that the new restrictions, which have closed borders and ports, and severely limited the movement of key staff from Africa to South America and Asia, threaten a “dramatic” knock-on effect in countries suffering from conflict, extreme climate events and other crises.

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    Mogadishu’s refugees ‘waiting for death’ as Covid-19 reaches Somalia

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    Fears are growing about the spread of coronavirus in camps where few can afford soap, water is rare and social distancing impossible

    In the Nabadoon camp on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Asho Abdullahi Hassan, a 40-year-old mother of seven, has heard about the coronavirus on the radio.

    “I am very scared about this deadly virus. I only heard about it from the news. It is like we are waiting for death to come,” she says.

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    The isolated tribes at risk of illness from Amazon missionaries

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    As evangelical Christians use their influence with Brazil’s government to cast their net ever wider, indigenous people vulnerable to common diseases face a growing threat

    A radical group of evangelical Christian missionaries set on converting every last tribe on Earth has raised fears that deadly diseases – and even the coronavirus – will spread in the Brazilian Amazon. The group has based its newly bought helicopter right beside a reserve with the world’s highest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, who have little resistance to common illnesses.

    There are more than 100 isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, all highly vulnerable to common diseases such as measles and flu, and 16 of them live in the same reserve in the Javari Valley, a vast, remote area the size of Austria. Covid-19 could wipe out any of them.

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    World’s most vulnerable in ‘third wave’ for Covid-19 support, experts warn

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    Fears that lack of coronavirus testing and supplies could mean refugees and those caught in crises are left behind

    The world’s most vulnerable people could be last in line for support to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, experts have warned.

    Countries already dealing with humanitarian and refugee crises face a struggle to find the resources to deal with the pandemic by the time it reaches them, specialists said in a webinar hosted by the New Humanitarian news agency on Thursday.

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