Communicable Diseases

Students of Yangzhou University in East China's Jiangsu Province, put red ribbon on their hands as an appeal to eliminate social discrimination against HIV patients on World AIDs Day. Photo: cnsphoto GHealth News - A patient with leukaemia in the United States has become the first woman and the third person to date to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant, researchers say. The case, presented on Tuesday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunisitic Infections in the US city of Denver, was the first involving umbilical cord blood to treat acute myeloid leukaemia, which starts in blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. Since receiving the cord blood, the middle-aged woman of mixed race has been in remission and free of HIV for 14 months, without the need for ...

An Ebola outbreak in Guinea that started in February, infecting 16 people and killing 12, has been declared over, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. Health authorities were able to move swiftly to tackle the resurgence of the virus, which causes severe bleeding and organ failure and is spread through contact with body fluids, after lessons learned from previous outbreaks in Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Based on the lessons learned from the 2014-16 outbreak and through rapid, coordinated response efforts … Guinea managed to control the outbreak and prevent its spread beyond its borders,” the WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement. The Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 killed 11,300 people, mostly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. ...

The World Health Assembly, the main governing body of the World Health Organization, has adopted a new resolution that aims to revitalize and accelerate efforts to end malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that continues to claim more than 400 000 lives annually.  Led by the United States of America and Zambia – and co-sponsored by Botswana, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Eswatini, Guyana, Indonesia, Kenya, Monaco, Mozambique, Namibia, Philippines, Peru, Sudan, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Member States of the European Union – the resolution comes at a critical time as global progress against malaria stalls and the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to further derail efforts to tackle the disease worldwide. The resolution urge...

“This great achievement shows that together we can overcome any health challenge”, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director General, wrote in a tweet.  The outbreak in DRC’s northwestern Equateur Province emerged in early June and caused 130 Ebola cases and 55 deaths. Vaccinations key A key part of the response – with potential lessons for the global fight against COVID19 – was the vaccination of more than 40,000 people at high risk of falling sick from the frequently fatal haemorrhagic disease, the WHO said in a statement. Like one of the COVID-19 candidate vaccines, the Ebola vaccine needs to be kept at super-cold temperatures to keep it from spoiling. “Overcoming one of the world’s most dangerous pathogens in remote and hard to access communities demonstrat...