Not long after the announcement made linking processed meats and bacon to certain types of cancer, WHO has delivered yet another heavy dietary blow – one which will also affect vegans.

Speaking at an emergency press conference in Geneva on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the agency warned against eating muesli before 10 am on weekdays.

WHO spokesperson, Jean-Pierre Jejunum said, "After extensive research and data analysis we have found a definite link between the consumption of muesli before 10 o'clock on a weekday and the likelihood of being hit by a bus."

Jejunum said people who consume muesli first thing in the morning on a weekday have a much higher risk of being killed by a bus than those who consumed bacon and eggs.

"We have spent 9 years collecting, collating and analysing the data, and it is our duty as the World Health Organisation to make our findings public. By avoiding muesli before 10 o'clock you can and will reduce your risk of being hit by a bus by up to 7%. This is substantial," Jejunum said.

According to Jejunum, it is suspected there might be an ingredient or compound in muesli that either influenced depth perception or made people attracted to the smell of the fumes emitted by a bus.

For countries that do not have a public transport system, Jejunum said consumers of muesli risked being hit by a low-flying hawk.

"The findings are irrefutable,"he said.

The World Health Organisation will now campaign to have warning notices printed on all packs of muesli before April 2016.

source: http://www.ecr.co.za/

For a few hours one morning two weeks ago, private cars were banned from driving into the heart of old Delhi. It was hard to tell at the messy road junction in front of the historic Red Fort and the shopping street of Chandni Chowk, though, which was still crammed with auto-rickshaws and buses barrelling along the roads with seemingly little regard for any traffic rules.

But Delhi's so-called "car-free day" experiment was nevertheless a success: scientists monitoring the air here, routinely one of Delhi's most polluted areas, found a dramatic 60% drop in the amount of dangerous pollutants – the tiniest particles that come out of traffic exhausts and which can exacerbate health problems such as asthma, heart disease and stroke – compared to the previous day.

Delhi is the most polluted city in the world, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and doctors and scientists say the locals there are facing a public health crisis. Beijing has historically drawn international attention when it comes to poor air quality but, in reality, that city's air is nowhere near as dangerous as many of India's major cities.

The rapid development of the country in recent years means India has the dubious honour of having 13 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. The WHO found that Delhi had an average of 153 micrograms of the smallest particles, known as PM2.5s, per cubic metre in its air. The international "safe" level for these particles is 6 micrograms per cubic metre.

Delhi's bad air is already causing a spike in the people with asthma and reduced lung function.

Filming in the city's leading chest hospital, for a series of stories for ITV News at Ten on India's challenges ahead of the climate change summit in Paris that begins later this month, a doctor told me he had to now keep his clinics open for double their normal hours in order to keep up with demand. Even then, the corridors were overrun with wheezing patients and a room that had a line of oxygen masks for patients to take respite breaths as they waited, had queues snaking out of the door.

The air is already having long-term effects on children in the Indian capital, 4.4 million of whom already have irreversible lung damage. "The children's lung is in the budding stage, they are not mature," said Prof Raj Kumar a respiratory specialist at the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute, University of Delhi.

"Ultimately their bronchi or alveoli are going to be damaged and the lung function is harmed. [Since] that is the main organ where the oxidisation is taking place, if the lung is affected then the whole of your body will be affected."

The damage goes beyond that – reaching even further back in people's lives. At the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, neonatologist Professor Neelam Kler has been working with the Public Health Foundation of India to track an increase in premature and underweight babies and those born with birth defects. "People are probably not so aware of the hidden effects of pollution and that is on the pregnant woman and the growing foetus in her body, which is a very vulnerable period," she said.

There is already evidence of a spectrum of health problems, ranging from allergies and respiratory conditions, malformations, growth restrictions and even an increasing incidence of cancers, all of which could be related to increased pollution. "Putting it together, we are heading towards health disasters," said Prof Kler.

The reasons behind the worsening air are manyfold – more than 8m vehicles on the roads already, with 1,400 new ones added every day. Most of those new vehicles burn diesel and face relatively low emissions standards, belching out clouds of the tiny PM2.5 particles that can be most harmful to health.

In addition to vehicles, there are an increasing number of diesel-burning electrical generators attached to the swanky apartment blocks springing up across the capital. Farms and coal-burning factories around the region further worsen the air.

The pollution has a double-whammy effect. Health problems are happening now but the vehicle and factory exhausts also contain greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxides, ozone and carbon dioxide. These will linger in the atmosphere for many decades and contribute to future climate change. India's cities are facing the problems right now but the pollution (and its problems) is a stark indication of what many more developing nations will face in future.

The Indian government says it is aware. Environment minister Prakash Javadekar said he wants to fast-track the construction of a bypass that would prevent around 50,000 polluting lorries having to drive into the city every day. And he wants the car companies to clean up their vehicles to the more exacting standards in Europe. "We want to migrate early but auto industry is not ready," he said.

The car industry in India could produce Euro-6 compliant vehicles, he said, but they have been lagging behind. "We will deal with this menace of air pollution and we will win the battle and there will be marked difference in the next two years."

Delhi has managed to clean up its air before. At the turn of the century, the local government moved polluting industries out of the city, shut down coal-burning power plants and forced public transport vehicles to move from diesel and petrol to cleaner gas alternatives. The air quality improved steadily until 2007, said Anumita Roychowdhury of the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi thinktank.

"But after that, if you look at the data, 2009 onwards, you will find the levels are going up again and gone up so high that now what we are saying is that we have lost the gains of the first generation action," she said. "And that's the scary story unfolding today. What has gone wrong is that the momentum that we had built to clean up, we could not keep that momentum going. Somewhere along the line the pollution source has overwhelmed the action."

For Profs Kler and Kumar, all Delhi citizens need to do their part in dealing with the pollution problem. Health professionals need to petition authorities to act and individuals must work out how to keep the city growing without just buying more cars.

"Development not only means industrialisation," said Prof Kler. "I think its a time that we take a note of it and do something about the quality of air, the quality of water, our waste disposal, so that we don't become a heap of garbage."

As Delhi chokes, initiatives such as the car-free day around the Red Fort two weeks ago will become more important in bringing attention to the pollution crisis. A small crowd had gathered that morning with banners and wearing T-shirts with slogans reading "No Pollution, No Congestion". They marched around the road in the shadow of the Red Fort on the day, handing leaflets out to passers by.

Sunil Dahiya, a campaigner with Greenpeace India who was measuring the levels of pollutants in the air around him, said: "If you talk to anybody there will be appreciation of yes Delhi air is very hazardously polluted and there should be something done about it."

source: http://www.theguardian.com/

Singapore has been declared as the world's healthiest country in a recent reports with India securing the 103rd position. The list ranked the countries with the help of the data from the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation.

In order to identify the healthiest countries in the world the Bloomberg Rankings created health score and health risk scores with populations of at least 1 million, reports the Independent.

The ratings were given depending on factors such as birth, mortality rates and cause of death. Health risks are based on factors such as number of young people who smoke, people suffering from high cholesterol and number of immunisation.

Singapore receives an overall grade of 89.45%. Italy is in second place with 89.07%, while Australia comes third with 88.33%.
The rankings are dominated by Asian and European countries. North and South American countries did not feature in the top 20s.
Israel was the only Middle Eastern country to make it in the top 10 league.

The UK also failed to reach the top 20, ranking at number 21 with a score of 76.84% per cent, behind Belgium, Ireland and Norway.
India ranked 103rd with an overall score of 22.17%. Most African nations occupied the latter half of the list with Lesotho, Democratic republic of Congo, Chad and Mozambique falling in the bottom 10.

Swaziland was the at the very bottom of the list with an overall grade of just 0.26 per cent.
The study also pointed towards a global rise in the level of consumption of healthy food like fruits and vegetables, along side an increasing intake of unhealthy junk food.

source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/

EDITOR'S NOTE: A "grand convergence" on investing in health between poor and rich countries is achievable within our lifetimes. This is a remarkable and unique opportunity, one unprecedented in human history, Center for Global Development's Rachel Silverman writes in this blog post.

Imagine a world in which children in Zambia, Bolivia and Laos have the same chance to survive, grow, and thrive as their peers in Canada or Europe. Such a world sounds nice, to be sure, but probably quite far out of reach. Yet according to the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, that "grand convergence" between poor and rich countries is achievable within our lifetimes. This is a remarkable and unique opportunity, one unprecedented in human history.

But what will it take to get there? Last week, CGD welcomed the commission's two lead authors — Lawrence H. Summers (also the chair of CGD's Board of Directors) and Dean Jamison — to share their thoughts on the future of health investments for convergence, based in part on their recent paper in The Lancet. Here are my three big takeaways from their remarks, with major implications for the world's global health funders.

Middle-income countries can pay their own way ... if there's political will

According to the Lancet report, global convergence will cost $70 billion per year. The price tag certainly sounds hefty — and it far exceeds current aid flows for health. But 70 percent of the global disease burden is now concentrated in rapidly growing middle-income countries like China, India and Nigeria. According to Summers, those MICs should be able to up their health investments with relative ease — if their leaders are willing to take on existing inefficient patterns of taxation and spending. Where to start? Summers suggests hiking taxes on "bads" like tobacco, alcohol, sugar and extractive industries, plus redirecting fossil fuel subsidies toward the health sector. These policies would be win-wins for health, helping finance a stronger health sector while also dissuading risky behavior. (Like, for example, Thailand's successful campaign for tobacco control, which will be featured in our forthcoming new edition of Millions Saved).

For the future of health aid, viva la evolution!

The rise of MICs does not mean the end of health aid; rather, it implies an evolving role for donor investments to achieve convergence. Drawing on their paper, Summers and Jamison suggest a conceptual distinction between two types of health aid. The first type is country-specific — that is, direct support to low- and middle-income countries, benefitting only the specific recipient countries.

In contrast, the second type serves "global" functions, including global public goods like R&D, data, pandemic preparedness, and containment of antimicrobial resistance, some of which fall outside the traditional boundaries of overseas development assistance. With MICs increasingly funding their own health sectors, Summers and Jamison argue that donors should shift their investments toward the latter category, limiting their country-specific investments to the very poorest countries that need external funds to deliver essential services.

The next global fund should fund global functions (repeat 5x fast!)

According to their new paper, roughly four in five aid dollars go to country-specific functions, potentially leaving essential global functions neglected and vulnerable. (For example, Jamison noted the WHO's lackluster response to Ebola came after many years of sustained budget cuts).

To increase those investments, Summers recommended the creation of a new global fund focused exclusively on global goods. Politicians love new and shiny objects, so a new institution might be what's needed to build momentum for change.

The global health community has an enormous opportunity to capitalize on an historic moment. I hope global health donors will take on this sound advice and make savvy decisions about the allocation of their scarce resources.

source: https://www.devex.com/

Processed meats - such as bacon, sausages and ham - do cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Its report said 50g of processed meat a day - less than two slices of bacon - increased the chance of developing colorectal cancer by 18%.
Meanwhile, it said red meats were "probably carcinogenic" but there was limited evidence.

The WHO did stress that meat also had health benefits.

Cancer Research UK said this was a reason to cut down rather than give up red and processed meats.

And added that an occasional bacon sandwich would do little harm.
What is processed meat?

Processed meat has been modified to either extend its shelf life or change the taste and the main methods are smoking, curing, or adding salt or preservatives.

Simply putting beef through a mincer does not mean the resulting mince is "processed" unless it is modified further.

Processed meat includes bacon, sausages, hot dogs, salami, corned beef, beef jerky and ham as well as canned meat and meat-based sauces.

It is the chemicals involved in the processing which could be increasing the risk of cancer. High temperature cooking, such as on a barbeque, can also create carcinogenic chemicals.

In the UK, around six out of every 100 people get bowel cancer at some point in their lives.

If they were all had an extra 50g of bacon a day for the rest of their lives then the risk would increase by 18% to around seven in 100 people getting bowel cancer.

"So that's one extra case of bowel cancer in all those 100 lifetime bacon-eaters," argued Sir David Spiegelhalter, a risk professor from the University of Cambridge.

How bad?

The WHO has come to the conclusion on the advice of its International Agency for Research on Cancer, which assesses the best available scientific evidence.

It has now placed processed meat in the same category as plutonium, but also alcohol as they definitely do cause cancer.

However, this does not mean they are equally dangerous. A bacon sandwich is not as bad as smoking.

"For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," Dr Kurt Straif from the WHO said.

source: http://www.bbc.com/

One million people per year in China die of tobacco-related illnesses, a number that could be if the country adopted a nationwide smoke-free law similar to Beijing's smoking ban, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Monday.

"China's addiction to tobacco is taking a dreadful toll on its health, its society, and its economy. And China's smokers are not only hurting themselves, but also their friends, family, and others around them. The rates of exposure to second-hand smoke are extraordinarily high, with devastating health consequences for those affected," said Dr. Bernhard Schwartländer, WHO Representative in China, in a statement.

More than 1 million people die each year in China from tobacco-related illnesses. If current smoking habits continue, this number is expected to triple by the year 2050, WHO said.

An additional 100,000 people die in China every year as a result of exposure to second-hand smoke, which can make indoor venues more polluted than the air outside even on the most heavily polluted days.

"China is unfortunately a world leader in second-hand smoke exposure: among the countries we work in, China has the highest rates of smoking in workplaces and homes, and among the highest rates in restaurants and bars. This puts the health of millions of non-smokers at risk every single day," said Dr. Geoffrey T. Fong, principal investigator, of the International Tobacco Control Policy Evaluation Project (ITC Project).

The new report issued Monday demonstrates that there is likely to be strong popular support for a national smoke-free law. The ITC Project data shows that even smokers are supportive of smoke-free laws, particularly in workplaces. Support for smoke-free bars among smokers is higher in China than it was in other countries, such as Ireland, Scotland (United Kingdom), and France before such smoking bans were introduced.

Beijing banned smoking in public spaces on June 1, which coincides with WHO's No Tobacco Day. While the ban has been largely successful so far, the arrival of colder weather – and the continued willingness of Beijingers to report smoking citizens that is the key enforcement mechanism of the new law – will determine its long-term success.

Photo: World Health Organization

source: http://www.thebeijinger.com

On 8 October 2015, the National IHR Focal Point of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) notified WHO of one confirmed type 1 vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) case.

Details of the case

In Lao PDR, one case of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 (cVDPV1) was confirmed, with onset of paralysis on 7 September. The patient was 8 years old when he died on 11 September.

Genetic sequencing of the virus confirmed on 6 October that it is vaccine-derived and suggests that it has been circulating in the area for more than two years. The child was in the district of Bolikhan, in Bolikhamxay Province. The district has chronically low immunization rates: reported coverage with 3 doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) was of 40% to 66% between 2009 and 2014; and 44% in 2015 to date.

Lao's last case of indigenous wild poliovirus was reported in 1993.

Public health response

Comprehensive outbreak response activities are taking place in response to this outbreak, in line with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative Standard Operating Procedures for responding to a poliovirus outbreak. A joint team of the Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the Lao Office of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team travelled to the province for further assessment on 7 October. A rapid survey conducted in the affected village showed low vaccine coverage for OPV. Active case finding in the surroundings of the case's household is ongoing; stool specimens are being collected from healthy children in the case household and community.

Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) at the national and province level have been activated to coordinate outbreak response activities. Preparations are under way for large-scale supplementary OPV immunization campaigns covering Bolikhamxay province and several adjacent provinces. The scope of additional campaigns will be ascertained following completion of the ongoing investigations.

WHO risk assessment

Circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs) are rare but well-documented strains of poliovirus mutated from strains in oral polio vaccine (OPV). They can emerge in some populations that are inadequately immunized.

Ending polio for good requires eliminating both wild and vaccine-derived polio, and due to the risk of cVDPVs, use of OPV must be stopped to secure a lasting polio-free world. OPV will be withdrawn in a phased manner, beginning with the removal of type 2-containing OPV. The switch from trivalent to bivalent OPV, planned in April 2016, will reduce the risk of cVDPV substantially (as 90% of cVDPV is caused by type 2) and sets the stage to eventually stop using OPV altogether and transition to the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which cannot cause cVDPV.

Because of relatively limited travel to and from this area and the planned immunization activities , the World Health Organization (WHO) assesses the risk of international spread of the cVDPV1 from Lao to be low.

WHO advice

It is important that all countries, in particular those with frequent travel and contacts with polio-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. Countries, territories and areas should also maintain uniformly high routine immunization coverage at the district level to minimize the consequences of any new virus introduction.

WHO's International Travel and Health recommends that all travelers to polio-affected areas be fully vaccinated against polio. Residents (and visitors for more than 4 weeks) from infected areas should receive an additional dose of OPV or inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) within 4 weeks to 12 months of travel.

source: http://www.who.int/

World Health Organization leaders along with Public Health Director James Gillan and Governor Eddie Calvo presided over the opening ceremony of the 66th Session of the WHO Regional Committee.
Gov. Calvo talks about the health issues that arise from climate change which forces more and more migrants to Guam. This puts Guam in a predicament as it wants to welcome all people but it struggles to provide healthcare to everyone. One of the issues Calvo focused on was tuberculosis.

"We have the potential to become a petri dish as migrants, tourists and international travelers touch ground on here as a real life example I know that the who is trying to eradicate tuberculosis. While immunization is available here on Guam and many other communities, this treatment is not available to everyone within this western pacific region," said Calvo

Calvo says that Guam is the educational Hub of the region and every year, there are at least one or two cases of TB every year. While Guam is fortunate to prevent the spread of TB, The issue becomes the rising price of the vaccination for TB.

"We want to make some comments about how the United States Pharmaceutical industry through licensing and patent agreements has actually jacked up the price of resistant strain medicine; to the point where it's almost unaffordable. We had one company, just recently, purchase the manufacturing right for a drug we used to pay 500-dollars for a 30-day supply for multiple resistant strains of Tuberculosis, it now cost 10-thousand, 600 dollars," said Gillan

Gillan says the rising costs of medication are one of the things WHO health officials will discuss during the week long session. Tomorrow the group will discuss viral hepatitis and tuberculosis. On Wednesday, the group will discuss one of Guam's main issues, Domestic Violence.
Guam - It's been 43 years since the last time the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Western Pacific was on Guam. Today, at the opening ceremonies, delegates from 37 nations, including Guam, were on hand to discuss a number of things including Guam's health issues.

source: http://www.pacificnewscenter.com/