3 decades in, a global push to wipe out polio has fueled tremendous progress—bringing wild polio cases down from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 22 in 2017—but fallen short of eradicating the disease.
October 23, 2018
We are very close to eradicating polio, with just 3 countries experiencing ongoing transmission: Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Polio is usually tracked based on reports of acute flaccid paralysis. The condition only occurs in a tiny proportion of cases, but reveals the…
October 22, 2018
In Mauritania, HIV services are free—but in the conservative Muslim nation, the shame of being seen using them creates its own barrier to access. An EU/UN initiative is looking to upend pervasive myths about the disease and its transmission, but evasive communication poses…
October 22, 2018
Deadly rebel attacks hit the epicenter of the DRC’s Ebola outbreak this weekend, redoubling concerns for the safety of response teams as violence hampers efforts to fight the virus. Rebels targeted army positions in Beni, killing 13 civilians and abducting a dozen children…
October 18, 2018
72 babies born with microcephaly—plus 2 WHO-confirmed cases—indicate “strong evidence” of a Zika cluster in Angola. But a lack of capacity for advanced testing coupled with a meager national health system mean tracking a potential outbreak will be difficult.
October 18, 2018
The Ebola outbreak unfolding in a Democratic Republic of Congo conflict zone does not amount to a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the WHO concluded yesterday.
October 15, 2018
Top CDC Ebola experts were pulled from the DRC’s outbreak zone amid security concerns several weeks ago, raising questions about the overall outbreak response. While the early deployment of an experimental vaccine showed promise in containing the outbreak quickly, ongoing…
October 11, 2018
Before it went on to take 50 million lives worldwide, Boston’s 1918 flu outbreak started with military personnel returning home to overcrowded barracks from the Great War. The city health commissioner William Creighton Woodward had seen flu outbreaks before, but not like…
October 4, 2018
HIV prevalence in Nigeria is about 4%. But among gay men and MSM this figure is more like 30% with untold numbers of men—and the women they marry to avoid suspicion—unaware of their status. Stigma means that many will not seek health services, while a lack of training for…
October 3, 2018
Economic collapse has pushed over a million Venezuelans across the border to Colombia in the past 18 months, marking “the biggest exodus of people in modern Latin American history,” Thomson Reuters Foundation reports. After arriving in Colombia, Venezuelan HIV/AIDS patients…