HIV is increasingly affecting the health and welfare of children and undermining hard-won gains in child survival in some of the highly affected countries. Recent estimates from UNAIDS suggest that, globally, about 2.1 million children younger than 15 years of age have HIV. The roll out of paediatric HIV...
This 2011 update of Guidelines for the programmatic management of drug-resistant
tuberculosis is intended as a tool for use by public health professionals working in response
to the Sixty-second World Health Assembly’s resolution on prevention and control of
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and extensi...
Maternal mortality rates remain high, with approximately 1000 women dying from
complications related to pregnancy or childbirth worldwide every day. Vitamin A
deficiency affects about 19 million pregnant women, mostly from the WHO regions of
Africa and South-East Asia. During pregnancy, vitamin A is esse...
Commercial liquid culture systems and molecular line-probe assays have been endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as gold standards for rapid detection of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB); however, because of technical complexity, cost and the requirement for sophisticated laboratory...
Research over the past decade has resulted in the development of two commercial interferongamma release assays (IGRAs), based on the principle that the T-cells of individuals who have acquired TB infection respond to re-stimulation with Mycobacterium tuberculosis-specific antigens by secreting interferon...
Earlier and improved tuberculosis (TB) case detection - including smear-negative disease, often associated with HIV co-infection - as well as expanded capacity to diagnose multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) are global priorities for TB control. Conventional laboratory methods are slow and cumberso...
Direct sputum smear microscopy is the most widely used means for the diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and is available in most primary health-care laboratories at health-centre level. Smear microscopy may, however, be costly and inconvenient for patients, who have to make multiple visits to healt...
A deficiency and 293 million children in the same age group have anaemia. Member
States have requested guidance from the World Health Organization (WHO) on the
effects and safety of the use multiple micronutrient powders for home fortification of
foods consumed by infants and children 6–23 months of ag...
Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to vitamin and mineral deficiencies
because of the increase in metabolic demands to meet fetal requirements for growth
and development (1). Iron deficiency is the most common micronutrient deficiency
and is the leading cause of anaemia in the general population....
Low birth weight (LBW) has been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as weight at birth less than 2500 g. The global prevalence of LBW is 15.5%, which means that about 20.6 million such infants are born each year, 96.5% of them in developing countries. There is significant variation in LBW rate...
