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by Robin MILLARD Agence France-Presse GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) – The World Health Organization strengthened its air quality guidelines on Wednesday, saying air pollution was now one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, causing seven million premature deaths a year. Urgent action is needed to reduce exposure to air pollution, said the UN body, ranking its burden of disease on a par with smoking and unhealthy eating. “WHO has adjusted almost all the air […]
by Robin MILLARD GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organization strengthened its air quality guidelines on Wednesday, saying air pollution was now one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, causing seven million premature deaths a year. Urgent action is needed to reduce exposure to air pollution, said the UN body, ranking its burden of disease on a par with smoking and unhealthy eating. “WHO has adjusted almost all the air quality guideline […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — Delta has all but elbowed out the three other Covid-19 variants of concern, which now represent a tiny fraction of the samples being sequenced, the WHO said Tuesday. “Less than one percent each of Alpha, Beta and Gamma are currently circulating. It’s really predominantly Delta around the world,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on Covid-19. Delta “has become more fit, it is more transmissible and it […]
HAVANA, Cuba (AFP) — Cuba said Wednesday it would seek World Health Organization approval for two home-grown coronavirus vaccines it hopes to commercialize widely. A vetting process will start Thursday with WHO experts examining the nation’s Abdala and Soberana 02 jabs, said Rolando Perez of state pharma group BioCubaFarma. Perez said the experts would examine the vaccines’ “safety, immunogenicity (the ability of a vaccine to provoke an immune response) and efficacy.” The WHO’s representative in […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organization called Wednesday for countries to avoid giving out extra Covid jabs until year-end, pointing to the millions worldwide who have yet to receive a single dose. “I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists. Speaking from WHO’s headquarters in Geneva, Tedros urged […]
Booster shots to be allocated initially for A1 sector or the health frontliners, says Galvez (Eagle News) – The Philippines is preparing to buy additional vaccines as booster shots as the highly infectious Delta variant is declared as the dominant COVID-19 variant driving infections in the country. National Task Force Chief Implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito G. Galvez, Jr., said the NTF has started to negotiate with four different manufacturers that produce COVID-19 […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organization has said it is monitoring a new coronavirus variant known as “Mu”, which was first identified in Colombia in January. Mu, known scientifically as B.1.621, has been classified as a “variant of interest”, the global health body said Tuesday in its weekly pandemic bulletin. The WHO said the variant has mutations that indicate a risk of resistance to vaccines and stressed that further studies were needed to […]
by Camille BAS-WOHLERT COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP) — The World Health warned Monday that 236,000 more people could die from Covid in Europe by December, sounding the alarm over rising infections and stagnating vaccine rates across the continent. The warning came as the world passed the grim milestone of 4.5 million deaths from Covid since the start of the pandemic, according to an AFP tally Monday. Infections rates are ticking up globally again, as the highly […]
by Natalie HANDEL PARIS, France (AFP) — The search for the origins of the Covid pandemic that has killed millions and crippled economies is at a standstill even as time is running out, scientists charged with the task by the UN warned Wednesday. An initial report by the team of independent, international experts sent to China by the World Health Organization in January concluded that it was most likely that the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped from […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The World Health Organization condemned Wednesday the rush by wealthy countries to provide Covid vaccine booster shots, while millions around the world have yet to receive a single dose. Speaking before US authorities announced that all vaccinated Americans would soon be eligible to receive additional doses, WHO experts insisted there was not enough scientific evidence that boosters were needed. Providing them while so many were still waiting to be immunised […]
Ivory Coast has recorded a first case of Ebola, the health minister announced late Saturday, the first occurence of the deadly disease in nearly three decades. Officials at the Institut Pasteur had confirmed the case after testing samples taken from an 18-year-old Guinean woman, Health Minister Pierre N’Gou Demba said on RTI state television. She had left the city of Labe in Guinea by road, arriving in Ivory Coast on Wednesday, he added. “This is […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — China on Friday rejected the World Health Organization’s calls for a renewed probe into the origins of Covid-19, saying it supported “scientific” over “political” efforts to find out how the virus started. Pressure is once more mounting on Beijing to consider a fresh probe into the orgins of a pandemic which has killed more than four million people and paralyzed economies worldwide since it first emerged in the central Chinese city […]
