Students in Port Vila, Vanuatu. ©WHO/Yoshi Shimizu
Contributions to WHO have helped Vanuatu become the first Pacific island country to eliminate a disease that causes blindness, improve the safety of Mongolia’s food supply, and fight a deadly liver disease in Viet Nam.
On islands across the Pacific, emergency medical teams are learning to quickly set up and run field hospitals, children are catching up on the routine vaccinations they missed during the COVID-19 pandemic and new drowning-prevention measures have been put place in countries around the world.
Read on for these stories and more
Related: The Asia Pacific Parliamentarian Forum on Global Health this week focuses on strengthening health security. The Forum will promote partnerships at the global, regional and national level as parliamentarians share information and experiences on responding to COVID-19, and discuss parliamentary strategies that can strengthen health security and build resilient health systems for the future.
Vanuatu eliminates trachoma, the world’s leading cause of blindness
Epidemiological surveys in 2014 showed that 12% of children ages 1-9 in Vanuatu had active trachoma. The statistic sparked an aggressive effort that succeeded in eliminating the disease. Above, schoolchildren break for lunch in Port Vila, Vanuatu. ©UNICEF/Bobby Shing
Vanuatu announced in August that it was the first Pacific island country to eliminate trachoma, a neglected tropical disease that can cause blindness.
“To understand the magnitude of this feat, just imagine what it must take to reach people across all of Vanuatu’s inhabited islands – taking boats across open ocean and walking for hours through creeks and over hills in all kinds of weather,” said WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Dr Takeshi Kasai. “My heartfelt congratulations go out to Vanuatu for this tremendous achievement.”
WHO is following a 10-year roadmap, launched last year, to fight neglected tropical diseases that endanger more than a billion people worldwide.
Pacific islands build up their capacity to tackle COVID-19
Health workers carry COVID-19 vaccines to interior communities on the Micronesian island of Yap. ©WHO/Ann Norizal Lopez
The government of Japan is funding a one-year project to prepare hard-to-reach areas in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau to tackle COVID-19.
The project, which runs through next March, is establishing emergency medical teams and logistics, positioning critical equipment and supplies, and working with health professionals and communities to be ready for COVID-19 cases.
“As we see increasing cases of COVID-19 in the Pacific, it is all the more important that we enhance these measures to protect people on hard-to-reach outer islands,” said Dr Mark Jacobs, WHO Representative to the South Pacific and Director of Pacific Technical Support. “We thank the governments of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau for their leadership and the Government of Japan for their contribution to ensure that we save lives.”
Regionwide: Read about bringing COVID-19 vaccinations to hard-to-reach groups across the Western Pacific.
Japan: See the many ways it supports WHO.
WATCH: “They went house to house, urging us to get vaccinated” – a civil society organization’s work with WHO on Manicani, a remote island in the Philippines.
Mongolia transforms its food system to ensure safer food, increase health security
On the job: food inspectors in Mongolia. ©Mongolian General Agency for Specialized Investigation
Mongolia is building a safer food sector to stop foodborne illnesses, fight malnutrition and ensure a steady food supply in the years to come.
WHO and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization have been helping carry out a multi-pronged strategy for food safety in the country, where hunger threatens a quarter of the population.
“Food businesses and inspectors were often on opposite sides, one seen as the punisher and the other as the violator,” said Gerelmaa Lkhaasuren, senior state inspector of health, General Agency for Specialized Investigation. “Today food businesses and inspectors work jointly to reduce food safety risks and have prioritized teaching over punishment.”
More from Mongolia:
Mobile health care for hard-to-reach communities
USAID and WHO provide equipment for mental health services in Ulaanbaatar.
Curing hepatitis C in the Vietnamese countryside
None of the dozens of people recently checked for hepatitis C in the village of Tam Dao had ever been tested before, although all fell into high-risk groups. Above: a visiting health worker from the Minh Phat organization provides the free testing. ©WHO Viet Nam/Huong Le
In Vietnam, health workers are traveling to isolated communities to fight hepatitis C, a curable liver disease that kills an estimated 290 000 people around the world every year.
Teams are also seeking out and testing people who avoid health facilities because of stigma and discrimination.
Testing and treating people near their homes is one of the strategies for reaching WHO’s target of eliminating viral hepatitis by 2030. In September, the WHO South-East Asia Region will launch an action plan to stop viral hepatitis, HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.
WATCH: In Malaysia, more than 400 000 people are living with hepatitis C. One patient, Safri, explains how he was cured.
Up close and personal: stories from the Western Pacific
WHO’s Regional Office for the Western Pacific has gathered stories about how people have been weathering the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Philippines, Maria Fe Inting Molina and her family provided supplies to out-of-work rickshaw drivers, while in New Zealand, a Maori community leader encouraged others to get vaccinated.
See the personal mini-stories from six countries.
WATCH: Malaysia’s RELATE ME program was developed to relieve the isolation and mental stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Catching up: Indonesia vaccinates millions of children
A health worker checks on siblings’ vaccination status during Indonesia’s childhood vaccination push. ©WHO/Iqbal Lubis
Indonesia is on a mission to bring children up to date on their routine vaccinations after two years of pandemic-related disruptions to the country’s immunization programmes.
For National Child Immunization Month in June, the country ran a campaign to reach 36 million children with vaccines that protect against polio, diphtheria, measles, rubella and other illnesses.
Indonesia noted a drop of about 10 percentage points in childhood vaccine coverage during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As in many other countries, the drop stemmed from supply chain interruptions, restrictions on movement, and a shortage of health workers.
Drowning prevention: celebrating the achievements of 2021-22
For
World Drowning Prevention Day on 25 July, Bloomberg Philanthropies partnered with Viet Nam to provide water safety classes for more than 50 000 children around the country. ©Bloomberg
Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Viet Nam and many other countries have been conducting water safety campaigns, with an emphasis on teaching children and training educators. The push follows a 2021 United Nations General Assembly resolution on drowning prevention.
WHO supports crisis-training exercises for medical teams across Pacific island countries
Fiji’s FEMAT team practices crisis-preparation drills. ©WHO/Jason Chute
Emergency medical teams in Pacific island countries have been honing their skills to respond quickly in a humanitarian crisis. That means knowing how to set up a field clinic from scratch and providing care that meets quality standards.
“In the Pacific, we are coping with COVID-19, worsening disasters due to climate change and outbreaks of infectious diseases such as measles or dengue,” said Gaafar J. Uherbelau, Palau’s Minister of Health and Human Services. “We are not only a small island state, we are also a large-ocean nation, and we need the capacity to cover communities dotted across hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean.”
With support from WHO and many partners, emergency medical teams have been established in Fiji, the Cook Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu, and new teams are forming in Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.
Related: Palau’s new emergency medical team is named after the rope that holds the sails of traditional canoes
Republic of Korea trains biomanufacturing professionals
In July, more than 100 participants from 24 countries completed training in the Republic of Korea geared toward helping low- and middle-income countries boost production of vaccines and biologics. ©International Vaccine
Institute
The Republic of Korea is supporting training sessions for members of the biomanufacturing workforce from low- and middle-income countries as part of a global effort to decentralize the manufacture of vaccines and other critical health products.
At the same time, the Republic of Korea is working with WHO Academy to establish a global biomanufacturing training hub on the outskirts of Seoul that will serve countries wishing to locally produce vaccines, insulin, monoclonal antibodies, cancer treatments and other health essentials.
Local manufacture would not only allow countries to better fend for themselves in a pandemic, global health leaders say, but to prepare for outbreaks of local diseases, come to the aid of neighbors, and help resolve a huge global shortfall in vaccine manufacturing capacity.
Read more about the biomanufacturing training hub.
See the call for applications for the October course in Seoul, on good biomanufacturing practices.
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WHO thanks all governments, organizations and individuals who are contributing to the Organization’s work, and in particular those who have provided fully flexible contributions to maintain a strong, independent WHO.
Donors and partners featured in this week’s stories include: Australia, the Australian NGO Cooperation Program, the Commonwealth Fund of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Community Chest of Korea, the European Union, FAO, the Fred Hollows Foundation, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the International Life Saving Federation, the International Maritime Rescue Federation, the International Trachoma Initiative at the Task Force for Global Health, Japan, the Korea Foundation for International Health Care, the Republic of Korea, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Minh Phat, Nagaoka University of Technology, New Zealand, People in Need, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, Royal Life Saving, Soap Aid, Sri Lanka Life Saving and USAID.