Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Nearly four months after its reappearance in Haiti, the number of cholera victims has risen to 496 dead, the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) reported Saturday.

The country has already registered 25,182 suspected cases and 21,407 hospitalized, 73 new, while 312 of the 496 deaths occurred in health institutions and 184 in the communities.

In a bulletin, the health authorities state that the average age of those infected is 19 years, and the positivity rate is 37.25%.

56.60% of the accumulated suspected cases are men, and the remaining are women. The most affected age group is 1 to 4 years old, with 374 confirmed cases out of more than 3,000 suspected cases.

The most affected department is the West, where Port-au-Prince is located and where more than one-third of the population lives, with 1,155 confirmed cases for 16,408 suspected cases.

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned last week that the world is suffering unprecedented cholera outbreaks in countries affected by climate disasters and other crises. As a result, vaccines to prevent this disease have become “extremely scarce.”

According to the UK Health Safety Agency, which designed an outbreak categorization system to describe potential monkeypox transmission scenarios, the second level of outbreak means that a local transmission scenario already exists within a defined subpopulation.

Given this, the DS classified Puerto Rico as being in the second level of the outbreak, because 83.1% of confirmed cases had no travel history, and the most commonly reported transmission route is prolonged and direct close contact, of the type skin to skin.

“31 countries have reported outbreaks, more widespread and lethal than normal, and the figure is 50% higher than in previous years,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, warned at a press conference in 2022.

Tedros emphasized that Haiti, Syria, and Malawi are among the most affected countries and that the simultaneous outbreaks have resulted in a vaccine shortage, prompting the international immunization coordination mechanism to reduce the doses administered to each patient. 

“Despite this unprecedented measure, stocks remain very low and production is at its maximum capacity,” Tedros lamented, urging countries that have recently experienced outbreaks to step up prevention of potential new infections.

e, Livestock, and the Environment of the affected countries. “We want to appeal to the public to calm down. We have been actively warning about this situation since March of this year, particularly last September due to the start of bird migrations from North America to South America,” said Andrés González, FAO Livestock, Animal Health, and Biodiversity Officer.

“We have active coordination with international organizations, and we are managing ways to assist recently affected countries,” he added. He also stated that there is no scientific evidence that HPAI is transmitted to humans through the consumption of birds or properly prepared eggs. González explained that the countries’ prevention, early detection, and response plans are being supported in the regional emergency of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza with the assistance of national representations, through an incident command group led by the FAO’s Animal Health division, and in close coordination with the regional steering committee of the Global Framework for the Progressive Control of Transboundary Diseases of Animals (GF-TADs).

Latin America and the Caribbean produce 20.4% of the world’s poultry meat and 10% of the world’s eggs, making this a vital sector for the livelihoods of millions of small and medium-sized agricultural producers. As a result, it is critical to activate the region’s emergency protocols as soon as possible.

Only the fact that they are two males was provided, but the current state of the admitted passengers, as well as their nationality, are unknown, though it is assumed that they are foreigners.

Until now, no information has been released by the corresponding authorities, about the origin of the cruise and where the boat was heading, which according to information, has already left the Dominican port.

However, “the coronavirus will not disappear; it will continue, and countries will have to learn to manage it alongside other respiratory problems such as the flu,” Tedros said, adding that the 90% drop in mpox cases encourages hope for a quick resolution to this health crisis.

Tedros recalled that the criteria for determining whether the covid pandemic is no longer an international emergency will be discussed at the next meeting of the committee of experts, which has met quarterly since 2020 to analyze the evolution of the health crisis.

The WHO chief emphasized that, while the number of cases in both the covid and mpox crises is declining, the world still faces numerous health challenges, citing the cholera outbreaks currently declared in 29 countries, including the one that has killed 280 people in Haiti.

The rise in cases is primarily due to two factors, lamented this community health specialist on World AIDS Day this Thursday: The lack of fuel paralyzed Haiti, preventing patients from attending medical appointments, and insecurity prevented people living in the so-called “red zones” from visiting health centers to receive care.

According to the most recent Ministry of Public Health and Population data, there are approximately 150,000 people in Haiti living with HIV/AIDS, 145,000 of who are adults and 5,700 of whom are children. 85% of those infected with the virus are aware of their situation, and 90% are receiving treatment. In 2021, 4,300 people became infected with HIV and 1,500 died from AIDS-related illnesses, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to 217,000 since the outbreak began.

Women account for 59% of those living with HIV, making them the most vulnerable to the disease due to factors such as higher poverty, more visits to health centers than men, greater vulnerability, and a lack of economic and financial autonomy. According to health officials, approximately 133,000 people have active access to antiretrovirals, to eradicate the disease in Haiti by 2030.

Scientists say they have made a breakthrough designing a vaccine against all 20 known types of flu.

It uses the same messenger-ribonucleic-acid (mRNA) technology as successful Covid vaccines.

Flu mutates and the current annual jab is updated to ensure the best match for the sort circulating but would probably not protect against new pandemic types.

The new vaccine triggered high levels of antibodies, in tests on ferrets and mice, that could fight a broad range.

The antigens it contains – safe copies of recognisable bits of all 20 known subtypes of influenza A and B viruses – can teach the immune system how to fight them and, hopefully, any new strain that could spark a pandemic, the researchers say, in the journal Science.

“The idea here is to have a vaccine that will give people a baseline level of immune memory to diverse flu strains,” Dr Scott Hensley, one of the scientists behind the work, at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“There will be far less disease and death when the next flu pandemic occurs.”

The 2009 swine flu pandemic – caused by a virus that jumped species to infect humans – was less serious than initially feared.

But the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is thought to have killed tens of millions of people.

Director of the Institute for Global Health and Emerging Pathogens at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York, Adolfo García-Sastre, said: “Current influenza vaccines do not protect against influenza viruses with pandemic potential.

“This vaccine, if it works well in people, would achieve this.

“The studies are preclinical, in experimental models.

“They are very promising and, although they suggest a protective capacity against all subtypes of influenza viruses, we cannot be sure until clinical trials in volunteers are done.”

Estanislao Nistal, a virologist at San Pablo University, said: “All of this implies the potential for an easily and rapidly constructed universal vaccine that could be of great use in the event of a pandemic outbreak of a novel influenza virus.”  (BBC)

Nearly half of the world's population, or 3.5 billion people, suffer from oral diseases, the majority of them in low- and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.

The most common oral illnesses are tooth decay, severe gum disease, tooth loss and oral cancers, with untreated tooth decay affecting nearly 2.5 billion people, the United Nations agency said.

About 380,000 new cases of oral cancers are diagnosed every year, it said.

HAITI SEES A SURPRISE RETURN OF CHOLERA, AS A GANG BLOCKADE CAUSES A SHORTAGE OF DRINKING WATER

WHO cited large out-of-pocket expenditure and the unavailability of highly specialized dental equipment in primary healthcare facilities as two of the reasons for the high prevalence of oral diseases, especially in poor countries.

"Oral health has long been neglected in global health, but many oral diseases can be prevented," said WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The agency suggested countries include equitable oral health services as part of their national planning and integrate oral health services into their primary health care models, while also improving access to affordable fluoride toothpaste, among other measures.

SOURCE: AP — The World Health Organization says it’s holding an open forum to rename the disease monkeypox, after some critics raised concerns the name could be derogatory or have racist connotations.

In a statement Friday, the UN health agency said it has also renamed two families, or clades, of the virus, using Roman numerals instead of geographic areas, to avoid stigmatisation. The version of the disease formerly known as the Congo Basin will now be known as Clade one or I and the West Africa clade will be known as Clade two or II.

WHO said the decision was made following a meeting of scientists this week and in line with current best practices for naming diseases, which aims to “avoid causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional, or ethnic groups, and minimize any negative impact on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare.”

Numerous other diseases, including Japanese encephalitis, Marburg virus, Spanish influenza and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome have been named after the geographic areas where they first arose or were identified. WHO has not publicly suggested changing any of those names.

Monkeypox was first named in 1958 when research monkeys in Denmark were observed to have a “pox-like” disease, although they are not thought to be the animal reservoir.

WHO said it was also opening a way for the public to suggest new names for monkeypox, but did not say when any new name would be announced.

To date, there have been more than 31,000 cases of monkeypox identified globally since May, with the majority of those beyond Africa. Monkeypox has been endemic in parts of central and west Africa for decades and was not known to trigger large outbreaks beyond the continent until May.

WHO declared the global spread of monkeypox to be an international emergency in July and the US declared its own epidemic to be a national emergency earlier this month.

Outside of Africa, 98 percent of cases are in men who have sex with men. With only a limited global supply of vaccines, authorities are racing to stop monkeypox before it becomes entrenched as a new disease.

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