public health

In recent years, the field of mobile health, or mHealth, has exploded. The power of cell phones and other mobile devices is being harnessed to improve health delivery systems worldwide. For instance, in Malawi, community health workers (CHWs) have been using text messages to improve drug adherence among HIV positive patients. And in India, a potentially disastrous cholera outbreak was avoided during a religious festival in 2001with the help of mobile tools.

By Olufunmilayo Akande Today, 16,000 children worldwide die each day before celebrating their fifth birthday as a result of preventable causes linked to malnutrition.

Efforts to stem the impact of COVID-19 in low to middle-income countries could be creating a health time bomb in their slum communities by deepening existing inequalities, according to an international team of health researchers led by the University of Warwick.

Survivors of COVID-19 from 37 countries are among almost 1,000 people who have signed an open letter to pharmaceutical industry leaders calling for a ‘people's vaccine’ and treatments that are available to all.

Notwithstanding all measures put in place, and considering the alarming rate of infection of the coronavirus, the inevitable eventually happened. On 12 March 2020, Ghana Health Service under the Ministry of Health confirmed the first two COVID-19 cases in the country. The cases have since been rising daily with the COVID-19 story yet to end. To this point, Ghana has recorded 46,222 cases of COVID-19 cases with 45,417 recoveries and 299 deaths.

The latest estimates are that a staggering 3 billion people or more cannot afford a healthy diet. In sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, this is the case for 57 percent of the population – though no region, including North America and Europe, is spared.

While this pandemic may have created new forms of exclusion, strategies and tools exist to address health promotion, whilst continuing to communicate for peace in conflict-affected contexts. The design of an integrated peacebuilding and technical health response, which is sensitive to individual conflicts’ dynamics and keeps in mind communication challenges such as misinformation, mistrust and reduced interpersonal contact, is crucial.

The Duterte administration has assigned former military generals to deal with Covid-19 and has sent police Special Forces to contain communities.

It is also important that Nepal's central as well as provincial governments extend support, both financial and moral, to pandemic-affected Nepali citizens, especially to the foreign returnees, to capitalize on their skills and expertise which they have gained from overseas employment.

Timely interventions and health actions are not the only aspects that enabled the Kerala model of COVID-19 response to be unique. It focused a lot on preparing Kerala as a society to face this adverse condition by building people’s trust in its health system.