public health

Efforts to stem the impact of COVID-19 in low to middle-income countries could be creating a health time bomb in their slum communities by deepening existing inequalities, according to an international team of health researchers led by the University of Warwick.

By Olufunmilayo Akande Today, 16,000 children worldwide die each day before celebrating their fifth birthday as a result of preventable causes linked to malnutrition.

In recent years, the field of mobile health, or mHealth, has exploded. The power of cell phones and other mobile devices is being harnessed to improve health delivery systems worldwide. For instance, in Malawi, community health workers (CHWs) have been using text messages to improve drug adherence among HIV positive patients. And in India, a potentially disastrous cholera outbreak was avoided during a religious festival in 2001with the help of mobile tools.

The Rwanda National Police has intervened with drones to raise COVID-19 awareness in densely-populated and hard-to-reach areas of the country.

When I make it back into the swirling cacophony of the street, I can’t help but think that this initiative is truly saving lives.

In many African countries, infection prevention and control measures aimed at preventing infections in health facilities are still not fully implemented.

The latest estimates are that a staggering 3 billion people or more cannot afford a healthy diet. In sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, this is the case for 57 percent of the population – though no region, including North America and Europe, is spared.

Survivors of COVID-19 from 37 countries are among almost 1,000 people who have signed an open letter to pharmaceutical industry leaders calling for a ‘people's vaccine’ and treatments that are available to all.

Timely interventions and health actions are not the only aspects that enabled the Kerala model of COVID-19 response to be unique. It focused a lot on preparing Kerala as a society to face this adverse condition by building people’s trust in its health system.

It is also important that Nepal's central as well as provincial governments extend support, both financial and moral, to pandemic-affected Nepali citizens, especially to the foreign returnees, to capitalize on their skills and expertise which they have gained from overseas employment.