Health | WPN World People News

Amid ongoing search and rescue operations being carried out in Nepal after Saturday’s devastating earthquake, WHO has taken leadership in coordinating medical relief for affected communities.

Using computer modeling, Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh and his colleagues found that nanoscale knobs, which form at the membrane of infected red blood cells, cause the cell stiffening that is in part responsible for the reduced blood flow that can turn malaria deadly. The findings represent a new understanding of the mechanisms behind the progression of malaria, opening a new avenue of research into therapies for the disease that infects close to 200 million people each year.

The World Bank Group’s Board of Executive Directors approved a total of US$5 million in new financing for The Gambia to strengthen primary health care services and improve community nutrition for the country’s most vulnerable children and women. The project is expected to reach approximately 477,000 direct beneficiaries (children under five and women aged 15-49 years) by 2019.

A large-scale, multicenter study has shown that emergency body cooling does not improve survival rates or reduce brain injury in infants and children with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest more than normal temperature control.

WHO is surging additional medical supplies and health workers into the earthquake-affected region to help the Government of Nepal provide rapid medical assistance to the thousands who have been injured in Saturday’s disaster.

Allowing more basic emergency medical service (EMS) staff to administer naloxone could reduce drug overdose deaths that involve opioids, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, “Disparity in Naloxone Administration by Emergency Medical Service Providers and the Burden of Drug Overdose in Rural Communities,” published in the American Journal of Public Health.