The World Health Organization is responding to a crucial global health care need. The need to simply know "Where are your health facilities?"
The WHO announced the creation of a new Global Health Facilities Database (GHFD) that will allow all populations to locate and access information about health care services and facilities on a global scale. This timely and essential repository will
"standardize the master lists of local and regional health facilities into an open database. Doing so will strengthen country's technical capacity at all levels, improve data interoperability across information systems, support the provision of universal health coverage..." etc.
The Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health 2011, published by the World Health Organization, presents a comprehensive perspective on the global, regional and country consumption of alcohol. It also portrays patterns of drinking, their health consequences, as well as policy responses in the various countries. The goal of the WHO is to assist countries in their efforts to reduce the harmful use of alcohol, and its health and social consequences. Click for the statistics on individual countries including St. Kitts & Nevis.
The World Health Organization estimates that chronic infectious diseases cause more than 20 percent of all cancers in the world, including liver, cervical and gastric malignancies. Given that infection-related cancers are more frequent and often more severe in people infected with HIV, in resource-poor Uganda, the HIV epidemic is fueling a 20,000-fold upsurge in Kaposi’s sarcoma in adults and Burkitt’s lymphoma in children! Both are disfiguring cancers with abysmal survival rates due to lack of access to early diagnosis and treatment.
"Up to one-quarter of the world’s cancers are attributable to chronic infections,” Hutchinson Center physician-scientist Corey Casper, M.D., M.P.H., scientific co-director of the Uganda Program on Cancer and Infectious Diseases, explained. “Better understanding the link between infectious disease and cancer provides a unique opportunity to reduce cancer-related suffering and death in both resource-rich and resource-poor regions.”
It is the hope of Dr. Casper and Dr. Jackson Orem, Director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, that this partnership
"will benefit the world by identifying new infectious causes of cancer, new ways to prevent infection-associated cancers such as through the development of new vaccines, and new ways to treat such cancers with nontoxic drugs, thus avoiding the need for chemotherapy."
Citation: (2010). Hutchinson to Build First US Cancer Clinic and Training Facility in Africa. Cancer (0008543X), 116(7), 1618-1619. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Initial results on prevalence, health outcomes and women's responses
"This report presents initial results based on interviews with 24 000 women,.. the study was implemented by WHO, in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) [and others], covering 15 sites and 10 countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Peru, Namibia, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand and the United Republic of Tanzania. Data from the report show that violence against women is widespread and demands a public health response." Full .pdf download and Summary available on the WHO website.
...facilitating communication between the Library and the Faculty, students, staff and community partners of the University of Medicine & Health Sciences (UMHS).
