WHO validated Bhutan's elimination of dog-transmitted human rabies, a disease almost always fatal once symptoms appear. The country has recorded zero such deaths since June 2023.
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WHO validated Timor-Leste's elimination of trachoma, the last suspected focus in its South-East Asia Region. A 2025 survey of 4,949 young children found no transmission requiring intervention.
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ANALYSISErvebo was licensed against Zaire ebolavirus. WHO says it is not known whether it protects against Bundibugyo virus in humans — which is why a trial is running alongside the wider rollout.
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WHO's latest update records 1,129 more confirmed cases in twelve days and a case fatality ratio of 48.1%. Transmission is now confined to Congo, across 60 health zones in six provinces.
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EXPLAINEROSHA and NIOSH use different rules for how fast allowable exposure falls as sound gets louder. WHO's venue standard permits an average of 100 decibels. The headline 'one billion at risk' figure is a modelled range.
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The emergency funding is meant to keep trauma care, disease surveillance and maternal care running in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Jordan, atop a regional appeal only 37% funded.
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The country became the first in its region to receive shipments through a WHO-backed platform supplying 46 essential cancer drugs — refugees included, at no cost.
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The Bundibugyo virus epidemic is now the largest Ebola outbreak in Congo's history. WHO's emergency committee met again this week; MSF says the response still isn't reaching people fast enough.
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EXPLAINERA dose-response meta-analysis of 94 cohorts and more than 30 million people found the steepest part of the curve sits between zero and the recommended weekly dose, with small and uncertain gains above double it.
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The seventh session on the pathogen-sharing annex ran nearly twice as long as previous rounds. WHO says the text is narrowing. A new deadline, set in May, gives them until next year.
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Two months after the emergency declaration, confirmed cases in DRC have passed 2,100 and spread to 46 health zones. There is still no approved vaccine or treatment — but patients are now being enrolled in one.
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Thirteen cases and three deaths, tracked across 33 countries and territories. The final determination rested on one thing: 653 contacts completing 42 days of monitoring without a single new case.
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A single patient is on ventilatory support in Kozhikode. WHO says 104 contacts are being monitored and the source of infection has not been identified.
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Five weeks into the Bundibugyo virus emergency, WHO says some new cases reflect transmission that had gone undetected for weeks — a sign the outbreak may be larger than the count shows.
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WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern on 17 May. By early June, confirmed cases had climbed past 500 and Africa CDC put a price tag on the continental response: $518 million.
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Stroke is the world's second-leading cause of death and third-leading cause of disability. The new resolution asks countries to build stroke-ready emergency systems, not just treat risk factors.
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The World Health Assembly gave negotiators another year — or a special session later this year — to finish the annex that has to be adopted before the pandemic agreement can open for signature.
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Eight confirmed cases, 246 suspected, and 80 suspected deaths in eastern DRC were enough for the Director-General to invoke his highest level of alarm — before convening the emergency committee that usually comes first.
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A Lancet evaluation of the RTS,S introduction in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi reports a 13% drop in mortality among vaccine-eligible children — achieved with third-dose coverage of 71% and fourth-dose uptake under 40%.
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Five confirmed cases and three deaths, all linked to Andes virus, the only hantavirus known to pass between people. WHO calls the public health risk low but says more cases are possible.
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WHO's latest mpox report shows global case counts holding steady, but flags a Sindh province cluster where nearly all deaths were in babies under six months old.
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WHO's latest tally puts the 2026 year-to-date count at 58,740 cases and 732 deaths across 22 countries, down sharply from last year except in conflict-affected states.
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The FY2027 request would cut global health funding by $4.3 billion and eliminate WHO, PAHO and UNFPA outright. Three weeks later House appropriators proposed a smaller cut.
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WHO reports 19,161 suspected cases and 166 deaths in a single month, most in children under five. The country had been close to eliminating the disease.
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The sixth negotiating round on the WHO Pandemic Agreement's pathogen-sharing annex was supposed to finish text ahead of May's World Health Assembly. Member states pushed the deadline to late April instead.
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Products reached 99 countries before recalls began. WHO's first Disease Outbreak News report on the event lists 144 suspected and confirmed illnesses and calls the risk moderate.
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WHO's Emergency Committee extended the public health emergency for three more months. Wild poliovirus cases dropped from 99 to 40, while vaccine-derived strains spread to two new countries.
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WHO updated all three components for the 2026-2027 northern hemisphere season after subclade K dominated globally, and recommended a new candidate vaccine virus for an H9N2 avian strain.
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Negotiators finished a week in Geneva with a plan to streamline the text and consult separately on the hard parts. The treaty cannot open for signature until the annex is adopted.
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WHO reports two cases of a monkeypox virus carrying genetic material from both clade Ib and clade IIb. The finding that matters for surveillance is that clade differentiation PCR missed it both times.
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The objection turns on a no-treatment arm. WHO says placebo or no-treatment vaccine trials are acceptable only where no proven intervention exists, and here one does.
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The patient drank raw date palm sap through most of January. Thirty-five contacts are under monitoring, and the six who developed symptoms have tested negative.
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Global oral cholera vaccine supply has roughly doubled since 2022, enough to release 20 million doses for prevention rather than outbreak response. Nearly all of it comes from a single company.
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ANALYSISThe Lancet Global Health paper that produced this month's headline number also produced a larger one: 22.6 million additional deaths by 2030 if defunding deepens. The distinction matters more than the figure.
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WHO was notified on January 26 of the third Nipah outbreak recorded in West Bengal. There is no licensed vaccine or drug, and the source of exposure is still under investigation.
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ANALYSISWHO's year-end tally records 614,828 cases across 33 countries. December brought a decline — and the reported figures are known to be a fraction of the true burden.
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The Ministry of Health declared the end on January 26, two incubation periods after the last confirmed patient was buried. No vaccine or drug for Marburg is approved anywhere.
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EXPLAINERNegotiators on the Pandemic Agreement's pathogen-sharing annex met January 20–22 and reported emerging consensus on parts of the system. The deadline is the World Health Assembly in May.
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The year-end immunization summary reports 88% fewer measles deaths since 2000, malaria vaccine in 24 African countries, and 25 years without wild polio in the Western Pacific.
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WHO and the World Bank put the global service coverage index at 71, up from 54 in 2000. On current trends it reaches only 74 by 2030.
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EXPLAINERNegotiators met in Geneva for five days and agreed to come back in January. Until the annex is adopted, the pandemic agreement cannot even open for signature.
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The Bulape outbreak in Kasai Province ended 88 days after it was declared, with a case fatality ratio above 70% and nearly 48,000 people vaccinated.
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ANALYSISThe recommendations are conditional, cover three drugs, and come with a projection that fewer than one in ten people who could benefit will have access by 2030.
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WHO has graded the regional resurgence a level 2 emergency. Only 5.7% of the 20,412 suspected cases were laboratory-confirmed, and the antitoxin that prevents most deaths is in global short supply.
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New EGASP surveillance data released for World AMR Awareness Week show cefixime resistance up from 1.7% to 11% and ciprofloxacin resistance at 95% across 12 reporting countries.
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Six laboratory-confirmed cases and three probable ones have been reported from Jinka town. All deaths involved unsupervised burials — the step in the chain that historically turns a cluster into an outbreak.
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Intimate partner violence has declined by 0.2% a year over two decades. The report also produces the first national and regional estimates of sexual violence by someone other than a partner.
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IARC and WHO put five modules on screening and precancer management online. The 90-70-90 targets they support depend on health workers who can act on a positive test.
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A WHO and Brazil special report released on the summit's Health Day says extreme heat kills over 540,000 people a year and that health facilities face 41% higher weather-damage risk than in 1990.
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The 27 recommendations cover monitoring, diet and medication for type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes. WHO had guidance on diabetes and guidance on pregnancy, but never on the two together.
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WHO's Global Tuberculosis Report 2025 counts 10.7 million people ill and over 1.2 million dead last year. Available funding is US$5.9 billion against a US$22 billion annual target.
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WHO validated Egypt as the 27th country to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem. Its programme began in 2002; the disease still blinds or impairs about 1.9 million people elsewhere.
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ANALYSISA TB vaccine financing plan, six target product profiles for children's cancer drugs, and a paediatric research agenda. All three are attempts to specify a product before a market decides to build it.
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WHO reports 404 confirmed human cases across the two countries in six weeks. The case fatality ratio is 30% in Mauritania and 7.8% in Senegal — a gap that says more about detection than about the virus.
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The agency stops short of calling 2025 a global surge. Its own regional tables show why: the Americas and the Indian Ocean drove the total while the Philippines and Malaysia reported fewer cases than last year.
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Three of the four cases drank raw date palm sap in the usual December-April window. The fourth, a child who fell ill in August, did not — and the source remains under investigation.
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Sequencing points to a fresh spillover from wildlife rather than a resurgence of the province's earlier outbreaks. Four of the dead are health-care workers.
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Nine genetically linked virus isolates from seven environmental sites triggered the declaration. Sequencing traced the lineage back to a paralysis case reported in December 2024.
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WHO counted 409,222 cases and 4,738 deaths across 31 countries by 17 August. The divergence between the two trends is the finding, and it points at case management, not transmission.
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Kerala's ninth Nipah outbreak since 2018 produced four unlinked cases between April and July, suggesting separate spillovers from bats rather than a chain of human transmission.
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The guidelines pair the new injectable with a second, quieter recommendation: use simplified rapid diagnostic testing to start and continue long-acting PrEP, rather than more complex assays.
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