This week we highlight how contributions to WHO are providing health services and supplies to snow-blanketed refugee camps, and vaccines to flood zones threatened with cholera.WHO support is protecting remote Nepali villages from COVID-19, improving Timor-Leste’s health system, and providing much-needed refrigeration equipment for vaccination campaigns in Suriname and Belize.Read on for details on all these stories:In the thick of winter, WHO appeals for help to save Afghanistan’s collapsing health systemPolio workers in Afghanistan. ©WHOWHO is urgently calling for international donors to find alternative ways to fund Sehatmandi, Afghanistan’s biggest health program, which lost its major funding last August after the Taliban takeover of Kabul and is increasingly unable to provide vital primary health services.“The recent funding pause … will cause the majority of the public health facilities to close.
As a result, more mothers, infants and children will die of reduced access to essential health care,” said WHO Afghanistan Representative Dr Luo Dapeng. “WHO is determined to work with partners in identifying a sustainable solution.”Mobile teams rush to help displaced people in Syria; countries donate COVID-19 vaccinesWHO has recently launched an appeal for Syria. ©WHOWHO and partners have been deploying rescue health services to northwest Syria, a conflict zone where some 4.4 million people are trying to survive a punishing winter with too little fuel, heat, medical services and other essentials.
The area includes dozens of storm-damaged camps that are home to more than 88 000 people displaced by the country’s long conflict.The freezing weather is especially dangerous to pregnant women, the chronically ill, and children.