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Despite the ongoing crisis in the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to support the Ministry of Health of South Sudan and implementing partners to deliver immunization services and conduct disease surveillance activities across the country. Routine immunization and disease surveillance are key health interventions highly affected by the ever changing country context as they demand more logistics and human resource.

Poliomyelitis (polio) is a highly infectious viral disease, which mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system and can cause paralysis. In the event of a polio outbreak, it is important that all countries, in particular those with frequent travel and contacts with the affected countries and areas, strengthen surveillance for Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP) cases in order to rapidly detect any new virus importation and to facilitate a rapid response.

South Sudan has joined the rest of the world in commemorating World Hepatitis Day under the theme “Eliminate Hepatitis” on 28 July 2017, at the University of Juba, college of medicine.

The Transformation Agenda is a programme for accelerating the implementation of WHO reform within the WHO African Region. It is a vision and a strategy for change aimed at facilitating the emergence of “the WHO that the staff and stakeholders want”. Its objective is to improve delivery of results with clearer links to better health outcomes in countries, focusing on countries’ health priorities in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.

To respond to the grave food security and address the alarming nutritional emergency in children, WHO has intensified its response focusing on inpatient therapeutic nutrition programs, through the distribution of essential medicines. In June 2017, WHO distributed 50 sever acute malnutrition (SAM) kits, to treat over 2 500 children suffering from SAM with medical complications. The SAM kits were dispatched to 13 hospitals, 25 primary health care centers and 2 health facillities in the Protection of Civilians (PoCs) supporting Inpatient Therapeutic Programs (ITP) in the Greater Equatoria Regions, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Unity, Upper Nile and Jonglei and Counties with high prevalence of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) to provide sustainable lifesaving interventions.

Organisations involved in managing health emergencies and disease outbreaks in the African Region have agreed on better ways of coordinating their activities in the event of a crisis so as to save more lives and resources.