The post The world is failing people with dementia, and that hurts all of us : WHO director-general appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The progressive condition can be caused by stroke, brain injury or Alzheimer’s disease. With populations ageing, the number of sufferers is projected to rise to 78 million by 2030 and 139 million by 2050, the WHO said in a report.
Only one in four countries has a national policy in place to support dementia patients and their families, it said, urging governments to step up to the public health challenge.
“Dementia robs millions of people of their memories, independence and dignity, but it also robs the rest of us of the people we know and love,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general.
“The world is failing people with dementia, and that hurts all of us,” he said.
Health ministers agreed in 2015 on a global action plan, including early diagnosis and providing care, but are falling short on meeting targets by 2025, it said.
“Dementia truly is a global public health concern and not just in high-income countries. In fact, over 60% of people with dementia live in low- and middle-income countries,” Katrin Seeher, an expert in WHO’s department of mental health, told a news briefing.
Medication, hygiene products and household adjustments for dementia patients are more accessible in wealthy countries, which have a greater level of reimbursement than in lower-income countries, the report said.
Dementia affects memory, orientation, learning capacity, language, judgement, and the ability to perform everyday tasks.
Seeher noted that dementia can also affect people aged below 65, with so-called young-onset dementia accounting for around 10% of all dementia cases.
But developing dementia is not inevitable and some risk factors can be reduced, by controlling hypertension, diabetes, diet, depression, and the use of alcohol and tobacco, the WHO said.
These are the things that we can do to promote our brain health and decrease the cognitive decline and the risk for dementia. These are things that can be started at a younger age,” said WHO expert Tarun Dua.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post The medical supplies in Afghanistan will run out in a few days : WHO appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Rick Brennan, regional emergency director of the WHO’s eastern mediterranean office, said that humanitarian needs across Afghanistan are “enormous and growing.” He also said that trauma kits, emergency supplies for hospitals and medicines for treating chronic malnutrition in children were among the priority items in the medical supply.
Following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, several countries have been evacuating their citizens and diplomatic officers, along with Afghan nationals who want to flee the country, via the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The US has said that it would pull all its troops out of the country by August 31, before which the evacuations have been continuing frantically. Meanwhile, two explosions rocked the Kabul airport earlier on Thursday in which several civilians along with US armed personnel were killed.
Due to the security concerns in the Kabul international airport, Brennan said that it would not be suitable for the supply of aid in Afghanistan. “Right now because of security concerns and several other operational considerations, Kabul airport is not going to be an option for the next week at least,” news agency Reuters quoted him as saying during a press briefing.
Further, he also said that the WHO is working with the Pakistani authorities to establish an air bridge into Afghanistan. “One of the problems we have in Afghanistan right now is there is no civil aviation authority functioning but we are working with Pakistan particularly in the context of Mazar-i-Sharif airport. Because they can work with contacts on the ground that all the necessary steps to land an aircraft, to land a cargo aircraft, can be put in place,” he added.
Mentioning that insurance prices for flying into Afghanistan have “skyrocketed to prices never seen before,” Brennan said, “So we are trying to jump through that hoop at the moment and once we have addressed that we will hopefully be airborne in the next 48 to 72 hours.”
(With Reuters inputs)
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]]>The post ‘India May Be Entering Endemic Stage Of Covid’: WHO Chief Scientist appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus. It’s very different from the epidemic stage when the virus overwhelms a population.
On clearance to Covaxin, she said she is fairly confident that the WHO’s technical group will be satisfied to give Covaxin clearance to be one of its authorised vaccines and that could happen by mid-SeptemberWe may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low level transmission or moderate level transmission going on but we are not seeing the kinds of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago,” Ms Swaminathan said.
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]]>The post Half a Billion Covid Vaccine Doses Registered in WHO S-E Region appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>As a sign of their dedication to containing the epidemic as soon as possible, countries in the area are making extraordinary trying to attain as many people as possible with the life-saving Covid-19 vaccine.
Dr. Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO Regional Director for South-East Asia, said, “We must maintain these efforts and execute public health and social measures with rigor.”
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]]>The post Delta is a warning says WHO after it’s outbreak in China and Australia appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>China’s most serious surge of coronavirus infections in months spread to two more areas Saturday — Fujian province and the sprawling megacity of Chongqing.
More than 200 cases have been linked to a Delta cluster in Nanjing city where nine cleaners at an international airport tested positive, with the outbreak spanning Beijing, Chongqing and five provinces as of Saturday.
The nation where the disease first emerged has rushed to prevent the highly transmissible strain from taking root by putting more than one million people under lockdown and reinstituting mass testing campaigns.
Worldwide, coronavirus infections are once again on the upswing, with the World Health Organization announcing an 80 percent average increase over the past four weeks in five of the health agency’s six regions, a jump largely fuelled by the Delta variant.
First detected in India, it has now reached 132 countries and territories.
“Delta is a warning: it’s a warning that the virus is evolving but it is also a call to action that we need to move now before more dangerous variants emerge,” the WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan told a press conference.
He stressed that the “game plan” still works, namely physical distancing, wearing masks, hand hygiene and vaccination.
But both high- and low-income countries are struggling to gain the upper hand against Delta, with the vastly unequal sprint for shots leaving plenty of room for variants to wreak havoc and further evolve.
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]]>The post Delta variant spreading faster than other variants of concern, shows WHO reports appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>The latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO) showed a “substantial” uptick in the Americas and the Western Pacific, which jumped 30 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively.
An average of around 5,40,000 cases was reported globally each day over the past week as compared to 4,90,000 cases reported daily the week before.
The number of deaths reported this week increased sharply with over 69,000 deaths, a 21 per cent increase when compared to the previous week. The cumulative number of cases and deaths reported globally is almost 194 million and over 4 million respectively.
WHO said that over the seven days, the highest number of new cases was reported in the United States, which saw more than half a million new infections, representing a skyrocketing 131 per cent increase.
Of the four Covid-19 mutations that WHO has designated “variants of concern”, the UN agency said that the Alpha variant is present in 182 countries, Beta is in 131, Gamma in 81 and after reaching eight new countries in the past week, the Delta variant is now in 132 countries
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]]>The post Mental Health Might Be Affected Post Covid, WHO Stated appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Hans Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe, stated that mental health ought to be considered a “basic human right,” emphasizing how the virus had torn families apart.
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]]>The post Delta variant to become dominant strain : WHO appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Delta, which was first detected in India, has now been recorded in 124 territories — 13 more than last week — and already accounts for more than three-quarters of sequenced specimens in many major countries, the WHO said.
“It is expected that it will rapidly out-compete other variants and become the dominant circulating lineage over the coming months,” the UN health agency said in its weekly epidemiological update.
Of the three other coronavirus variants of concern (VOCs), Alpha, first detected in Britain, has been reported in 180 territories (up six from last week), Beta, first detected in South Africa, in 130 (up seven) and Gamma, first detected in Brazil, in 78 (up three).
According to SARS-CoV-2 sequences submitted to the GISAID global science initiative over the four weeks to July 20, the prevalence of Delta exceeded 75 percent in several countries.
Those included Australia, Bangladesh, Botswana, Britain, China, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Israel, Portugal, Russia, Singapore and South Africa.
“Growing evidence supports the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant as compared to non-VOCs. However, the exact mechanism for the increase in transmissibility remains unclear,” said the WHO.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by The Edge Media staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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]]>The post Health Ministry Warns About The Next 100 Days appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>Spain has experienced a 64% increase in week’s Covid-19 instances, while the Netherlands is seeing a 300% increase in Covid-19 cases. Thailand’s condition has been steady for a long period, but it is suddenly experiencing a rise. According to the government, Africa has seen a 50 percent surge in Covid-19 cases. Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh are also facing an unprecedented increase.
“Waves are a thread appraisal of how we are controlling the issue; the strength of the waves is more significant than the number of waves”, says Ministry.
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]]>The post Covid-19 pandemic is now in the “early stages” of the third wave : WHO appeared first on The Edge Media.
]]>According to a PTI report, Tanvee Gupta-Jain, chief economist of UBS Securities India, said the third wave risks are real even more now as economic activity has improved sequentially for the seventh successive week to July 12, with several states gradually easing curbs on movement. The UBS report further said the pace of vaccination has also slowed down to under 3.4 million doses per day as against four million jabs earlier along with 45 per cent of the daily Covid-19 case count being reported from the rural regions of India.
In a note on Wednesday, Jain said that although the number of daily Covid-19 cases seems to have plateaued, the same still remains much above the 2021 trough and the drop in active caseload has also started to narrow down.
The report added that in more than 20 per cent of the top districts accounting for most of the daily cases and where the second wave of Covid-19 has not yet dialled down, the third wave has already set firmly in. The figure was only 5 per cent even a month before, it said.
Meanwhile, World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said the Covid-19 pandemic is now in the “early stages” of the third wave. “The Delta variant is now in more than 111 countries and we expect it to soon be the dominant Covid-19 strain circulating worldwide, if it isn’t already,” an UN report quoted Ghebreyesus as saying.
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