Health Policy Watch

1 week ago | healthpolicy-watch.news | Elaine Ruth Fletcher

The World Health Organization decried Thursday’s direct hit by Iran on one of Israel’s largest hospitals, Soroka Medical Center, which put the 1200-bed facility serving most of the country’s southern region largely out of operation. In an X post, WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also deplored the deaths of three Iranian Red Crescent Society health workers three days ago, following an Israeli airstrike on Tehran three days ago.

3 weeks ago | healthpolicy-watch.news | Elaine Ruth Fletcher

Most countries’ climate action plans refer to the health benefits of adaptation and mitigation strategies, such as reduced air pollution, but few actually track them. And as World Environment Day is observed Thursday, global climate commitments remain extraordinarily weak. Only 21 countries out of the 195 parties to the UN Paris Agreement have submitted updated national climate action plans (Nationally Determined Commitments) through the year 2035 – nearly four months after the plans were due.

1 month ago | healthpolicy-watch.news | Disha Shetty

Global temperatures are expected to remain near record levels over the next five years, and there is an 80% chance that at least one of the next five years will exceed 2024 as the warmest on record. This is the key takeaway from a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The temperature rise is expected to worsen the climate impacts on countries, their economies, and sustainable development. “We have just experienced the 10 warmest years on record.

1 month ago | healthpolicy-watch.news | Elaine Ruth Fletcher

A new WHO Climate and Health Action plan was approved by a key World Health Assembly Committee Tuesday evening – after hours of high-stakes, high drama parliamentary maneuvers by a cluster of oil-rich WHO member states to shelve the plan failed.  WHO Member states accepted the original plan by a vote of 109-0, with 19 absentions. Hours earlier, the WHA rejected a Saudi-led initiative to delay approval of the plan for another year by a vote of 86-23 with 11 abstentions.

1 month ago | healthpolicy-watch.news | Kerry Cullinan

From hospitals facing up to 80% antibiotic resistance to gonorrhoea that is resistant to almost all treatment, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious and growing problem, countries told the World Health Assembly (WHA) on Tuesday. But it has been 10 years since the global action plan on antimicrobial resistance was adopted, and the WHA endorsed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposal to present an updated plan to next year’s assembly.