Former prime minister also admits he should have worked more closely with devolved administrations
Hugo Keith KC is questioning Johnson.
He asks if Johnson’s approach has been to give all relevant material to the inquiry.
I understand the feelings of these victims and their families and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and suffering of those victims and their families.
Continue reading...Continent must have more resilient health systems and local vaccine manufacturing to prevent next pandemic, says public health body
Africa’s leading public health body is using the first ever health day at Cop on 3 December to call for increased funding to fight the health impacts of the climate crisis on the continent and create more resilient systems to ensure it is prepared for the next pandemic.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) launched the second phase of its three-year, $1.5bn Saving Lives and Livelihoods drive this week, but its director general, Dr Jean Kaseya, said multiple disease outbreaks combined with the growing burden of non-communicable diseases and recovery from Covid means that much more financial support is needed.
Continue reading...Discredited ex-PM faces a demolition job in one of the few policy areas to which he and his allies still cling
Even at the height of his popularity, Boris Johnson routinely avoided close questioning – to the extent of once hiding in a fridge to dodge a TV inquisitor. The former UK prime minister is likely to be dreading next week’s appearance at the Covid inquiry. And he probably should.
It is no exaggeration to say that events on Wednesday and Thursday at the inquiry’s repurposed office building in Paddington, west London, could help define the post-power image and legacy of Johnson, and very possibly not for the good.
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Hancock is now deploying the defence previewed in the Observer on Sunday. (See 9.58am.)
He says from the middle of January the DHSC was “trying to effectively raise the alarm”. He says:
We were trying to wake up Whitehall to the scale of the problem and this wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be addressed only from the health department. Non-pharmaceutical interventions cannot be put in place by a health department. A health department can’t shut schools. It should have been grasped and led from the centre of government earlier. And you’ve seen evidence that repeatedly the department and I tried to make this happen.
And we were on occasions blocked, and at other times our concerns were not taken as seriously as they should have been until the very end of February.
Continue reading...Data has been supplied to World Health Organization and China says flu and other known pathogens are culprits
A surge in respiratory illnesses across China that has drawn the attention of the World Health Organization is caused by the flu and other known pathogens and not by a novel virus, the country’s health ministry said on Sunday.
Recent clusters of respiratory infections are caused by an overlap of common viruses such as the influenza virus, rhinoviruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and adenovirus, as well as bacteria such as mycoplasma pneumoniae, which is a common culprit for respiratory tract infections, a National Health Commission spokesperson said.
Continue reading...Epidemiologists say wave in north, particularly among children, may be partly caused by ‘immunity debt’
Chinese health authorities have provided the requested data on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children, and have not detected any unusual or novel pathogens, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.
The WHO had asked China for more information on Wednesday after groups including the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children in north China.
Continue reading...England’s chief medical officer says incomplete knowledge of epidemiological concepts can be ‘dangerous thing’
Sir Chris Whitty spent early parts of the Covid pandemic trying to “implore” people in government not to publicly discuss health concepts they did not fully understand such as “flattening the curve” of infections and herd immunity, he said.
Giving evidence to the inquiry into Covid, Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said he did this after realising that incomplete knowledge could be “a dangerous thing”.
Continue reading...Chief scientific adviser in pandemic says lockdown should have come sooner and that Johnson is not great at science
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser throughout Covid, has been giving evidence to the inquiry into the pandemic on Monday. Here is what we have learned so far.
Continue reading...PM would almost certainly have known concerns over ‘eat out to help out’ scheme, says former chief scientific adviser
Rishi Sunak would almost certainly have known scientists were worried about his “eat out to help out” scheme during the pandemic, Sir Patrick Vallance has said, directly contradicting the prime minister’s evidence to the Covid inquiry.
In potentially damaging testimony, Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, said he would be “very surprised” if Sunak had not learned about objections to his plan to help the hospitality industry.
Continue reading...Study urges Australia to research new drugs as it warns rate of mutated infections ‘much worse than anticipated’
“Alarming” rates of babies with infections resistant to common antibiotics in the Asia-Pacific region should prompt urgent investment into new drugs for treating childhood diseases, findings from a new study suggest.
The misuse and overuse of antibiotics is driving bugs to mutate so that common drugs are no longer effective to kill them, known as antimicrobial resistance. Dr Phoebe Williams, an infectious diseases paediatrician and antimicrobial resistance researcher with the University of Sydney, said she regularly travelled to work in hospitals in the south-east Asia and Pacific region where she found “entire wards of babies that have multi-drug resistant infections, and there is nothing left to treat them with”.
Continue reading...Cases are rising in many parts of the country and critics are blaming chronic water shortages and poor sanitation systems
The Zimbabwean government has banned large gatherings in parts of the country and increased surveillance at ports of entry in an effort to contain a rise in cholera cases.
With 100 suspected deaths, most of them in September, and nearly 5,000 possible cases of the water-borne disease in more than 41 districts, including Harare, authorities fear a repeat of the 2008 epidemic where 4,000 people died.
Continue reading...Woman treated with antibiotics and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to survive infection by pathogen that causes blackleg disease in cattle and sheep
An Australian woman has became the first documented person in the world to survive a pathogen that is usually the cause of the deadly “blackleg” disease in cattle and sheep.
The woman’s doctors this week published the case in the Medical Journal of Australia, detailing the successful treatment of the pathogen, after the only other two known cases in humans – one in the US and the other in Japan – had proved fatal.
Continue reading...World faces ‘malaria emergency’ from resistance to insecticides, waning efficacy of drugs, funding shortfalls and climate change
African leaders have warned that the world is facing the “biggest malaria emergency” of the past two decades.
Heads of state and experts came together in a show of unity to call for urgent action on malaria at the UN general assembly on Friday, saying progress on eradicating the disease faced serious setbacks from mosquitoes’ growing resistance to insecticides, and the decreased effectiveness of antimalarial drugs and diagnostic tests.
Continue reading...WHO says China facing ‘sustained community transmission’ of virus first detected as imported case last year
China is fuelling a global surge in mpox cases, accounting for the majority of new cases reported in September, according to the World Health Organization.
The number of weekly cases reported globally increased by 328% in the week to 10 September, data shows. Most of that rise came from China, where more than 500 new cases were reported in August. The WHO said China was experiencing “sustained community transmission” of the virus, which was first detected as an imported case in September last year.
Continue reading...Moderna and Pfizer shots approved with vaccinations potentially beginning as soon as this week
The US has approved a series of Covid-19 booster vaccines amid rising cases of coronavirus around the country, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Monday.
The FDA said it had approved Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which can be administered even to people who never previously received a Covid-19 vaccination.
Continue reading...Large-scale field trials that provided healthy food packages to sufferers and their families showed radical reductions in fatalities
Infectious, deadly and long associated with poverty, tuberculosis causes weight loss, while poor diets increase the likelihood of developing the disease. Now, a study in India has found that improved nutrition can cut the risk of death by 60% and reduce the chances of infection within families by about 40%.
India has the highest burden of TB and TB deaths globally and has launched an ambitious plan to reduce incidence and death rates by 80% and 90% respectively by 2025.
Continue reading...New law in Sindh introduces ‘extraordinary measures’ to ensure vaccination of children against range of infectious diseases
Parents in Pakistan who refuse to get their children vaccinated against infectious diseases could be jailed or fined under a new law introduced in Sindh province.
The introduction of the legislation is an attempt to eradicate polio, which is endemic in Pakistan, but will cover vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis), measles, mumps and rubella.
Continue reading...Move in England comes after detection of highly-mutated coronavirus variant that is spreading around the world
Health officials have brought forward plans for autumn flu and Covid vaccinations after detecting a highly-mutated Covid variant that is spreading around the world.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said vaccinations would be available from 11 September in England as a precautionary measure intended to protect the most vulnerable as the winter months approach. The vaccination programme had not been scheduled to launch until early October.
Continue reading...About 100 students have reported symptoms of infection, and officials are trying to pinpoint the source of the outbreak
Health officials are investigating an outbreak of E coli food poisoning among students at the University of Arkansas, with dozens reporting symptoms and five people needing treatment in the hospital.
Among those affected are two 19-year-old sorority members who developed serious complications that can lead to kidney failure after being infected with the E coli strain O157:H7. That is according to Bill Marler, a Seattle food safety lawyer who said he reviewed the patients’ medical records after being contacted by the families.
Continue reading...Active community testing required on an intermittent basis to see ‘the whole iceberg, not just the tip’, Prof Catherine Bennett says
Political momentum for the monitoring and surveillance of Covid-19 is “fading”, the Australian virologist who developed a world-first method for rapidly isolating and characterising variants said.
Prof Stuart Turville, with the University of New South Wales Kirby Institute, said while the impact of Covid-19 in Australia is waning, the Sars CoV-2 virus that causes disease is constantly changing and “there is still a lot we don’t know”.
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