Benin has declared a state of emergency and called for international humanitarian aid after floods hit the south of the West African country.
The government estimates that some 2,000 families have already been displaced by flooding caused by heavy rains and it appealed late Monday for immediate help to prevent the imminent spread of epidemics.
Mumbai: The dreaded chandipura virus, known to give very little time for recovery, has struck Nagpur and its adjoining districts claiming seven lives in two weeks. The state has declared it an epidemic now and started massive anti-vector campaigns in the severely affected villages.
Two senior Ministers yesterday in Parliament called for the government to introduce the Cuban bio-control method to arrest the Dengue epidemic which had now become a global issue.
Construction and Engineering Services Minister Rajitha Senaratne and Minister of Science and Technology Prof. Tissa Vitharana made this remark at an adjournment debate on Dengue in the House.
As Sri Lanka painfully battles the dengue epidemic and swine flue, it is an irony that people in poor countries like Sri Lanka, which have contributed least to carbon emissions, should suffer disproportionately the resulting climate change.
When World Health Organization (WHO) chief Margaret Chan declared last week that for the first time in more than 40 years the world is facing an influenza pandemic, she simply stated what everybody already knew.
Health authorities battled to contain the ever increasing dengue epidemic with an island wide surveillance and clearing programme yesterday while the number of dengue related deaths rose to 134 and the number of cases touched the 9,300 mark, health ministry source said.
June 15: The government has decided to include 33 microorganisms including virus, bacteria and fungi which could be used to wage biological terror attacks, in the new Epidemic Diseases Act.
The new H1N1 virus, which has caused the first pandemic of the 21st century, appears to have been circulating undetected among pigs for years, researchers reported on Thursday.
Although health officials have been watching for new influenza viruses in humans, animal health regulators have missed the opportunity to check swine, the researchers reported.
The potential consequences of climate change extend to the health of the public, with warming of the planet projected to have both positive and negative consequences that will vary temporally and spatially. Climate change will not act to introduce new causes of morbidity and mortality, but to change the distributions of factors that affect the occurrence of morbidity and mortality.
This publication reports on the human and economic losses caused by natural disasters in 2008 with figures based on the EM-DAT database with comparisons to previous years. It asserts that although fewer disasters occurred in 2008, events had a larger impact than usual on human settlements. In 2008 once again, large numbers of persons were affected by a few natural disasters.
