[procaare] The world health report 2007

["Ana Lucia Ruggiero" <ruglucia@paho.org>]

The world health report 2007 - A safer future: global public health 
security in the 21st century
-- World health Organization August 2007
************** 

>From Afro-Nets (www.afronets.org)

Cross posted from: EQUIDAD@listserv.paho.org

The world health report 2007 - A safer future: global public health 
security in the 21st century
World health Organization August 2007

UN Press Release:

"….."International public health security is both a collective 
aspiration and a mutual responsibility. The new watchwords are 
diplomacy, cooperation, transparency and preparedness," she added 
of the report, which calls pandemic influenza the most feared 
threat to health security in our times.

Experts fear that the current bird flu virus, which has so far 
infected 321 people, killing 194 of them, could mutate to easy 
human-to-human transmission. The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 
1918-1920, which spread easily between humans, is estimated to have 
killed from 20 million to 40 million people. The experts say a new 
flu pandemic is not a question of if but of when.

The report sets out the WHO strategic action plan to respond to a 
pandemic. It also draws attention to the need for stronger health 
systems and for continued vigilance in managing the risks and 
consequences of the international spread of polio and the newly 
emerging strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis 
(XDR-TB).

It notes that since 1967, at least 39 new pathogens have been 
identified, including HIV, the deadly haemorrhagic Ebola and 
Marburg fevers, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which 
emerged in China in 2003 and spread rapidly as far as Canada, 
infecting more than 8,000 people, over 800 of them fatally, before 
it was brought under control.

Other centuries-old threats, such as pandemic influenza, malaria 
and tuberculosis, continue to pose a threat to health through a 
combination of mutation, rising resistance to antimicrobial 
medicines and weak health systems. New threats have also emerged, 
linked to potential terrorist attacks, chemical incidents and 
radio-nuclear accidents, it adds.

Its recommendations include global cooperation in surveillance and 
outbreak alert and response; open sharing of knowledge, 
technologies and materials, including viruses and other laboratory 
samples, necessary to optimize secure global public health; and 
global responsibility for capacity building within the public 
health infrastructure of all countries.

The report also calls for cross-sector collaboration within 
Governments and increased global and national resources for 
training, surveillance, laboratory capacity, response networks, and 
prevention campaigns.

It shows how and why diseases are increasingly threatening global 
public health security, citing the high and rapid mobility of 
people as one factor. Airlines now carry more than two billion 
passengers a year, enabling people and the diseases that travel 
with them to pass from one country to another in a matter of hours.

The potential health and economic impact was seen in 2003 with 
SARS, which cost Asian countries an estimated $60 billion of gross 
expenditure and business losses.

The report outlines some of the human factors behind public health 
insecurity, including inadequate investment in public health 
resulting from a false sense of security in the absence of 
infectious disease outbreaks; unexpected policy changes such as a 
decision temporarily to halt immunization in northern Nigeria in 
2003, which led to the re-emergence of polio cases; and conflicts 
where forced migration obliges people to live in overcrowded, 
unhygienic and impoverished conditions heightening the risk of 
epidemics. …."


Full report available online PDF [96p] at:
http://www.who.int/whr/2007/whr07_en.pdf

Overview

- Director General's Message & Overview [pdf
1.96Mb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_overview_en.pdf>
- Overview in French [pdf
1.94Mb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_overview_fr.pdf>
- Overview in Spanish [pdf
1.96Mb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_overview_es.pdf>
*report by chapters*

- Contents [pdf 
567kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_contents_en.pdf>
- Chapter 1: Evolution of public health security [pdf
735kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_chap1_en.pdf>
- Chapter 2: Threats to public health security [pdf
408kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_chap2_en.pdf>
- Chapter 3: New health threats in the 21st century [pdf
727kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_chap3_en.pdf>
- Chapter 4: Learning lessons, thinking ahead [pdf
583kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_chap4_en.pdf>
- Chapter 5: Towards a safer future [pdf
261kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_chap5_en.pdf>
- Conclusions & recommendations [pdf
81kb]<http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_conclusion_en.pdf>
- Index [pdf 44kb] 
http://www.who.int/entity/whr/2007/07_index_en.pdf

--
Mrs. Ana Lucia Ruggiero (WDC)
mailto:ruglucia@paho.org