Executive summary

Harare, 21 March 2003 -- Tuberculosis (TB) infects 1.6 million people and kills 600,000 others in Africa every year, making the disease one of the most common preventable causes of death from a single infectious agent in the Region, according to a report issued Friday by the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa. 

After more than two years without the detection of wild polio in Nigeria, the Government reported three laboratory confirmed wild poliovirus type one (WPV1) cases with onset between July and August 2016.

All three cases were detected from Borno State, in children between 2 and 5 years of age. Two of them developed acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) while one was asymptomatic, identified as a close contact of a child with AFP.

The surveillance of outbreaks of the Ebola disease in West Africa needs to be intensified if the deadly virus is to finally be beaten, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) new Regional Director for Africa.

More than 8,700 people have died from Ebola mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, but now the number of cases is dropping.

Daniel Johnson has been speaking to the new WHO chief, Dr Matshidiso Rebecca Moeti, about her priorities for dealing with the epidemic

Huambo is Angola’s second biggest city and the province with the largest urban population after Luanda province.

It is also one of the eleven Angolan provinces currently with confirmed local transmission of Yellow Fever cases.  The urban nature of this outbreak and its spread to countries like DRC, Congo, Kenya and China, is of major global concern.

A staggering 95% of people infected with hepatitis B or C around the world do not know they are infected. One reason for this is that people can live without symptoms for many years. When they find out they have hepatitis, it is often too late for treatment to be fully effective. As a result, liver damage becomes cirrhosis or liver cancer.

To help countries build up national hepatitis testing and treatment programmes and to encourage more people globally to get tested, WHO will shortly release new testing guidelines for hepatitis B and C.

Brazzaville -- Resistance to available anti-malarial drugs has become a growing threat to efforts to control the malaria in Africa, the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Africa warned in Brazzaville on Wednesday.

In a statement to mark the continent's second Africa Malaria Day on Thursday, whose theme is Mobilizing Communities to Roll Back Malaria, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr Ebrahim Samba, said a result of this development had been an increase of malaria cases and deaths on the African continent.

oday Sierra Leone kicked off bed net distributions to help protect its population against malaria, which remains one of the country’s most deadly diseases. In total, 4.3 million insecticide treated bed nets will be distributed through the landmark nationwide campaign.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 40 million children aged below 15 years fall victim to violence each year. The ensuing traumas vary according to the gravity of the violence and the child's personal experience and can, in the long run, have medical and psychosocial consequences.