Health | WPN World People News

The largest-ever immunization response in the Middle East is under way this week, aiming to vaccinate more than 23 million children against polio in Syria and neighbouring countries over the coming weeks.

One month after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, WHO identifies as top priorities expanding essential health services, reviving clinics and hospitals, preventing disease and scaling up mental health services as the relief effort shifts from emergency to early recovery programmes.

Fifty years after the approval of an extremely effective vaccine against measles, one of the world’s most contagious diseases, the virus still poses a threat to domestic and global health security.

Men with hormone-sensitive metastatic prostate cancer who received the chemotherapy drug docetaxel given at the start of standard hormone therapy lived longer than patients who received hormone therapy alone, according to early results from a National Institutes of Health-supported randomized controlled clinical trial.

The prostate gland rests below the bladder

As many as 500 000 people suffer a spinal cord injury each year. People with spinal cord injuries are 2 to 5 times more likely to die prematurely, with worse survival rates in low- and middle-income countries. The new WHO report, "International perspectives on spinal cord injury", summarizes the best available evidence on the causes, prevention, care and lived experience of people with spinal cord injury.

At a White House event to mark the 25th annual World AIDS Day, President Obama announced that the National Institutes of Health plans to redirect AIDS research funds to expand support for research directed toward a cure for HIV. NIH plans to invest an additional $100 million over the next three fiscal years on this increasingly promising area of HIV/AIDS research.

U.N. data show the HIV/AIDS infection rate in South Sudan has dropped from 3.1 percent in 2001 to 2.7 percent last year, but success in fighting the disease could be undone by low levels of testing and treatment, officials said on World AIDS Day.

Researchers can now freely access the first batch of genome sequence data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced. The ADSP is one of the first projects undertaken under an intensified national program of research to prevent or effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease.