Nairobi — Nairobi is hosting a regional high-level training workshop on the Animal Resources Information System (ARIS), bringing together experts from Eastern, Southern and selected West African countries to strengthen animal health information management across the continent. Te training, taking place from May 11 to 14, is being implemented under the European Union-funded Pan-African Programme…
World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus arrived in Tenerife Saturday to personally oversee the painstaking process of evacuating more than 100 people from a cruise ship dealing with an outbreak of the rare and deadly hantavirus. Addressing the people of the Canary Islands, where the ship will anchor off the coast of its…
It’s been confirmed that another passenger from the cruise liner linked to the outbreak of hantavirus has contracted the disease, which has claimed the lives of three people on board and sparked an international alert coordinated by the UN World Health Organization (WHO). The individual, who is male, had been travelling on the Dutch-flagged vessel,…
When the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, another crisis quietly grew behind closed doors. Reports from around the globe suggested that violence against women and girls was increasing. Governments, nongovernmental organizations and advocates began referring to the phenomenon as a “shadow pandemic.” To determine whether these headlines and informal…
Cruises are sold as floating holidays, but they are also useful for understanding public health. Cruise ships are carefully designed places where many people live, eat, relax and move through the same shared spaces for days at a time. They show how easily illness can spread when people are packed into a single interconnected environment….
Three people have died after a suspected outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. At least one other passenger is in intensive care in South Africa. The World Health Organization announced the deaths in a social media statement on Monday, along with one confirmed case of the rare…
Nairobi — More than 20 civil society and community organisations across Africa have urged governments to prioritise epidemic preparedness and disease surveillance, warning that weak systems could undermine responses to future outbreaks. The call was made during the launch of the *Nairobi Declaration on African Health Security and Collaborative Disease Surveillance*, bringing together groups from…
Modern medicine prides itself on being a universal science, built on evidence from clinical trials. But there’s a bias in medical research. While Africa accounts for roughly 25% of the global disease burden and 19% of the global population, the continent’s people are largely invisible in some clinical trials. The scale of the erasure is…
Each animal species has an optimal temperature at which it can metabolise food and its immune system can best fight off pathogens. As our recent research shows, temperature directly affects the immune systems of vertebrates – regardless of how they moderate their own body temperatures. At first, slightly hotter temperatures actually give many animal immune…
The World Health Organization (WHO) wrapped up Exercise Polaris II, a 2-day high-level simulation exercise, based around an outbreak of a fictional new bacterium spreading across the world. Bringing together 26 countries and territories, 600 health emergency experts and over 25 partners, the exercise, which took place on 22 and 23 April, allowed countries to…
