Author: GHealth News

By: Madhukar Pai There is a lot that is wrong with how global health is designed, structured, taught, and practiced. If this was not clear before the pandemic, the ongoing Covid-19 vaccine inequity (vaccine apartheid) offers abundant proof that global health, as a field, does not walk the talk on buzzwords such as global solidarity or social inequities. Whether it is vaccines, grant funding or journal authorship, it is all about the power and privilege high-income countries (HIC) have and maintain, and what they may be willing to part with, as charity. The past two or three years have seen a flood of conferences, webinars, talks, op-eds, and articles on the need to decolonize global health (DGH). Similar calls are also being made to decolonize humanitarian aid. A numbe...

Following the recent G20 side event co-hosted by the Italian Government and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) focusing on the role of logistics in current and future health emergencies, WFP and the World Health Organization (WHO) are launching INITIATE2, a joint project to bring together emergency actors, research and academic institutions, and international and national partners to promote knowledge sharing and skills transfer for improved emergency response to health crises. INITIATE² will develop standardized, innovative solutions such as disease-specific field facilities and kits and test these solutions in real-life scenarios. The agencies will also train logistics and health responders on their installation and use, contributing to their capacity to respond in health c...

By: Charli Shield It is a search that has so far eluded scientists for 40 years: Finding a safe and effective vaccine to protect people from HIV.   Not a single HIV vaccine has made it beyond Phase III clinical testing in 37 years of research. In comparison to COVID-19, that timeline seems baffling. Over the last 18 months, more than 32 COVID vaccines have made it to Phase III clinical trials, eight have so far been approved and manufactured, and another 90 are in the Phase I and II pipeline.  "When there's the political will, there is funding and resources," said Hendrik Streeck, virologist and director of the German Center of HIV &...

Consumers should stop using certain brands of spray-on sunscreen products made by Johnson & Johnson. The company has issued a voluntary recall after finding low levels of benzene, a known cancer-causing agent, in some samples. Benzene is not an ingredient of sunscreen, and should not be present in these products. The levels detected were low and would not be expected to have an adverse effect on health, but the company says it is recalling the products anyway “out of an abundance of caution.” The sunscreen products that have been recalled are: NEUTROGENA® Beach Defense® aerosol sunscreen,NEUTROGENA® Cool Dry Sport aerosol sunscreen,NEUTROGENA® Invisible Daily™ defense aerosol sunscreen,NEUTROGENA® Ultra Sheer® aerosol sunscreen, andAVEENO® Pr...

New guidelines from WHO strongly recommend offering self-testing for hepatitis C virus (HCV) as an additional approach to HCV testing services. WHO releases the new guidelines – its first on HCV self-testing – during the International AIDS Society Conference 2021.  WHO set a goal to eliminate HCV as a public health problem by 2030 in its Global health sector strategy on viral hepatitis (2016–2021), with targets to diagnose 90% of those with HCV and to treat 80% of those diagnosed. However, as of 2019 only an estimated 21% of the 58 million people with chronic HCV infection globally were diagnosed. And, despite recent advances in highly effective and affordable direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatment, only 9.4 million (62% of those diagnosed) were treated with DAAs between 2015...