| No images? Click here  Wednesday, 4 September 2024 Post-presser links Media briefing held on 4 September 2024 WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing – 4 September 2024 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, First, to Gaza. On Sunday, WHO and our partners began a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza. Over the first three days, we vaccinated more than 187,000 children up to 10 years old in central Gaza. Families have been eager to participate, telling our vaccination teams about children nearby who also should be vaccinated. Thanks to the community’s active participation, health workers were able to vaccinate more children than expected. Four fixed sites will continue to offer polio vaccination for the next three days in central Gaza to ensure no child is missed. WHO also provided supplies and training to health workers in areas not covered by the humanitarian pause to ensure children in those areas are also protected. Today we are preparing the logistics, cold chains, teams and communications to begin vaccination in southern Gaza tomorrow. We thank the health workers, UNICEF, UNRWA and the many other partners and countries in the region and beyond who have supported this campaign. Together, we are helping to prevent the spread of polio in Gaza. But other health needs remain immense. We acknowledge that the humanitarian pause has been respected to allow the vaccination campaign to be conducted safely and successfully. We ask not only for that to remain the case, but also for a ceasefire. === Now, an update on the mpox outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighbouring countries. We expect the first delivery of vaccines to arrive in DRC tomorrow, donated by the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, or HERA. DRC’s Ministry of Health plans to begin deploying the vaccines this weekend. WHO is working with our partners to coordinate vaccine demands, share information on doses available, and ensure those doses are directed to areas where they can contribute to controlling the outbreak. I thank the European Union and the European Commission for its donation, and we call on countries with stockpiles of vaccines to work with us and our partners to get those vaccines to where they are needed now. We have also been supporting DRC and other countries to ensure the necessary cold chain systems are in place, to support communications campaigns to provide information about vaccination, and to counter mis- and disinformation. Vaccination is one part of the continental response plan that WHO has been developing with the Africa CDC, and which we expect to publish on Friday. But vaccines alone won’t stop these outbreaks. We’re also working to strengthen surveillance, risk communication, community engagement, clinical and home care, and coordination between partners at every level. === Today, WHO has published new data on cholera for 2023, showing an increase in both cases and deaths. The number of reported deaths from cholera last year increased by 71% compared with 2022, and the number of cases increased by 13%. Cholera killed 4000 people last year, a disease that is preventable and easily treatable. Conflict, climate change, unsafe water and sanitation, poverty and displacement all contributed to the rise in cholera outbreaks last year. The geographical distribution of cholera also changed significantly, with cases from the Middle East and Asia declining by one-third, and cases from Africa more than doubling. Preliminary data show that the global cholera crisis continues into 2024, with 22 countries reporting active outbreaks. So far this year, more than 342,000 cases and 2400 deaths have been reported to WHO from all regions. The global cholera crisis has caused a severe shortage of cholera vaccines. Between 2021 and 2023, more doses were requested for outbreak response than the entire previous decade. About 36 million doses were produced last year, only half the amount requested by 14 affected countries. Since October 2022, the International Coordinating Group, which manages emergency vaccine supplies, has suspended the standard two-dose vaccination regimen, adopting a single-dose approach to reach and protect more people with limited supplies. There is currently only one manufacturer of cholera vaccines, EUBiologics, and we thank them for the work they are doing to expand production. We urge other manufacturers planning to enter the market to accelerate their efforts, and to make doses available at affordable prices. While vaccination is an important tool, safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene remain the only long-term and sustainable solutions to ending cholera outbreaks and preventing future ones. === Finally, today WHO is publishing a new framework to guide our Member States in the studies that need to be performed to understand the origins of pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. Understanding when, where, how and why outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics start is extremely challenging. But it is both a scientific imperative, to prevent future outbreaks, and a moral imperative for the sake of those who lose their lives to them. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most extreme example of this in recent years. The framework published today has been developed by the WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, or SAGO, a panel of independent experts which WHO established in 2021. I thank the Chair of SAGO, Dr Marietjie Venter, and the Vice-Chair Dr Jean-Claude Manuguerra for their leadership, and all the members for supporting the work of SAGO with their time and expertise. The framework outlines six areas in which scientific investigations are needed to identify the origins of outbreaks: early investigations; human studies; animal-human interface studies; environmental and ecological studies; genomic and phylogenetic studies; and laboratory biosafety and biosecurity assessments. It stresses the importance of timely, comprehensive scientific investigations, of building research capacity, and the necessity of sharing results rapidly when they become available. This framework should be used by Member States each time a new pathogen emerges. It would have been useful to implement when COVID-19 struck. However, even with a framework in place, it requires the cooperation, collaboration and transparency of all Member States. We still don’t know how the COVID-19 pandemic began, and unfortunately, the work to understand its origins remains unfinished. SAGO is now finalizing its independent assessment of how the COVID-19 pandemic began. As I have said many times, including to senior Chinese leaders, China’s cooperation is absolutely critical to that process. That includes sharing information on the Huanan Seafood Market, the earliest known and suspected cases of COVID-19, and the work done at laboratories in Wuhan, China. Without this information, none of us are able to rule any hypothesis out. Until or unless China shares this data, the origins of COVID-19 will largely remain unknown. Christian, back to you. *************** Audio files: Length: 53 mins Download and listen: https://who.canto.global/b/J9I9E Weblink: https://terrance.who.int/mediacentre/presser/WHO-AUDIO_Press_Conference_04SEP2024.mp3  Media contacts:  You are receiving this NO-REPLY email because you are included on a WHO mail list.  |
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Post-presser links: Media briefing held on 4 September 2024
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