Human behavior

Approximately 30% of teenagers in South Africa report ‘ever having been pregnant’, the majority, unplanned. While this number has decreased over the past few decades, it is still unacceptably high. The figure is for all teenagers. (13-19 years old), but motherhood for an 18 or 19 year old has very different implications than for a young teenager, one aged 15, for example. Therefore this report tries, where possible, to be mindful of differing experiences of pregnancy and motherhood across the teen years.

The ART guidelines deal with Fixed Dose Combinations medications and introduces fixed dose combination (FDC) ART for patients initiated with ART for the first time; introduce FDC ART for HIV positive pregnant women irrespective of CD4 count during pregnancy and during the breastfeeding period; phased introduction of FDC to patients with other co-morbidities (diabetes, hypertension and respiratory diseases, including TB); phased introduction of FDC to patients who require switching due to drugs toxicity or switching from Stavudine (d4T) based regime and phased introduction of FDC to patients who are stable of ART and VL suppressed.

The UN Platform on Social Determinants of Health is an informal mechanism to provide coordinated support to Member States with implementation of the Rio Political Declaration on Social Determinants of Health. The Platform also advocate s placing the social determinants of health highly on the global development agenda, and fostering coherent action on the social determinants of health. Currently, the platform involves staff from ILO, UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, WHO and UNAIDS.

Superfood for Babies is a global call to action to rediscover the importance of breastfeeding and to support mothers to breastfeed their babies – especially in the poorest communities in the poorest countries.

The four major barriers that prevent mothers from breastfeeding are examined:

This note is by the World Health Organization (WHO) is intended as a discussion paper on the position of health in the post-2015 agenda. This paper focuses on content, identifying a series of issues that need to be addressed in framing future health goals and discussing ways in which Universal Health Coverage might be used as a way of bringing all programmatic interests under an inclusive umbrella and explaining its relationship to the achievement of gains in healthy life expectancy. The purpose of these papers is to provoke discussion rather than present definitive positions. They will be revised and updated as the process evolves.

Overview

The WHO Mental Health Atlas 2011 represents the latest estimate of global mental health resources available to prevent and treat mental disorders and help protect the human rights of people living with these conditions.

It presents data from 184 WHO Member States, covering 98% of the world’s population. Facts and figures presented in Atlas indicate that resources for mental health remain inadequate.

The distribution of resources across regions and income groups is substantially uneven and in many countries resources are extremely scarce. Results from Atlas reinforce the urgent need to scale up resources and care for mental health within countries.

This report is the third in a series of WHO reports on the status of global tobacco control policy implementation.

All data on the level of countries’ achievement for the six MPOWER measures have been updated through 2010, and additional data have been collected on warning the public about the dangers of tobacco. The report examines in detail the two primary strategies to provide health warnings – labels on tobacco product packaging and anti-tobacco mass media campaigns. It provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence base for warning people about the harms of tobacco use as well as country-specific information on the status of these measures.