NEWS
IN FOCUS
Recent news from WHO
- More than 2200 people from WHO's 192 Member States, nongovernmental organizations and other organizations attended the World Health Assembly from 16 to 25 May. The Assembly adopted the revised International Health Regulations, which govern national and international response to disease outbreaks. It approved the Proposed Programme Budget for 200607, which includes a 4% increase in the Regular Budget and it established World Blood Donor Day to be celebrated on 14 June each year.
- The Assembly reviewed progress in polio eradication and scaling up HIV/AIDS treatment and care and discussed smallpox vaccine reserves and research on the smallpox virus to counter possible bio-terror threats. WHO and its partners launched the Health Metrics Network to address the lack of basic data in many countries as the details of a person's birth, death and cause of death are often not recorded in developing countries.
- In other resolutions, the Assembly called on Member States to develop and implement national plans for pandemic-influenza preparedness and response and on Member States to coordinate their tuberculosis and HIV programmes to fight the dual epidemic. Another resolution called for more efforts to fight malaria through WHO's collaboration with Member States to reach internationally agreed malaria control goals, including the possibility of WHO undertaking bulk purchases of insecticide-treated nets and antimalarial medicines.
- The Assembly called on Member States to maintain financing for tuberculosis prevention and control to address the increasing number of cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and increasing death and disease among HIV-positive patients with tuberculosis. It also urged developed countries to honour their pledge to increase official development aid to 0.7% of gross national product and African countries to fulfil their commitment made at the African Summit in Abuja in 2001 to allocate 15% of their national budgets to health to help developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
- Member States were urged to continue to protect, promote and support exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a baby's life. Another resolution called on Director-General LEE Jong-wook to support countries with a high disease burden that losing health workers by strengthening WHO's human resources for health programme, the subject of the next World health report in 2006.
- Tanzanian farmers who grow the Artemisia annua plant from which malaria medicines can be manufactured, met international and nongovernmental organizations, government agencies and pharmaceuticals companies for the first time on 6 June to discuss ways of increasing production of artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) medicines. Officials from the health and agriculture ministries of Kenya, Uganda, and the United Republic of Tanzania and the trade ministry of the United Republic of Tanzania also attended the meeting that was convened by WHO.
For more about these and other WHO news items please see: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/en/ 