You are here

Global Health

Primary tabs

The mission of the Global Health Working Group is to explore and improve current and emerging states of health and human security worldwide.

General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 
Group description: 
This Working Group is focused on exploring current and emerging states of health and human security worldwide.
Group roles and permissions: 
Use default roles and permissions
Group visibility: 
Public - accessible to all site users

Members

Aboubacar Conte admin Albert Gomez Allan Anthony Carrielaj
Chisina Kapungu ChrisAllen Corey Watts CPetry DeannaPolk Elhadj Drame
Gavin Macgregor... Hadiatou Balde hank_test jranck JSole Kathy Gilbeaux
Lisa Stelly Thomas loguest Maeryn Obley mdmcdonald MDMcDonald_me_com Mika Shimizu
mike kraft njchapman Norea Tiaji Salaam-Blyther tnovotny

Email address for group

A Shockingly Small Number of Earth's Population Still Have Access to Unpolluted Air

           

(Daniel Stein/iStock)

You're probably not amongst the lucky few.

CLICK HERE - REPORT - State of Global Air 2018

sciencealert.com - by David Nield - April 19, 2018

How's the air in your neighbourhood today? A new State of Global Air report suggests more than 95 percent of the planet's population currently have to breathe polluted air – air containing fine particle levels that exceed the global air quality guidelines.

What's more, the burden of bad air quality is affecting the poorest communities the most. According to the US Health Effects Institute (HEI), which carried out the study, the gap between the most polluted and least polluted countries is steadily growing bigger.

This is having a real effect on health, too – an estimated 6.1 million deaths across the world in 2016 could be attributed to air pollution, the HEI reports. Strokes, heart attacks, lung cancer, and chronic lung disease were some of the health issues to blame.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

 

 

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Zika - Information, FAQs and Research

General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

An expanding list of information resources on Zika virus . . .

CDC - Zika Virus - Case Counts in the US
https://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/united-states.html

CDC - Zika Virus - Timeline of "What's New"
http://www.cdc.gov/zika/whats-new.html

CDC Newsroom Releases
http://www.cdc.gov/media/archives.htm

Nigeria Hit by Unprecedented Lassa Fever Outbreak

           

This year, the rats that carry Lassa fever may be more numerous, or more likely to harbor the virus.  Photo: Reuters/Stringer

CLICK HERE - reliefweb - Nigeria: Lassa Fever Outbreak

CLICK HERE - WHO - Nigeria - Lassa Fever

science.sciencemag.org - by Leslie Roberts - March 16, 2018

By early January, it was clear something “really, really extraordinary” was going on in Nigeria, says Lorenzo Pomarico of the Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA). Cases of Lassa fever, a rare viral hemorrhagic disease, were skyrocketing across the country—more were recorded in the first 2 months of 2018 than in any previous year. Unprepared for a disease that has no vaccines or drugs and kills 20% to 30% of those it sickens, eight health care workers were infected early on and three died. “Something was going very wrong with the outbreak,” Pomarico says.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Beware 'Disease X': The Mystery Killer Keeping Scientists Awake at Night

CLICK HERE - WHO - R&D Blueprint - List of Blueprint priority diseases

telegraph.co.uk - by Alanna Shaikh - March 10, 2018

Over two days in early February, the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened an expert committee at its Geneva headquarters to consider the unthinkable.

The goal was to identify pathogens with the potential to spread and kill millions but for which there are currently no, or insufficient, countermeasures available . . . 

 . . . In addition to eight frightening but familiar diseases including Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the list included a ninth global threat: Disease X.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Mysterious 'Disease X' Could Be The Next Deadly Global Epidemic, WHO Warns

 

Country / Region Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Stopping Pandemic X: DARPA Names Researchers Working to Halt Outbreaks

           

globalbiodefense.com - February 22, 2018

CLICK HERE - DARPA - Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in 2017, with the eventual goal of halting the spread of any infectious disease outbreak before it can escalate into a pandemic . . . 

 . . . In contrast with state-of-the-art medical countermeasures, which typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer, the envisioned P3 platform would cut response time to weeks and stay within the window of relevance for containing an outbreak.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

 

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Chinese Scientists Find How Bats Carry Viruses Without Getting Sick

xinhuanet.com - Editor: Liu - February 23, 2018

CLICK HERE - Dampened STING-Dependent Interferon Activation in Bats

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have identified the secret of bats that harbor highly pathogenic viruses like Ebola, Marburg and SARS coronavirus but do not show clinical signs of disease.

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China find that in bats, an antiviral immune pathway called the STING-interferon pathway is dampened, so bats can maintain just enough defense against illness without triggering a heightened immune reaction.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

 

Country / Region Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

BRIEF: The Virome Project Aims to Prepare Before the Next Pandemic

           

Ebola virus budding from surface of cells, from a scanning electron micrograph.  Image credits: NIAID

CLICK HERE - The Global Virome Project

insidescience.org - by Benjamin Plackett - February 22, 2018

 . . . In an article published in Science magazine today, Daszak and a group of like-minded scientists described a new initiative, called the Virome project, that would identify and catalogue hundreds of thousands of yet-to-be-discovered viruses found in wild animals.

The team estimates that there are about 1.6 million undiscovered virus types and that somewhere between 631,000-827,000 could potentially spill over into humans. The viruses are found mostly in wild mammals.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

 

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Ebola Had Significant Collateral Damage to Liberians' Health

           

A mural announces anti-Ebola sentiment outside a business in Harper, Liberia.  Brad Wagenaar

CLICK HERE - STUDY - The 2014–2015 Ebola virus disease outbreak and primary healthcare delivery in Liberia: Time-series analyses for 2010–2016

After the 2014 outbreak, the population's needs were often unmet in terms of primary care, mother-child health, and immmunizations.

newsroom.uw.edu - by Ashlie Chandler - February 20, 2018

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa rapidly became the deadliest occurrence of the disease — claiming 4,809 lives in Liberia alone.  Now new research from the University of Washington suggests Ebola's collateral effects on that nation's health system likely caused more deaths than Ebola did directly.

The study, published today in PLOS Medicine, found that it only took four months for Liberia to lose between 35 percent and 67 percent of primary health care services after the  Ebola outbreak began.

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Other Viruses Cause Zika-Like Damage to Fetuses, Study Finds

           

Zika's blood-sucking predator

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Zika virus–related neurotropic flaviviruses infect human placental explants and cause fetal demise in mice

cnn.com - by Susan Scutti - February 18, 2018

In 2016, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the Zika virus caused birth defects in babies born to women who had been infected while pregnant. This was the first mosquito-borne disease known to cause birth defects . . . 

 . . . Now, a study suggests that two viruses that are related to Zika can cause similar birth defects.

West Nile and Powassan viruses caused fetal death in infected pregnant mice, the researchers say.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - NEJM - Zika Virus and Birth Defects — Reviewing the Evidence for Causality

 

 

Country / Region Tags: 
General Topic Tags: 
Problem, Solution, SitRep, or ?: 

Pages

howdy folks
Page loaded in 1.082 seconds.