For decades, malaria has been one of Africa’s most persistent health challenges. In Ghana, it was once the leading cause of death for children under five. Bed nets and antimalarial drugs reduced deaths substantially, but by the mid-2010s, the pace of improvement had declined.  Climate change was altering the length and intensity of transmission seasons. […] Continue reading ->
Dutch, Spanish and Swiss medical experts applied slightly different criteria for discharging patients infected with Andes hantavirus during the recent outbreak on a cruise ship –  but none required a negative blood test, as this could remain positive “for months”. This emerged during a briefing convened by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Information Network for […] Continue reading ->
Despite claims by the United States that it has allocated over $270 million to the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak response, countries and groups dealing with the outbreak are in the dark about where the money is going. Washington’s directive to US health experts not to deal with World Health Organization (WHO) officials is also hampering their […] Continue reading ->
Ghana’s parliament invited a vociferously anti-vaccine Kenyan and a conservative Dutch activist campaigning to curtail the World Health Organization (WHO) to address visiting MPs on “health sovereignty” last week. Ghanaian President John Mahama – who is championing African “health sovereignty” via an initiative called the Accra Reset – was a keynote speaker at the WHO’s […] Continue reading ->
This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian. The response to the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) must be rooted in the country’s local health structures and avoid “asymmetrical” suffering by treating those in state-controlled and rebel-run areas the same, says a leading Congolese virologist. The current epidemic […] Continue reading ->