What's New

The present Consolidated guidelines include a comprehensive set of WHO recommendations for the treatment and care of DR-TB, derived from these WHO guidelines documents. The consolidated guidelines include policy recommendations on treatment regimens for isoniazid-resistant TB (Hr-TB) and MDR/RR-TB, including longer and shorter regimens, culture monitoring of patients on treatment, the timing of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in MDR/RR-TB patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), use of surgery for patients receiving MDR-TB treatment, and optimal models of patient support and care.  

These guidelines have been developed to provide updated, evidence-informed recommendations on tuberculosis (TB) infection prevention and control (IPC) in the context of the global targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Health Organization (WHO) End TB Strategy. The notion and practice of IPC encompasses a set of broader, practical, evidence-based approaches to preventing the community from being harmed by avoidable infections, preventing health care-associated infections (HAI), implementing laboratory biosafety and reducing the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).   

In less than 10 years, the Together for Girls partnership has made monumental progress in achieving a safer world for every child, adolescent and young person. Read about the results and priorities.

The survey showed that nearly all health facilities in Bangladesh offer antenatal care for women and curative care for children. A majority of the facilities provide family planning and child vaccination services. Less common services are for non-communicable disease and tuberculosis diagnosis or treatment and normal delivery. The availability of normal delivery services has increased across all types of health facilities with the most notable change among Union Health and Family Welfare Centers (UHFWCs).

The new UNAIDS report, Health, rights and drugs: harm reduction, decriminalization and zero discrimination for people who use drugs, shows that of the 10.6 million people who inject drugs in 2016, more than half were living with hepatitis C and one in eight were living with HIV. It outlines that ensuring that comprehensive harm reduction services are available—including needle–syringe programmes, drug dependence treatment and HIV testing and treatment—will kick-start progress on stopping new HIV infections among people who use drugs.

With scaling-up of HIV and other health services in low- and middle-income countries, an increasing amount of personally identifiable health information is being collected at health facilities and stored in data repositories at local, regional and national levels. Countries need to protect the confidentiality and security of identifiable and de-identified personal health information, and this can be accomplished in part through the existence and implementation of relevant privacy laws, policies and programmes.

Based on privacy, confidentiality and security principles an Assessment Tool was developed to assess in country the extent that the confidentiality and security of personal health information is protected at facility and data warehouse/repository levels and whether national guidelines exist including privacy laws. A Manual on the use of the Assessment Tool has been produced and is available below. 

Gender discrimination and gender-based violence fuel the HIV epidemic. Gender norms in many cultures combined with taboos about sexuality have a huge impact on the ability of adolescent girls and young women to protect their health and prevent HIV, seek health services and make their own informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health and lives.

Thailand has made outstanding progress in reversing the AIDS epidemic. To achieve the government’s commitment on Sustainable Development Goal 3.3 to end AIDS by 2030, several challenges remain particularly ensuring that key populations (KPs) are the focus of interventions. Evidence has shown that civil society organisations (CSOs) are more capable of reaching out and maintaining connections with KPs than public healthcare providers. Funding support from the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria (Global Fund) and other international development partners (IDPs) for addressing HIV/AIDS is gradually diminishing.

The 2018 Global Overview outlines key trends across the at least 35 countries that retain the death penalty for drug offences in law, and analyses data on death sentences and executions from the last decade. Extensive examination is provided on the divergent trends witnessed in 2018 of falling execution numbers globally, and rising appeal for reimplementation of the death penalty in some countries, while considering the role public opinion plays in all of this.