The United Nations agency responsible for aiding children is warning that the costs of coronavirus-related school closures out-weight the benefits, and that the pandemic poses substantial threats to children and their countries' long-term well-being.
Unprecedented quantities of vaccines could be produced by 28 manufacturers in 10 countries over the next two years to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN children's agency UNICEF said on Thursday, as it announced it would help lead efforts to procure and distribute them.
Nearly one in three children around the world have high levels of lead in their bloodstream, according to a new study, as widespread lead pollution puts millions of young people at risk of irreversible mental and physical damage.
Pneumonia killed more than 800,000 babies and young children last year: or one child every 39 seconds: despite being curable and mostly preventable, global health agencies said on Tuesday.
A third of the world's nearly 700 million children under five years old are undernourished or overweight and face lifelong health problems as a consequence, according to a grim UN assessment of childhood nutrition released on Tuesday.
Billions of people around the world are continuing to suffer from poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene, according to a new report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization. Some 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed* drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion lack basic** hand-washing facilities.
Ninety-eight countries reported more cases of measles in 2018 compared with 2017, and the world body warned that conflict, complacency and the growing anti-vaccine movement threatened to undo decades of work to tame the disease.
Poverty in Argentina has risen to its highest in eight years, a new report has revealed, with more than a third of the population now considered to be poor. The new survey, from the Catholic University of Argentina's Social Debt Observatory, found that 33.6% of Argentines were living below the poverty line in the third quarter of the year.
The World Health Organization has published “Coming of age”, an in-depth online feature to advocate for better health for adolescents. The package includes video, gifs, visuals, and features on a range of topics on adolescent health, spanning mental health, sexuality education, as well as violence against and among youth, which remains a leading cause of adolescent deaths world-wide.
The infant mortality rate in Brazil, which consistently went down since 1990, started going up in 2016. It is believed that the rate for 2017 will also be higher than the 2015 rate. Both the Zika epidemic and the country's economic recession have been highlighted by the Ministry of Health as causes for the rising infant mortality rate.