WHO – Desdemona Despair

Dengue cases in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, 2023-2024 and 5-year average. In the Region of the Americas, the number of dengue cases recorded during the first half of 2024 exceeded the maximum number of cases historically reported in a year, as compared to all previously recorded years. As of epidemiological week (EW) 23 of 2024, 43 countries and territories in the Region of the Americas have reported 9,386,082 cases of dengue; this number is twice as high as the number of cases recorded throughout 2023, 4,617,108 cases. Data: Adapted from the Pan American Health Organization / PLISA Health Information Platform for the Americas, Dengue Indicators Portal, Washington, D.C. PAHO; 2024 cited 13 June 2024. Graphic: PAHO / WHO

July 7, 2024

Dengue fever: CDC issues alert amid U.S. and global spike in cases – In 2024, cases of dengue fever in the Americas have reached record-breaking levels, with more than 9.7 million reported cases, twice the number for the entire year in 2023

By Finn Cohen 27 June 2024 (Healthline) – As cases of dengue fever rise worldwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an advisory for physicians, public health authorities, and the public in the United States to be alert to the trend. So far in 2024, cases of dengue fever in countries in the Americas have reached record-breaking […]

Measles cases in the UK (top) and Russian Federation (bottom), Jan 2020 - Feb 2024. Graphic: WHO

May 27, 2024

Global measles cases nearly doubled in one year, researchers say – “A crisis among many crises”

By Katherine Dillinger 27 April 2024 (CNN) – The number of measles cases around the world nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023, researchers say, presenting a challenge to efforts to achieve and maintain elimination status in many countries. There were 171,153 cases globally in 2022, according to Dr. Patrick O’Connor of the World Health Organization, […]

Map showing 28-day COVID-19 cases in U.S. counties on 26 January 2023. Graphic: Johns Hopkins University

January 26, 2023

Greg Olear: The Plague turns three – More than a million Americans are dead of COVID-19. Where is the outrage? “U.S. performance at the level of South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan in containing the pandemic would have saved over 300,000 American lives in 2020 alone”

By Greg Olear 24 January 2023 (Substack) – Three years ago today, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed a second travel-related infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the United States, this time in Illinois. The Illinois case was the epidemiological equivalent of the second airplane hitting the World Trade Center. It meant that the first U.S. […]

Global excess and reported COVID-19 deaths and death rates per 100,000 population, January 2020-January 2022. (a) Cumulative global excess death estimates and the cumulative reported COVID-19 deaths by month from January 2020 to December 2021. (b) Global excess death rates per 100,000 population and the reported COVID-19 death rates per 100,000 population, also by month, from January 2020 to December 2021. On both plots, the central lines of the excess mortality series show the mean estimates, and the shaded regions indicate the 95 percent uncertainty intervals. Graphic: Msemburi, et al., 2022 / Nature

December 30, 2022

WHO study reports global Covid death toll likely three times higher than official records – Pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million lives, more than 2.7 times official reports of 5.4 million – India mortality alone may be 6.45 million dead

By Robert Hart 14 December 2022 (Forbes) – The Covid-19 pandemic may have claimed nearly 15 million around the world in 2020 and 2021, according to World Health Organization estimates published in Nature on Wednesday, almost three times what was reported in official records and underscoring the devastating and far-reaching impact of the disease as countries strive to return […]

Residents ride on a wooden boat as they pass submerged houses amid flood water, following rains and floods during the monsoon season in Bajara village, at the banks of Manchar lake, in Sehwan, Pakistan 6 September 2022. Photo: Akhtar Soomro / REUTERS

September 7, 2022

Pakistan looks “like a sea” after floods, PM says, as 18 more die – “You wouldn’t believe the scale of destruction there”

By Syed Raza Hassan and Asif Shahzad 7 September 2022 SEHWAN, Pakistan (Reuters) – Parts of Pakistan seemed “like a sea”, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Wednesday, after visiting some of the flood-hit areas that cover as much as a third of the South Asian nation, where 18 more deaths took the toll from […]

Global distribution of estimated excess mortality rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for the cumulative period 2020–21. Although reported COVID-19 deaths between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 totaled 5.94 million worldwide, IHME estimates that 18.2 million (95 percent uncertainty interval 17.1–19.6) people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic over that period, as measured by excess mortality. Graphic: Wang, et al., 2022 / The Lancet

May 7, 2022

WHO estimates nearly 15 million deaths associated with COVID-19, more than double the official toll – “When you have a massive outbreak where people are dying in the streets because of a lack of oxygen, we end up never knowing just how many people died”

By Maria Cheng 5 May 2022 LONDON (AP) – The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 15 million people were killed either by coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems during the first two years of the pandemic, more than double the current official death toll of over 6 million. Most of the […]

Prevalence of overweight and obesity among children and adolescents aged 5–19 years in the WHO European Region, by sex, 1975–2016. Graphic: WHO

May 5, 2022

World Health Organization warns of obesity epidemic in Europe – “Overweight and obesity rates have reached epidemic proportions across the region and are still escalating”

3 May 2022 (AFP) – The WHO said Tuesday that “epidemic” overweight and obesity rates are linked to over 1.2 million deaths annually across Europe, calling for swift policy changes to reverse the dangerous trend. Obesity rates in the region have ballooned by 138 percent in the past five decades, the World Health Organization said […]

A haze caused by dust covers the capital Nicosia, in the southeast Mediterranean island of Cyprus, on Monday, 4 April 2022. The World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. health agency, says nearly everybody in the world breathes air that doesn't meet its standards for air quality. WHO is calling for more action reduce fossil-use use that generate pollutants that cause respiratory and blood-flow problems and lead to millions of preventable deaths each year. Photo: Petros Karadjias / AP Photo

April 10, 2022

Millions dying across the world due to poor-quality air that 99 percent of world’s population breathes – “After surviving a pandemic, it is unacceptable to still have 7 million preventable deaths and countless preventable lost years of good health due to air pollution”

By Jamey Keaten 4 April 2022 GENEVA (AP) – The U.N. health agency says nearly everybody in the world breathes air that doesn’t meet its standards for air quality, calling for more action to reduce fossil-fuel use, which generates pollutants that cause respiratory and blood-flow problems and lead to millions of preventable deaths each year. The […]

A man and a girl on a scooter are backdropped by a Lombardy region campaign advertising, reading in Italian, “Coronavirus: let’s stop it together”, at the Porta Nuova business district in Milan, Wednesday, 11 March 2020. Italy is mulling even tighter restrictions on daily life and has announced billions in financial relief to cushion economic shocks from the coronavirus. For most people, the new coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia. Photo: Luca Bruno / AP Photo

March 11, 2020

WHO declares virus crisis a pandemic, urges global fight – “We are deeply concerned by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction”

By Maria Cheng, John Leicester, and Jamey Keaten 11 March 2020 GENEVA (AP) – Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and inadequate government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but added that it’s not too late for countries to act. By reversing course and using […]