Volunteers across South Sudan are battling to eradicate polio among children under five in South Sudan, through a five-day “house to house” campaign, organized by the Ministry of Health of the government of South Sudan, and the World Health Organization.
The 2nd Global Forum on Human Resources for Health begins tomorrow in Bangkok. Health workers will be at the centre of the debate…
We need community workers, cars and fuel to physically go out, find these children, bring them back and save their lives.
And we need to help families in the longer term. They need food now, but they also needs to be protected from having to sell seeds and tools for just a few days of food.
The WHA is seen by some as an ineffective UN meeting but it has much greater legitimacy than the G8/G20 on account of its democracy. Unlike the rich countries’ clubs of the G8 and G20, all countries, however poor, have the right to speak out and to vote.
I’m working on a health proposal today; pulling together information from our work, reports, the internet, the news.
Malnutrition rates have broken the emergency threshold. Not far from here the number of children who die before they are five is at one and half times the emergency level, and almost three times the average for sub-saharan Africa.
But, despite all this, I’m feeling really optimistic. I genuinely think this situation can be changed. Nothing here feels like a basket case, a black hole. It feels like a place stuffed with potential and possibility, just waiting for a chance to shine.
Imagine being responsible for the health care of 1.3 billion people in a country the size of the United States! That is the job of the People’s Republic of China’s Minister of Health, Professor Chen Zhu, a medical doctor and a native of Shanghai with a background in academia and research in haematology and molecular biology.
