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In marking World Polio Day, advocates for a polio-free world are urging nations to commit to a new five-year strategy to eradicate this crippling disease and consign it to the trash bin of history.

An estimated 350,000 children were paralyzed by polio when the World Health Organization launched its Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988. In the world today, polio is endemic only in Pakistan, and Afghanistan. So far this year, 29 cases have been recorded, putting the possibility of a polio-free world within reach.

The WHO notes the final stretch is the most difficult and cautions nations against letting down their guard too soon. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the 29 recorded cases include a small number in southeast Africa linked to a strain originating in Pakistan.

“While it does not affect the WHO African region’s wild polio free certification, it shows us that as long as polio continues to circulate anywhere, it is a threat to children everywhere. Despite this news, we have a unique window of opportunity right now to end polio for good.”

The WHO warns polio also can spread within communities through circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. These variants, it notes, can emerge in places where not enough people have been immunized against this crippling disease. It reports these variants continue to spread across parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe and new outbreaks have been detected in Britain, Israel and the United States in recent months.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell says the new polio eradication strategy is designed to take the world to the finish line. She says the strategy includes tactics to protect children from variant outbreaks and stop their spread to other countries.

“We are also working with governments to speed up our response to these outbreaks, acting immediately to ensure that they do not harm more children,” Russel said. “And we continue working to integrate polio activities with other immunization and health programs so we can reach high-risk children who have never received vaccines before. The new strategy will help us end all forms of polio. It will also help prepare countries to respond to future health threats.”   

If this goal is reached, polio will become only the second disease after smallpox to have been wiped off the face of the Earth. U.N. health agencies say it will cost $4.8 billion to achieve this historic milestone.    

The economic returns, they say, will be significant. They estimate eradicating polio would result in savings of more than $33 billion.    
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Authorities in Cameroon say they are struggling to contain a cholera outbreak in an overcrowded refugee camp on its northern border with Nigeria. In the past week, three people have died in the Minawao refugee camp and at least 81 have been infected from the bacteria, which spreads through dirty water and food. The camp was designed to hold fewer than 15,000 refugees but currently has more than five times that number.

The camp located on Cameroon’s northern border is home to 76,000 Nigerians who have fled Boko Haram terrorist attacks.

Helen Ngoh, spokesperson for UNHCR Cameroon says the U.N. body needs support to contain the ongoing wave of infections and to prevent future outbreaks in the refugee camp.

“In Minawao specifically UNHCR needs at least 450,000 U.S. dollars to be able to increase portable water supply and also to be able to cover an existing gap of 900 latrines and to be able to improve waste management in the camp as well. All of these needs are extremely urgent at this point,” she said.

UNHCR says it is investigating suspected cases and treating patients free of charge. The refugee agency says it is also finding out if the disease has spread to host communities.

Ngoh said several hundred humanitarian workers have been deployed to the camp and host communities to educate refugees on prevention measures, which she said are basically respecting hygiene rules.

Nigerian refugee Special Bulama is among aid workers raising awareness about the outbreak and teaching civilians good hygiene practices.

Bulama says he has personally spoken about the disease to scores of families in the camp.

“We are telling the refugees to take care of themselves, they must boil water before they take [drink], they must wash their hands with Sabulu [soap], keep their latrines very safe because flies can take this disease to their food or to their water. We are telling them to help us to avoid this problem of cholera,” he said.

Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health has confirmed the outbreak. Government health officials say at least 22 people have died of cholera in several villages on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria and Chad. Humanitarian workers and health officials say many more people may be infected or are feared dead in difficult to access villages within the past two weeks.

The U.N. reports that up to October, more than 1,000 cases of cholera were reported in Nigeria.

Cameroon says hospitals in border localities are overwhelmed.

Officials in Cameroon say they are engaged in discussions with Nigeria and Chad to jointly combat cholera, a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration, usually spread through contaminated water. It can be fatal if not treated.
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Photos of Zarghoona Wadood sightseeing in Egypt with two other wheelchair-using women went viral last year in Pakistan, becoming a symbol of what women with disabilities can do.

Wadood was just 7 months old when polio paralyzed her legs. Her parents didn’t know to get her vaccinated.

“I can’t even move from my bed unless the wheelchair is near me … the wheelchair is a part of me now,” Wadood, now 38 and employed with the U.N. World Food Program, told VOA.

She is one of thousands of Pakistanis disabled by polio, an incurable and highly infectious viral disease that can infect a person’s spinal cord, causing muscles to stop working.

The invention of polio vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s wiped the disease from the industrialized world, and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative launched in 1988 largely eliminated the disease through mass vaccination campaigns in the developing world as well.

As the global health community marks World Polio Day on Oct. 24, only Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to grapple with the wild polio virus.

In Pakistan

After 15 months without any reported cases of the wild polio virus, Pakistan has recorded 20 cases since April — 17 in the former tribal region of North Waziristan that borders Afghanistan and three from nearby areas.

Dr. Shahzad Baig, who leads Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Program blames a poor security situation, migration patterns, harassment of polio teams, mistrust of the vaccine, and complicity among members of local communities and polio workers to find ways to circumvent vaccination enforcement.

“They are not confident that [the vaccine] is safe for the children,” Baig told VOA. “They think that the government is forcing this vaccine on the children, [so] there is some hidden agenda.”

Despite Pakistan’s decades-long Polio Eradication Program, many Pakistanis still believe the vaccine will make their children infertile or that it contains pork-based ingredients forbidden by Islamic scripture. In 2019, a rumor that the vaccine was making children sick caused a spike in refusals. That year ended with Pakistan recording 149 cases, significantly more than the year before.

And the vaccine has become a bargaining chip used to pressure the government to meet a community’s needs.

“So, the roads, the bridges, you know, electricity and anything they want there, when the campaign comes, they will say, ‘You do that and that is when we will accept the vaccination,’” Baig said.

Local customs also leave children vulnerable to the virus. Often male health workers cannot enter homes in the absence of a male member of the household. In more conservative communities that don’t allow women to work, the lack of female polio workers further limits access to children.

Baig told VOA that less than 1% of polio team members in former tribal areas are women.

Saira Abid, a polio worker from North Waziristan, told VOA it breaks her heart that most of the polio cases were recorded in her ancestral village.

Displaced by the military operation against terrorists in 2014 and forced by financial hardship to break tradition, Abid has been working as a community health worker in Peshawar since 2015.

“Whenever I go to my village, I see the word ‘locked’ chalked on the wall because men are not allowed to go inside,” Abid said. During a mass-vaccination campaign, polio workers mark the vaccination status of each household on a wall by the main door.

While Abid feels comfortable working in Peshawar’s urban setting, she says it’s not safe for her to work in her village because of strict local customs and the presence of militants. In June, three members of a polio team were killed and another injured in North Waziristan.

Safety is a long-running issue for polio workers in Pakistan. Many have been killed by either militants who see vaccination as part of a Western agenda or attacked by parents angry at being pressed to vaccinate their children.

In Afghanistan

Polio worker safety is also an issue across the border in Afghanistan, where eight polio workers were killed in separate attacks in February.

Remarkably, Afghanistan has recorded only two cases of wild polio virus so far this year, indicating the lowest level of the virus in the country’s history, according to the World Health Organization.

However, Afghanistan’s cases of vaccine-derived polio stand at 43. The vaccine uses a weak form of the polio virus, which can sometime infect a separate, unvaccinated person.

“If we succeed to implement the planned polio campaigns with high coverage of 95%, we can interrupt the circulation of polio virus by the end of 2022,” Kamal Shah Sayed, a UNICEF spokesperson in Afghanistan, told VOA earlier this year.

The Taliban pledged support for polio campaigns after taking control of Afghanistan last August, but for three years before that, they banned vaccination drives in areas under their control.

Since November 2021, at least seven campaigns have been conducted in Afghanistan.

World Polio Day

On World Polio Day, Afghanistan is wrapping up an immunization campaign while Pakistan is launching one.

From 3.6 million children inaccessible in Afghanistan in 2018, a WHO statement in August said the number of children missing vaccination had fallen to 700,000.

In Pakistan, despite frequent anti-polio drives, more than 400,000 children are missed every year, according to the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Baig of Pakistan’s Polio Eradication Program is concerned that the summer’s massive flooding has increased the risk of polio spreading via unsanitary conditions, and flood victims unhappy with government relief efforts may boycott the campaign to pressure authorities to provide them better facilities.

Zarghoona Wadood, who toured Egypt last year, is also a disability rights activist. She wants parents to learn from her experience and vaccinate their children against polio, just as her parents did for her three younger siblings.

“No matter what I am, I still have a disability, everybody cannot have the same strength that I have,” Wadood told VOA. “A lot of people give up and they isolate themselves … so why are you doing this to your children?”
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India launched a rocket carrying 36 private internet satellites on early Sunday, stepping in to keep the orbital constellation growing after a monthslong interruption related to the war in Ukraine.

The liftoff from southern India was the first launch for London-based OneWeb since breaking with the Russian Space Agency in March because of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We have accomplished the orbit very accurately, now the rocket is in its intended orbit,” said S. Somanath, the chairperson of India’s space agency. He said 16 satellites were put into orbit and expressed optimism that “the remaining 20 satellites will get separated as safely as the first of the 16.”

OneWeb now has 462 satellites flying — more than 70% of what the company said it needs to provide broadband services around the world. Despite this year’s disruption, OneWeb said it remains on track to activate global coverage next year with a planned constellation of 648 satellites. It’s already providing service in the northernmost latitudes.

Each OneWeb satellite weighs about 330 pounds (150 kilograms).

It was the 14th launch of OneWeb satellites and relied on India’s heaviest rocket, normally reserved for government spacecraft. All of the previous OneWeb flights were on Russian rockets; the first was in 2019.

The launch is important for India and reflects the gradual opening of its space agency to private customers, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, a director specializing in space and security at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Rajagopalan said India is an expert at launching smaller satellites and has been trying to corner this market, pitching itself as a satellite launch facility.

With the war in Ukraine still raging, it could open an opportunity for India as many countries shun Russian launch services.

“It could spur that trend in a big way,” she said.
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Two more people in an isolation unit of Uganda’s main hospital have tested positive for Ebola, bringing total cases recorded in the facility to five, the health minister said on Sunday.

The five confirmed cases in Kampala are the first known transmission of the virus in the city, coming days after the information ministry said the country’s Ebola outbreak was coming under control and was expected to be over by the end of the year.

Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said on Saturday that three patients among 60 people in isolation at Kampala’s Mulago Hospital tested positive for the disease a day earlier.

She had said the three infected people had been in contact with a patient from Kassanda district in central Uganda who had died in Mulago.

“Two more contacts to the Kassanda case, who are quarantined in Mulago Isolation facility, tested positive for Ebola yesterday…” Aceng said on Twitter.

She added the two had been transferred to a treatment unit at a hospital in Entebbe, 41 km (25 miles) away.

The government has introduced a three-week lockdown around the Mubende and Kassanda districts in central Uganda, the epicenter of the outbreak of the Sudan variant of the Ebola virus.

A government statement on Friday said the outbreak had by then infected 65 people and killed 27. It was not clear if the numbers included the three first new Kampala cases.

The government said last week two other cases of Ebola confirmed in Kampala had come from Mubende and were regarded as originating there, not the capital.
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U.S. health regulators Friday estimated that BQ.1 and closely related BQ.1.1 accounted for 16.6% of coronavirus variants in the country, nearly doubling from last week, while Europe expects them to become the dominant variants in a month. 

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said the variants are likely to drive up cases in the coming weeks to months in the European region. 

The two variants are descendants of Omicron’s BA.5 subvariant, which is the dominant form of the coronavirus in the United States. Regulators in Europe and the U.S. have recently authorized vaccine boosters that target it. 

There is no evidence yet that BQ.1 is linked with increased severity compared with the circulating Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5, European officials said, but warned it may evade some immune protection, citing laboratory studies in Asia. 

“These variants [BQ.1 and BQ.1.1] can quite possibly lead to a very bad surge of illness this winter in the U.S. as it’s already starting to happen in Europe and the U.K.,” said Gregory Poland, a virologist and vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic. 

In the U.S., weekly cases have been falling recently, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

The amount of coronavirus found in wastewater samples tested by Biobot Analytics has been basically flat around the United States over the last six weeks. Wastewater samples often predict possible spikes in COVID-19 ahead of the CDC data. 

New variants are monitored closely by regulators and vaccine manufacturers in case they start to evade protection offered by current shots. 

The World Health Organization this week said BQ.1.1 is circulating in at least 29 countries. 

The U.S. CDC said Friday that BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 last week were estimated to make up 9.4% of circulating variants. 
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As China’s ruling Communist Party holds a congress this week, many Beijing residents are focused on an issue not on the formal agenda: Will the end of the meeting bring an easing of the at times draconian “zero-COVID” policies that are disrupting lives and the economy?

It appears to be wishful thinking. As the world moves to a post-pandemic lifestyle, many across China have resigned themselves to lining up several times a week for COVID-19 tests, restrictions on their travels to other regions, and the ever-present possibility of a community lockdown.

“There is nothing we can do,” Zhang Yiming, 51, said this week at a park in Beijing. “If we look at the situation abroad, like the United States where over 1 million people have died, right? In China, although it is true that some aspects of our life are not convenient, such as travel and economy, it seems that there is no good solution.”

People are looking to the party congress, which ends Saturday, for two reasons. The meeting, which is held every five years and sets the national agenda for the next five, can send signals of possible changes in policy direction.

Secondly, authorities always tighten controls — COVID-19 and otherwise — before and during a major event to try to eliminate disruptions or distractions, so they could relax controls when the event ends.

Any hopes for an easing, though, appear to have been dashed before the congress. The Communist Party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a series of opinion pieces on the effectiveness of China’s “zero-COVID” approach, and health officials said last week China must stick with it.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, praised the policy at the opening ceremony of the congress. He said it had prioritized and protected people’s health and safety and made a “tremendous achievement in striking the balance between epidemic response and economic and social development.”

After an initial outbreak in early 2020 that killed more than 4,000 people and overflowed hospitals and morgues, China was largely successful in taming the virus while other countries were overwhelmed with it — a contrast trumpeted in Communist Party propaganda.

Then came omicron in late 2021. China had to employ ever more widespread restrictions to control the faster-spreading variant, locking down entire cites and starting regular testing of practically the entire population of 1.4 billion people.

The measures have bred simmering discontent, fed by instances of harsh enforcement that in some cases had tragic consequences.

During a two-month lockdown of Shanghai last spring, videos widely shared on social media showed officials breaking down apartment doors to drag unwilling residents to quarantine facilities. Children were also separated from their parents, because one or the other was infected.

Instances of hospitals denying treatment because of pandemic rules sparked outrage, including a woman in labor who lost her baby after she wasn’t allowed into a hospital during a lockdown of the city of Xi’an because she couldn’t show a negative COVID-19 test result.

While public protests are relatively rare in China, some people took to the streets in Shanghai and Dandong to protest harsh and prolonged lockdowns.

Last week, three days before the congress opened, banners were flung over an elevated roadway calling for Xi’s overthrow and an end to the “zero-COVID” policy. The incident spilled over into at least one other city, where photos shared on Twitter showed similar statements posted on a bus stop in the city of Xi’an.

Andy Chen, senior analyst at Trivium China, a Beijing-headquartered policy consultancy, said restrictions beyond the party congress should come as no surprise.

“All the conditions that have forced the government to put zero-COVID in place haven’t really changed,” he said, singling out the lack of an effective vaccine and the absence of sound home quarantine rules.

Even though vaccines are widely available, China’s homegrown versions don’t work as well as the Pfizer, Moderna and other shots developed elsewhere. China also has resisted vaccine mandates, keeping down vaccination rates. As of mid-October, 90% had received two shots, but only 57% had a booster shot.

Beijing authorities have doubled down on the hardline coronavirus policies during the congress.

Highway checkpoints into the city are heavily policed, with all entrants required to show a “green” code on a mobile phone app to prove they haven’t traveled to medium or high-risk areas.

Some express commuter bus lines between Beijing and neighboring Tianjin city and Hebei province have been suspended since Oct. 12.

Anyone who has been in a city, district, or neighborhood where even one case of coronavirus has been found within seven days is banned from entering the Chinese capital.

Within the city, the daily lives of residents are dictated by their health codes. They must use an app to scan the QR code of any facility they enter to show their status and log their whereabouts.

Without a green code and a negative coronavirus test result within 72 hours, people are not allowed into office buildings, shopping malls, restaurants and other public places. The policy means most of Beijing’s 21 million-plus residents take a coronavirus test at least two to three times a week.

And there is always the risk of a sudden lockdown. Officials in hazmat suits guarded entries to gated communities this week in Fengtai district, where five neighborhoods have been categorized as high-risk. Residents were not allowed to leave their compounds, and some shops were forced to close.

While the party congress has not provided the watershed moment that some have been hoping for, it may turn out to be the point at which the government begins to lay the groundwork for a long process of loosening restrictions, said Dr. Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University and an expert on public health in China.

Some factors suggest the government will be in no rush to open up, including a broad acceptance of the policy among those who are inconvenienced but have not experienced prolonged or repeated lockdowns.

“The vast, vast majority of the population goes on with their lives, unaffected, and that’s a much better policy from the government perspective to implement than, for example, forcing a vaccine mandate through the population,” Chen said.

But Huang noted signs of social instability, especially among the middle class and urban residents.

“I think the question is whether it has reached a tipping point that people really find this is not acceptable anymore,” he said. “We cannot tolerate that anymore. It remains to be seen even in the large cities, you know, how people are willing to tolerate draconian measures.”
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 A decade-old publicity stunt continues shaping modern life. Plus, satellite TV gets a serious upgrade, and the Webb telescope gives us another stunning image. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The World Health Organization warns physical inactivity can lead to the development of debilitating noncommunicable diseases and millions of premature deaths.

Data from 194 countries show governments are not doing enough to encourage their populations to engage in physical activity, including creating the opportunities for people to be more active and move around freely.

For example, the World Health Organization reports too few countries encourage active and sustainable transport. It notes just over 40% of countries have road design standards that make walking and cycling safer.

Fiona Bull, head of WHO’s physical activity unit within the Department of Health Promotion, said this neglect results in staggering economic, physical, and mental costs.

“Our estimates indicate that $27 billion a year or up to 2030, $300 billion dollars (in costs) could be averted if we increased physical activity,” she said. “It estimated that 500 million new cases of key important NCDs (noncommunicable diseases) and mental health conditions could be prevented by increasing physical activity.”

The report says nearly 500 million people will develop heart disease, obesity, diabetes or other noncommunicable diseases by 2030 due to inactivity.

Latest global estimates show 1.4 billion adults do not do enough physical activity to improve and protect their health. In 2016, it said, levels of inactivity among adults in high-income countries were double those in low-income countries.

The report finds women in most countries are less active than men, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean region and in the Americas. Juana Willumsen, technical officer in WHO’s physical activity unit, attributed this difference to lack of opportunities for women to engage in physical activity.

“Often women are finding it harder to access opportunities, finding it harder to find time to be physically active and to incorporate that within their day,” she said. “As well as many cultural barriers to physical activity. There are some cultures in which it is not currently seen as acceptable or appropriate for women to be active.”

The World Health Organization recommends adults engage in at least 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity. For children, it recommends 60 minutes of physical activity every day.

The good news is people do not have to run a marathon or participate in the Tour de France to stay healthy. WHO officials said all sorts of physical activity such as climbing stairs, walking, playing with the children, and doing household chores, are beneficial for health.

What is important, they said, is to keep moving.
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Canberra scientists are researching a mysterious new recreational drug not seen before in Australia. The Australian National University says the substance is a “close cousin” of ketamine, a controlled anesthetic used by doctors and veterinarians.

The new substance is known as “CanKet” — a Canberra ketamine. It was discovered at Australia’s first government-supported pill-testing center that started as a trial in the national capital earlier this year.

The research team says the new drug was handed in at Australia’s first pill-checking center in Canberra. The user thought it was ketamine but said its effects were unusual and wanted it checked by experts at the pill-monitoring service. The drug was presented in a “small plastic bag of crystals and powder.”

Australian National University scientists believe the new drug was probably imported from overseas. It is not known whether CanKet has side effects. It is chemically similar to ketamine but has characteristics that have not been seen previously.

Associate professor Malcolm McLeod of the Australian National University Research School of Chemistry told VOA that ketamine and its derivatives are becoming increasingly popular illicit drugs.

Ketamine is used in medicine and as a horse tranquilizer. It is also a popular recreational drug linked to a phenomenon known as the “k-hole” — a type of out-of-body experience. Common side effects include nightmares, hallucinations, high blood pressure and confusion.

It is typically injected, snorted, or taken orally.

In 2019, an estimated 9 million Australians — or more than 40% of the population aged over 14 — had illicitly used a drug, according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. The survey is a government-funded project that has been collecting data about alcohol, tobacco and drug consumption in Australia every two to three years since 1985.

The most popular illicit drugs were cannabis and cocaine. The survey showed that ketamine use rose from 0.4% of respondents in 2016 to 0.9% in 2019.
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The first Native American woman in space said Wednesday she is overwhelmed by the beauty and delicacy of Mother Earth and is channeling “positive energy” as her five-month mission gets underway.

NASA astronaut Nicole Mann said from the International Space Station that she’s received lots of prayers and blessings from her family and tribal community. She is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California.

Mann showed off the dream catcher she took up with her, a childhood gift from her mother that she’s always held dear. The small traditional webbed hoop with feathers is used to offer protection, and she said it’s given her strength during challenging times. Years before joining NASA in 2013, she flew combat in Iraq for the Marines.

“It’s the strength to know that I have the support of my family and community back home and that when things are difficult or things are getting hard or I’m getting burned out or frustrated, that strength is something that I will draw on to continue toward a successful mission,” Mann told The Associated Press, which gathered questions from members and tribal news outlets across the country.

Mann said she’s always heeded her mother’s advice on the importance of positive energy, especially on launch day.

“It’s difficult for some people maybe to understand because it’s not really tangible,” she said. “But that positive energy is so important, and you can control that energy, and it helps to control your attitude.”

Mann, 45, a Marine colonel and test pilot who was born in Petaluma, California, said it’s important to recognize there are all types of people aboard the space station. It’s currently home to three Americans, three Russians and one Japanese astronaut.

“What that does is it just highlights our diversity and how incredible it is when we come together as a human species, the wonderful things that we can do and that we can accomplish,” she said.

While fascinated with stars and space as a child, Mann said she did not understand who became astronauts or even what they did.

“Unfortunately, in my mind at that time, it was not in the realm of possibilities,” she said.

Now, she’s taking in the sweeping vistas of Earth from 260 miles (420 kilometers) up and hoping to see the constellations as she encourages youngsters to follow their dreams.

As for describing Earth from space, “the emotions are absolutely overwhelming,” she said. “It is an incredible scene of color, of clouds and land, and it’s difficult not to stay in the cupola (lookout) all day and just see our planet Earth and how beautiful she is, and how delicate and fragile she is against the blackest of black that I’ve ever seen — space — in the background.”

Mann rocketed into orbit with SpaceX on October 5. She’ll be up there until March. She and her husband, a retired Navy fighter pilot, have a 10-year-old son back home in Houston.

The first Native American in space, in 2002, was now-retired astronaut John Herrington of the Chickasaw Nation.
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The World Health Organization said Wednesday it is too early to lift the highest-level alert for the COVID-19 crisis, with the pandemic remaining a global health emergency despite recent progress.

The WHO’s emergency committee on COVID-19 met last week and concluded that the pandemic still constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a status it declared back in January 2020.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Wednesday that he agreed with the committee’s advice.

“The committee emphasized the need to strengthen surveillance and expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at risk,” he said, speaking from the UN health agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

The WHO first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a PHEIC on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.

Although declaration of a PHEIC is the internationally agreed mechanism for triggering an international response to such outbreaks, it was only in March, when Tedros described the worsening situation as a pandemic, that many countries woke up to the danger.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 622 million confirmed COVID-19 cases have been reported to WHO and more than 6.5 million deaths, although those numbers are believed to be significant underestimates.

According to WHO’s global dashboard, 263,000 new cases were reported in the previous 24 hours, while 856 new COVID-19 deaths had been reported in the past week.

Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that “the global situation has obviously improved since the pandemic began,” but warned that “the virus continues to change and there remain many risks and uncertainties.”

“The pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again,” he warned.

‘Surveillance has declined’

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, agreed, warning that there were still “millions of cases being reported each week, but our surveillance has declined.”

That decline is making it difficult to get a full overview of the situation and especially of how the virus is mutating. Van Kerkhove stressed that “the more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.”

The omicron variant accounts for basically all virus samples that are sequenced, with more than 300 sublineages of that variant recorded.

“All of the subvariants of omicron are showing increased transmissibility and properties of immune escape,” Van Kerkove said, adding that one new combination of two different subvariants was showing “significant immune evasion.”

“This is a concern for us because we need to ensure that the vaccines that are in use worldwide remain effective at preventing severe disease and death,” she said.

In light of the broad spread of new omicron subvariants, Van Kerkhove stressed that “countries need to be in a position to conduct surveillance to deal with increases in cases and perhaps deal with increases in hospitalizations.”

“We have to remain vigilant.”
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The eight most recent Ebola cases reported during the outbreak in Uganda have no known links with current patients, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, raising concerns about the spread of the deadly disease.

In a briefing, WHO said initial investigations into the cases by Uganda’s Ministry of Health had found they were not contacts of people already known to have Ebola.

“We remain concerned that there may be more chains of transmission and more contacts than we know about in the affected communities,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

There have been 60 confirmed and 20 probable cases since the outbreak began last month, and 44 deaths, the WHO said.

The strain spreading in Uganda is the Sudan strain, and the existing vaccines and therapies do not work against it.

However, the Ugandan government is collaborating with WHO to set up a trial of two vaccines in the early stages of development that target the Sudan strain — one developed by Oxford University and the Serum Institute, and one made by the Sabin Institute in the United States, WHO confirmed.

The U.S. has also sent experimental therapies to help tackle the outbreak.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Saturday that the government was implementing some lockdown measures, including restricting movement and closing places of worship and entertainment, in Mubende and Kassanda districts in central Uganda, the epicenter of the epidemic.
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The World Health Organization said on Wednesday it will temporarily suspend the standard two-dose vaccination regimen for cholera, replacing it with a single dose due to vaccine shortages and rising outbreaks worldwide. 

The U.N. agency said “the exceptional decision reflects the grave state of the cholera vaccine stockpile” at a time when countries like Haiti, Syria and Malawi are fighting large outbreaks of the deadly disease, which spreads through contact with contaminated water and food. 

As of October 9, Haiti had confirmed 32 cases and 18 deaths from the disease, while many cases were still awaiting confirmation. 

“The pivot in strategy will allow for the doses to be used in more countries, at a time of unprecedented rise in cholera outbreaks worldwide,” WHO said in a statement on Wednesday. 

The WHO’s emergencies director Mike Ryan told reporters in a briefing that the change in strategy was a sign of the “scale of the crisis” caused by a lack of focus on safe sanitation and immunization for all at risk. 

“It’s a sad day for us to have to go backwards,” he said. 

The one-dose strategy had proved to be effective as a response to cholera outbreaks, the agency said, although the duration of protection is limited and appears to be much lower in children. 

The disease often causes no or mild symptoms, but serious cases cause acute diarrhea and can kill within hours if untreated. 

Cholera cases have surged this year, especially in places of poverty and conflict, with outbreaks reported in 29 countries and fatality rates rising sharply. The WHO also said that climate change means that cholera is a risk in an increasing number of countries, as the bacteria causing the illness multiplies faster in warmer waters. 

A cholera outbreak in Syria has already killed at least 33 people, posing a danger across the frontlines of the country’s 11-year war and stirring fears in crowded camps for the displaced. 

A cholera outbreak in a north Cameroon refugee camp has killed three people and infected at least 36, the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday. 

The first case was confirmed on Saturday in the Minawao refugee camp, which hosts around 75,000 people who fled Boko Haram insurgents in neighboring Nigeria. 

 
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