Page 37 - Emergencies Program News Today

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was one of many global health leaders who spoke bluntly about the pandemic at annual meetings that conclude on Tuesday. Discussing the lack of priority given to vaccines for poor countries, he stated, "The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure." How to make sure the world is never so devastated by another pandemic? Health officials from around the globe have been vigorously discussing that question over the pa...

© Getty Images World Health Organization (WHO) officials suggested Monday that Olympic athletes should not be prioritized for coronavirus vaccinations. Asked at a Geneva news conference whether Olympians should be fast-tracked, Michael Ryan, who serves as executive director for the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, said doses should go to vulnerable and high-risk populations first. "We face a crisis now on a global scale, that requires front-line health workers, those older people and those ...

NEW YORK, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- Global COVID-19 cases hurtled to 100 million on Tuesday, breaking yet another grim record, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Throughout a roller-coaster year featuring a pandemic, when waves of the virus and its faster-spreading variants are ravaging the world, however, human efforts to defeat the disease at times and in some places lagged or went wrong, like belated test results, public defiance of neces...

Evidence UK strain could be more deadly AFP, LONDON The COVID-19 strain that has swept the UK and beyond in the past few months could be more deadly, as well as more transmissible, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday. The sobering news came as the UK is reporting record deaths from COVID-19, following a surge in cases and hospitalizations since the variant was identified in southeast England in September. The strain has also spread to more than 60 nations — including China, wh...

Image: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images As bad as Covid-19 seems, the world has grown increasingly vulnerable to an even deadlier global outbreak that experts expect is inevitable. It’s unclear when and where a more aggressive pathogen will emerge, but scientists say it will almost surely threaten an even worse pandemic than Covid-19. “This pandemic has been very severe, has spread around the world extremely quickly, it has affected every corner of this planet. But this is not necessarily th...

Following two weeks of lower reporting towards the end of 2020, an overall upward trend of the Covid-19 pandemic has been witnessed in the first several weeks of 2021, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said.On Monday, Mike Ryan, ...

GENEVA, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Following two weeks of lower reporting at the end of 2020, likely due to the holiday period, an overall upward trend of the COVID-19 outbreak has been seen in the first several weeks of 2021, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Monday.

The global death toll from COVID-19 passed 2 million on Friday, with the WHO urging mass vaccinations as the pandemic progresses at a record rate. By Friday evening, at least 2,000,066 people worldwide had been confirmed dead of the virus that first emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally. The grim milestone came as US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said shipments of its vaccines would slow for a period late this month — a blow to fledgling campai...

What are zoonoses? One of those researchers, wildlife veterinarian and microbiologist Fabian Leendertz, who helped trace the initial Ebola infection back to bats that lived in a hollow tree where children played, joins the WHO team on its mission in China. Leendertzs research helped experts understand how the disease had spread and the risk posed by close contact with these animals.  While identifying that first case was important in curbing Ebola, the detective work was made much easier bec...

SARS-CoV-2 probably originated in bats, but how it passed to people has been the subject of intense speculation and is now being investigated by the World Health Organization.