The World Health Organisation’s 193 member states on Saturday overcame their deep divisions over intellectual property rules and endorsed a strategy to help improve developing-country access to drugs and medical tests.
Forty-five children living in the Australian mining town of Mount Isa, where Xstrata produces 4% of the world’s lead, have unsafe blood lead levels above World Health Organisation standards. Xstrata and local and state governments are facing legal action from the parents of a six-year-old Mount Isa girl who has suffered injuries to her brain and nervous system.
China stepped up the fight on Thursday to stave off disease among over five million earthquake homeless as it tried to boost morale with plans to bring the Olympic flame through the disaster zone. Ten days after the quake, China was faced with the challenge of how to reconstruct shattered communities after more than 74 000 people were confirmed dead or missing.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Tuesday appealed to governments to do more to save Africa from disease. ”We cannot lose Africa,” Tutu told the 193-nation World Health Assembly. ”The cradle of humankind” is threatened by ”disease, conflict and destruction”.
Insufficient food, climate change and pandemic flu are global crises that could unravel progress in public health, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) director general said on Monday. "These three critical events, these clear threats to international security, have the potential to undo much hard-won progress in public health," WHO director general Margaret Chan said.
Torrential tropical downpours lashed Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on Friday, deepening the misery of an estimated 2,5-million destitute survivors of Cyclone Nargis and further hampering aid efforts. Burma state television raised its official death toll on Thursday to 43 328. Independent experts say the figures are probably far higher.
eThekwini municipal manager Michael Sutcliffe has likened the international Blue Flag scheme to an ”apartheid” system that creates separate beaches, the Mercury newspaper reported on Friday. Blue Flags are part of an international beach-quality accreditation scheme.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on May 23 to examine how the world’s food crisis is undermining the right to food for millions of people, officials said on Friday. The rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger are enshrined in international law as basic, universal human rights.
Many Africans are getting substandard malaria drugs, with more than a third of the pills tested failing quality tests. Tests of 195 different packs of malaria drugs sold in six African cities showed 35% of them either did not contain high enough levels of active ingredient or did not dissolve properly.
Fear of a virus that has infected thousands of children gripped parents in China’s capital and financial hub on Tuesday, as the number of cases of hand, foot and mouth disease mounted across the country. More than 11 900 cases of the virus have been reported in China this year, the official Xinhua news agency said.
This week Switzerland will become ground zero for the future of health policy in Africa. The World Health Organisation’s intergovernmental working group is meeting in Geneva to discuss public health, medical innovation and intellectual property. Many participants are expected to express their support for efforts to undermine patent protections for drugs.
A virus that has killed 25 children and infected thousands across China will not threaten Beijing’s Olympic Games in August, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in comments published on Monday. Health authorities in China have been battling to contain outbreaks of EV71, a sometimes fatal intestinal virus.
A rapidly spreading virus that has already killed 22 children in eastern China has killed an 18-month-old boy in southern China’s Guangdong province, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday. The boy died in Guangdong’s Foshan city from a suspected case of hand, foot and mouth disease, which was probably caused by the enterovirus 71, or EV71.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched a new campaign on World Malaria Day on Friday, calling on the world to ensure that all of Africa has access to basic malaria control measures by the end of 2010. Ban said the African countries hardest hit by malaria have fallen behind in the fight against the disease.
As many as 300Â 000 people may have died in the five-year conflict in Darfur, a dramatic increase over earlier estimates of 200Â 000, a top United Nations official said on Tuesday. Sudan’s UN ambassador, Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem, said the figure was grossly exaggerated.
South Africa has made no progress in reducing its under-five child mortality rate, a report published on Wednesday showed. Countdown to 2015 MNCH: The 2008 Report was published by the partnership for maternal, new-born and child health (MNCH), an umbrella organisation comprising about 240 members.
Iraq on Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s iron-fisted regime with the nation still in turmoil, the capital under curfew and a surge of deadly violence in the Shi’ite bastion of Sadr City. Iraqi officials said three mortar rounds slammed into Sadr City, killing at least seven people and wounding 24 others.
Drivers hooted their way through Mumbai’s first no-honking day on Monday, ignoring efforts to cut the ear-splitting cacophony of life in India’s most bustling city. Residents said they were unable to heed the police appeal to reduce the din because they could not make their way through the usual snarled traffic.
Weather-pattern changes are expected to have a negative effect on health and quality of life, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said on Monday. ”We need to take actions aimed at strengthening our infectious-diseases control, ensure safe use of water supplies and coordinate health actions in order to respond,” she said.
Climate change is one of the factors causing an increase in the incidence of diseases like malaria and dengue fever, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday. At least 150Â 000 more people are dying each year of malaria, diarrhoea, malnutrition and floods, all of which can be traced to climate change.
Israel has turned away more sick Palestinians from Gaza seeking treatment since Hamas seized control of the enclave and several have died each month unnecessarily. The World Health Organisation said Israel denied entry permits to 18,5% of patients seeking to leave the Gaza Strip in 2007 versus 10% in 2006.
The United Nations is to hold its first debate on road safety amid warnings that the problem is a ”public health crisis” on the scale of Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. Next week’s meeting will follow research by the World Health Organisation forecasting that between 2000 and 2015, road accidents will cause 20-million deaths.
Smokers are more likely to kick the habit if they are told how ”old” their lungs are, a British study found on Friday. The concept of lung age — measured by comparing a smoker’s lungs to the age of a healthy person whose lungs function the same — has helped patients better understand how smoking damages health.
Malawi lawmakers on Tuesday began examining draft legislation aimed at ridding the HIV/Aids-plagued country of quacks claiming to cure the pandemic through such remedies as sex with virgins, health authorities said. "When it passes into law, all traditional healers claiming to cure Aids will be dealt with," Mary Shaba, head of HIV/Aids issues for Malawi’s Health Ministry, said.
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/ 25 February 2008
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Sunday welcomed a new World Health Organisation (WHO) tobacco report that indicates that consumption of cigarettes has declined in South Africa. The WHO report states that higher taxes are especially important for deterring tobacco use among the young and the poor.
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/ 22 February 2008
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Friday said her efforts to promote a healthy lifestyle — including responsible drinking habits — among South Africans were not hypocritical. Speaking to the media at the launch of ”the Healthy Lifestyle Day” in Port Shepstone, she questioned why the media linked her recent liver transplant to her promotion of a healthy lifestyle.
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/ 14 February 2008
Malaria continues to cut a swathe through Africa, which accounts for most cases of the disease and of malaria-related deaths. A study by Burkina Faso’s Health Sciences Research Institute may point the way to reducing malaria’s toll on children, however.
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/ 13 February 2008
The KwaZulu-Natal doctor who faces a disciplinary hearing for giving dual-therapy drugs to babies at risk of HIV infection should be hailed as a hero, a doctors’ organisation said on Wednesday. ”To discipline him for doing his ethical duty is disgraceful,” the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society said in a statement.
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/ 8 February 2008
Tobacco use could kill a billion people this century unless governments act now to reduce smoking, the United Nations said on Thursday. In a strongly-worded report the World Health Organisation, the UN’s public health arm, said no country was doing all it could to curb tobacco use.
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/ 2 February 2008
The death toll from ethnic fighting and a police crackdown in western Kenya rose to 44 on Saturday, a day after the feuding political sides agreed to a framework to try to end weeks of violence. Thirty-four people have died in fresh clashes, police said on Saturday, including in western Nyanza province.
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/ 23 January 2008
Activists and doctors on Wednesday accused the government of backsliding on promises to provide more effective treatment to prevent mothers passing on Aids to unborn children. The Treatment Action Campaign said that more than 60Â 000 babies are infected with HIV yearly in South Africa, most of them in the womb.
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/ 10 January 2008
An estimated 151 000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the violence that has engulfed the country from the time of the United States-led invasion until June 2006, according to the latest and largest study of deaths officially accepted by the Iraqi government.