Ethiopia News

In response to the emergency situation caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon, the World Health Organization (WHO) has deployed a team of experts to work with the WHO Ethiopia Country Office team in coordinating the health response, assessing health impacts and needs, and strengthening disease early warning and outbreak management systems. The WHO Representative for Ethiopia gives overall direction and guidance to the emergency response activities of the newly reorganized emergency response team. 

A global consultation to draw lessons from the development of Single TB and HIV Concept Notes and defining the way forward for joint TB and HIV programming was held in Addis Ababa on 18-20 November 2015.

ADDIS ABABA, 16 November 2015 | Climate change is threatening to exacerbate health problems in Ethiopia, the World Health Organization warns in a new Climate and Health Country Profile 2015, published today. Increased temperatures, intense heatwaves, more extreme rainfall, floods and landslides, are expected to intensify existing challenges of communicable diseases, food insecurity and poverty unless timely action is taken.

Every year cancer claims thousands of lives in Ethiopia. The country responds to the growing burden of cancer by launching a five year cancer control strategy on 26 October 2015 in Adama Town. The Strategy is said to avert the health and economic impact of cancer by focusing mainly on prevention, and early detection.

In response to the need for access to life-saving surgical care, the World Health Organization's Emergency and Essential Surgical Care rogram has developed and launched the 'Integrated Management for Emergency and Essential Surgical Care'(IMEESC) toolkit via a mobile phone application. The toolkit will make available key resources in obstetric and surgical care literally at users’ fingertips.

ADDIS ABABA, 11 December 2015 | The World Health Organization (WHO) is working alongside the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and 22 partner organizations to respond to the health needs of 3.6 million people vulnerable to health and nutrition emergencies due to the El Niño weather phenomenon. Humanitarian partners came together in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, today to launch joint plans for the crisis response in 2016.

Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, attended the 18th General Assembly of the Organization of African First Ladies Against HIV/AIDS (OAFLA) on the sidelines of the 28th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 31 January 2017.

This year’s OAFLA General Assembly coincided with the commemoration of its anniversary, and was marked under the theme, “Building on 15 years of engagement to harness the demographic dividend of Africa through promoting the needs of adolescents and their access to youth-friendly health services.”

The civil society organizations (CSOs) met in Addis for a full day meeting on 23rd of February, 2016 to discuss their role in holding governments accountable to improve vaccine access and coverage in Africa in line with the Global Vaccine Action Plan. Key conclusions from the meeting as well as the CSOs’ declaration on immunization presented at the Ministerial Conference on Immunization in Africa (MCIA). So far as of march 2016, over 80 organizations endorsed the CSOs’ declaration on immunization to show their commitment to these goals.  

The Ethiopia Ministry of Health planned to conduct a Measles vaccination in a next few weeks in a high risk woredas of Oromia, Amhara, Afar, Somali, Tigray, SNNPR, Harari, Gambella and Benishangul Gumuz regions and Dire Dawa City Administration. The campaign aimed to respond to the measles outbreaks occurred in some localities of the country.

The national level command post decided to integrate measles campaign with the last polio NID with tOPV before the switch to bOPV to use the advantage of operational cost of polio budget and the preparatory activities are underway.

Addis Ababa, 22 February 2017 - The World Health Organization Country Office in Ethiopia in collaboration with the Global Leprosy Programme (GLP) organized a training of consultants on the Global Leprosy Strategy 2016-2020 to support Global Leprosy Program implementation at country level. The training took place in Addis Ababa, from 13-17 February 2017, and brought together Leprosy, Case Management NTD and Public Health Experts from WHO African Region as well as NTD/NPOs from 7 WHO country Offices (Ethiopia, DRC, Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Bangladesh and Indonesia).