app opinion
As an infectious disease epidemiologist who works with Ministries of Health in low-income countries and WHO regional offices, I am keenly aware that the leader of WHO will have a huge impact on my partners and my work.
This year alone 750 people have died and more than 8,000 cases have been reported in a Meningitis C outbreak in the north of Nigeria. This is the fourth meningitis C outbreak in the past , countering claims that the strain because it occurs too infrequently.
People living in 35 industrialised countries can look forward to longer lives, a recent suggests. The research showed that women in South Korea are expected to have a better than 50/50 chance of breaking the 90-year barrier by year 2030 - a remarkable feat that was not considered possible by many at the turn of the 21st century.
“It is quite possible that we will see a drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic of unprecedented global scale.” The view of Dr David W Dowdy from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a Lancet Respiratory Medicine comment (PDF) this week. Alarming words, and we need to listen.
In his latest annual letter, Bill Gates warned of the imminent threat of a deadly to the global community.
Today we have a similar emergency on our hands, but one that is largely silent and failing to secure the necessary global attention and funding. The prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is comparable to the greatest global health challenges we have had to confront in recent history.
The evidence that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking was described in the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recent as “scant and of low certainty”. Predictably, this triggered the latest of claims and counterclaims in an ongoing, and often acrimonious, dispute about the potential of e-cigarettes.
‘Dengue fever kills 20 in Burkina Faso’ reports the . ‘Dengue claims 26 lives in Maharashtra’ leads the .
I recently sat with a mother and her baby in an intensive care unit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The baby was tiny, with lots of dark hair and a beautiful name. He also had – and the doctor euphemistically said that his face was disproportionate to his head.
In rich countries, tuberculosis is sometimes thought of as a thing of the past, the disease that claimed Keats, Poe, Chopin. But globally, TB is today the number one infectious killer, causing an estimated in 2015.