Author: GHealth News

By LOIS QUAM, RACHEL VOGELSTEIN From the household to the national stage, women play crucial roles in global health systems. Governments should adopt inclusive strategies before another crisis strikes. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the limitations of the United States and Europe’s current approach to global health. Experts had long predicted the rapid spread of a contagious respiratory virus. But while global health spending increased at an average annual rate of 3.9 percent from 2000 to 2017, countries around the world were ill-prepared for the coronavirus pandemic, global shutdowns, and the economic shocks that followed. Women experience unique challenges during global health crises, and COVID-19 has exacerbated preexisting gender inequalities, including domestic violenc...

It’s a question that has generated yearlong discord between China and the West: how did this virus that plunged the world into crisis begin in the first place? Last Thursday, a team of World Health Organization experts touched down in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected in 2019, to start a much-delayed mission into the origins of the virus that has now killed more than two million people worldwide. But first, like all travelers to China, the team of 10 must undertake a strict two-week quarantine. Some of them have been tweeting from their hotels in Wuhan, using Virtual Private Networks to circumvent a ban on Twitter in the country. On Monday -- day four of their quarantine -- British-American zoologist Peter Daszak tweeted a picture of his b...

When the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship suffering from an outbreak of covid-19, arrived in Japan in February, it seemed like a stroke of bad luck. A small floating petri dish threatened to turn the Japanese archipelago into a big one. In retrospect, however, the early exposure taught the authorities lessons that have helped make Japan’s epidemic the mildest among the world’s big economies, despite a recent surge in infections. In total 2,487 people have died of the coronavirus in Japan, just over half the number in China and fewer people than on a single day in America several times over the past week. Japan has suffered just 18 deaths per million people, a higher rate than in China, but by far the lowest in the G7, a club of big, industrialised democracies. (Germany comes in sec...

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s daily coronavirus cases have exceeded 3,000 for the first time while the government delays stricter measures for fear of hurting the economy ahead of the holiday season. The 3,030 new cases, including 621 in Tokyo, took Japan’s national tally to 177,287 with 2,562 deaths, the Health Ministry said Sunday. Experts say serious cases are on the rise around the country, putting an extra burden on hospitals and affecting the daily medical treatment for other patients. They urged authorities to take measures such as suspending out-of-town trips and requesting stores to close early. Source: AP News