Category Archives: World Health Organization

Johnson defends G7 deal amid criticism of final communique

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Green campaigners and anti-poverty groups say Cornwall summit failed to address challenges facing the world

Boris Johnson has sought to defend the deal struck by G7 leaders at the Cornwall summit, as green groups and anti-poverty campaigners said the rich nations’ club had failed to match the scale of the challenges facing the world.

The final communique contained no early timetable to eradicate coal-fired emissions, offered only 1bn extra coronavirus vaccines for the world’s poor over the next 12 months and made no new binding commitments to challenge China’s human rights abuses.

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High risk of autumn Covid surge in Europe despite drop in infections, says WHO

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Organisation urges governments to be cautious as societies open up and Delta variant advances

Covid-19 infections, hospitalisations and deaths are falling fast across Europe, but the risk of a deadly autumn resurgence remains high as societies open up and the more transmissible Delta variant advances, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

The warning came as new case numbers continued to plunge in most of the continent, falling in some areas to their lowest levels since August, and multiple governments, including France and Germany, relaxed restrictions further.

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G7 leaders will call for fresh WHO inquiry into Covid origins, leaked communique suggests

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Statement indicates leaders will also commit to delivering 1bn vaccine doses and plans to tackle forced labour

Leaders at the G7 summit will call for a new, transparent investigation by the World Health Organization into the origins of the coronavirus, according to a leaked draft communique for the meeting.

The call was initiated by Joe Biden’s administration and follows the US president’s decision to expand the American investigation into the origins of the pandemic, with one intelligence agency leaning towards the theory that it escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

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Third wave sweeps across Africa as Covid vaccine imports dry up

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WHO says continent urgently needs more jabs as eight countries report rise of 30% in cases in a week

African countries face a last-ditch battle against a third wave of Covid infections, as the supply of vaccines to the continent “grinds to a halt”, top health officials have warned.

“The threat of a third wave in Africa is real and rising. Our priority is clear – it’s crucial that we swiftly get vaccines into the arms of Africans at high risk of falling seriously ill and dying of Covid-19,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization (WHO) regional director for Africa.

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Coronavirus live news: India aims for 10m Covid jabs a day by July; WHO approves Chinese Sinovac jab

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So far nearly 45 million people fully vaccinated, 4.7% of India’s adult population; Sinovac is second Chinese vaccine approved as safe by WHO

The Coachella music festival will return to the US in April 2022, organisers have announced.

The 2020 event was scheduled for April of that year before being pushed to October.

New infection control guidance to help keep NHS workers safe from Covid-19 “falls short”, leading nurses in the UK said.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said that the updated official Covid-19 infection prevention and control guidance “focuses too much on aerosol generating procedures as the main risk”. But doctors have welcomed the new guidance as a “step in the right direction”, PA reports. Concerns were raised early on in the pandemic that medics were not able to get access to appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) amid a worldwide shortage.

The guidance, issued jointly by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as well as public health agencies across the UK’s four nations and NHS England, has been updated to “strengthen existing messaging”, it states.

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Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma

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WHO unveils new names for variants of concern to replace ones linked to where they were discovered

Coronavirus variants are to be named after letters of the Greek alphabet instead of their place of first discovery, the World Health Organization has announced, in a move to avoid stigma.

The WHO has named four variants of concern, known to the public as the UK/Kent (B.1.1.7), South Africa (B.1.351), Brazil (P.1) and India (B.1.617.2) variants. They will now be given the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta respectively, to reflect their order of detection, with any new variants following the pattern down the Greek alphabet.

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Covid investigators must interview Wuhan stall owners, says virologist

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Efforts to find origin of coronavirus ‘must look at what animals were in the market in late 2019’

A leading scientist has called for stallholders at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan to be interviewed in any further investigation of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Prof Eddie Holmes has joined a growing chorus of voices calling for increased efforts to identify the source of the outbreak. The US president, Joe Biden, has ordered the US intelligence community to intensify its scrutiny of the origins of coronavirus, as the theory that the virus might have come from a lab in Wuhan gains traction.

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Vaccine inequality exposed by dire situation in world’s poorest nations

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Analysis: the failings of the Covax programme, logistical issues and governments’ own inadequacies are making a bad situation worse

Only 1% of the 1.3 billion vaccines injected around the world have been administered in Africa – and that comparative percentage has been declining in recent weeks. It is a stark figure that underlines just how serious a problem global vaccine inequity has become. But the answer for the developing world is not as simple as delivering more vaccines.

From Africa to Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean, the same issues have been replicated. On top of finding enough doses, there have been logistical difficulties with delivery, problems over healthcare infrastructure and, in some countries, public hesitancy towards vaccines.

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‘Protect and invest’: WHO calls for 6m more nurses worldwide

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Warnings of brain drain from developing world as Covid adds to numbers of nurses leaving profession

Health ministers around the world are being urged to sign off on plans to create 6m more nursing jobs by 2030, amid warnings that Covid-19 has exacerbated a global shortage and could spark a “brain drain” from the developing world.

Delegates meeting virtually this week at the World Health Assembly, the key decision-making body of the World Health Organization, are expected to adopt a resolution calling on countries to transform the nursing profession through more investment, support and training.

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Did Covid come from a Wuhan lab? What we know so far

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To China’s fury, Joe Biden has ordered a review of rival theories about lab leaks and animal hosts

President Joe Biden has ordered US intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day review of what is known about the origins of Covid-19 and whether it could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. So what does this mean for the lab leak theory?

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WHO and global faith leaders call for fair access to Covid vaccines

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Declaration warns that the world is at a turning point in saving poorer countries from devastation

Global faith leaders and senior health and humanitarian figures are calling on countries to ensure the equitable distribution of Covid vaccines, warning that the world is “at a turning point”.

The signatories of an international declaration include Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization; Henrietta Fore, executive director of Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency; Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross; Filippo Grandi, United Nations high commissioner for refugees; Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the global Anglican church; Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar; and Christian and Jewish leaders.

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Washington toughens stance to fight atrocities in Ethiopia

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Joe Biden’s administration increases pressure on government of prime minister Abiy Ahmed to end human rights abuses

Senior Ethiopian officials may face restrictions on their travel to the US, as Washington increases pressure on the government of prime minister Abiy Ahmed amid growing global concern about atrocities and famine caused by conflict in the northern region of Tigray.

Though visa restrictions are likely to target only a small number of individuals, the move signals President Joe Biden’s administration is shifting to a more direct strategy to force Ahmed to end continuing human rights abuses in Tigray and allow free flow of much-needed humanitarian aid.

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Covid still a threat to Europe – travel should be avoided, says WHO

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Vaccines work against new variants but ‘increased mobility may lead to more transmission’

Covid vaccines in use in Europe appear to protect against all new variants but progress in region remains “fragile” and international travel should be avoided to prevent pockets of transmission quickly spreading into “dangerous resurgences”, the World Health Organization has said.

Weekly official cases in Europe have fallen by almost 60% from 1.7m in mid-April to nearly 685,000 last week with deaths also in decline, the WHO regional director, Hans Kluge, said on Thursday, but incidence rates remained stubbornly high in eight countries.

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Why is the world still being hit by wave after wave of Covid when we know how to stop it? | Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

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Leaders failed to act fast enough when Covid-19 appeared. They must not keep making the same mistakes

Death and illness from Covid-19 is steadily rising once again. In the last week of April, more than 93,000 people died – approaching the worst of the global second wave. How can this still be happening? How can some countries still be experiencing wave after wave of infection when we know how to prevent them?

For the past eight months, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response has been rigorously reviewing the evidence of what happened to allow Covid-19 to take a firm grip – and why. The panel spoke to hundreds of experts and people on the frontline of the response, and conducted extensive original research and numerous literature reviews.

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Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report

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Independent panel castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to ensure it cannot happen again

The Covid pandemic was a preventable disaster that need not have cost millions of lives if the world had reacted more quickly, according to an independent high-level panel, which castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to bring it to an end and ensure it cannot happen again.

The report of the panel, chaired by the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, found “weak links at every point in the chain”.

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Beijing accuses G7 ministers of interfering in China’s affairs

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Foreign ministry responds to west’s human rights claims, saying countries should ‘face up to their own problems’

China has rejected accusations of human rights abuse and economic coercion, made by G7 foreign ministers, accusing them of “blatantly meddling” in China’s internal affairs, calling their remarks groundless.

“Attempts to disregard the basic norms of international relations and to create various excuses to interfere in China’s internal affairs, undermine China’s sovereignty and smear China’s image will never succeed,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin. “They should not criticise and interfere with other countries with a superior mentality, and undermine the current top priority of international anti-epidemic cooperation.”

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Global shortfall of nearly 1m midwives due to failure to value role, study finds

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Investing in midwifery could prevent two-thirds of maternal and newborn deaths, but investment and training are urgently needed

The world is facing a shortage of 900,000 midwives, with more than half the shortfall in Africa, where nearly two-thirds of maternal deaths occur, according to a new survey.

Insufficient resources and a failure to recognise the importance of the role mean there has been little progress since the last study in 2014, according to the State of the World’s Midwifery report, which looked at 194 countries.

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‘The situation in India can happen anywhere,’ says WHO Europe director – video

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The World Health Organization (WHO) said the kind of struggle India was having against a devastating resurgence in Covid cases could happen anywhere in the world, during a briefing on Thursday.

Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, said relaxing measures and allowing mass gatherings should be avoided, especially where vaccination coverage was low and there were contagious variants.

The B.1.617 coronavirus variant – thought to be partly responsible for India's crisis – is now considered a 'variant of interest' by the WHO

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Coronavirus live news: more countries tighten travel restrictions for arrivals from India

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Spain and Philippines join Cambodia and Fiji in restricting arrivals; England extends vaccines to those aged 42 and over

Brazil’s congress has launched a parliamentary inquiry into what critics call Jair Bolsonaro’s disastrous and potentially criminal response to a Covid-19 pandemic that has killed nearly 400,000 Brazilians.

The politically charged investigation, which rivals of Brazil’s far-right president hope will torpedo his chances of re-election, will be conducted by 11 of the country’s 81 senators, including several of Bolsonaro’s fiercest opponents.

Related: Brazil begins parliamentary inquiry into Bolsonaro’s Covid response

Children who are hospitalised with coronavirus may be at risk of persistent fatigue and other symptoms of long Covid, according to researchers who examined the health of patients months after they were discharged.

Scientists interviewed the parents of more than 500 children who were admitted to a Moscow hospital with Covid between April and August last year. They found that a quarter had ongoing symptoms more than five months after returning home, with the most common ailments being fatigue, sleep disruption and sensory problems.

Related: Children may be at risk from long Covid symptoms, study finds

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The Gambia becomes second African state to end trachoma

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Health workers spent years targeting agonising and blinding eye disease, which was rife in rural areas

The Gambia has become the second country in Africa to eliminate trachoma, one of the leading causes of blindness.

The achievement, announced by the World Health Organization on Tuesday, came after decades of work on the disease, which has damaged the sight of about 1.9 million people worldwide. Ghana was the first country in Africa to eliminate the disease in 2018.

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