WHO and UNICEF to Launch Polio Vaccination Campaign in Afghanistan with PharmaJet
Poliovirus has been eliminated in most parts of the world due to widespread vaccination campaigns, but it continues to circulate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2024, wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) transmission rose significantly in Afghanistan. The use of Tropis ID enables site-to-site immunization, a strategy where vaccination services are offered at multiple, convenient locations. This approach is expected to help increase immunization coverage, particularly in high-risk areas. The Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on polio eradication endorsed the Afghanistan program's 'Strategic Reset' to optimize site-to-site vaccination, while stressing the need for stronger leadership, community acceptance, and broad government engagement. Including Tropis ID fIPV in this immunization program supports Afghanistan's polio eradication goals to eliminate persistent virus lineages in the East, prevent new WPV1 cases in the East and South Regions, and prevent local transmission in other parts of the country. 1
'We are pleased to be partnering with UNICEF, WHO, and NEOC Afghanistan in their continued efforts to eradicate polio,' said Paul LaBarre, Senior Vice President Global Business Development, PharmaJet. 'We aim to achieve high impact in the fight against poliovirus, including increased coverage, decreased costs, and high acceptability 2 previously seen with Tropis ID delivered fIPV in Pakistan, 2 Somalia, 3 and Nigeria 4.'
Refer to Instructions for Use to ensure safe injections and to review risks.
About PharmaJet
The PharmaJet mission is to improve the performance and outcomes of injectables with our enabling technology that better activates the immune system. We are committed to helping our partners realize their research and commercialization goals while making an impact on public health. PharmaJet Precision Delivery Systems™ can improve vaccine effectiveness, allow for a preferred patient and caregiver experience, and offer a proven path to commercialization. They are also safe, fast, and easy-to-use. The Stratis ® System has U.S. FDA 510(k) marketing clearance, CE Mark, and WHO PQS certification to deliver medications and vaccines either intramuscularly or subcutaneously. The Tropis ® System has CE Mark and WHO PQS certification for intradermal injections. They are both commercially available for global immunization programs. For more information or if you are interested in partnering with PharmaJet visit https://pharmajet.com or contact PharmaJet here. Follow us on LinkedIn.
About the NEOC Afghanistan
NEOC Afghanistan is led by the Ministry of Public Health and the core members are WHO, UNICEF, BMGF, CDC, Rotary International, Core Group of Polio Project (CGPP), EPI manager and the National Polio Focal Point.
About the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) 5
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative is a public-private partnership led by national governments with six partners – the World Health Organization (WHO), Rotary International, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Gates Foundation and Gavi, the vaccine alliance. Its goal is to eradicate polio worldwide.
Launched in 1988 after the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eradicate polio, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, along with its partners, has helped countries to make huge progress in protecting the global population from this debilitating disease. As a result, the global incidence of polio has decreased by 99.9% since GPEI's foundation. An estimated 20 million people today are walking who would otherwise have been paralyzed by the disease, and more than 1.5 million people are alive, whose lives would otherwise have been lost. Now the task remains to tackle polio in its last few strongholds and get rid of the final 0.1% of polio cases including the two remaining endemic countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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Medscape
2 hours ago
- Medscape
Is Red Meat Bad for You? The Proof Is in the Processing
This transcript has been edited for clarity. Is red meat bad for you? On the one hand, meat makes you strong, and it's every American's God-given right to grill a steak on his barbecue during the summer. I believe this came up in a church synod at some point… But on the other hand, the WHO (World Health Organization) has declared red meat a carcinogen, with a hot dog being as bad as cigarette. Yes, that was headline when the report came out. So, how do we reconcile these opposing ideas? Part of the solution is realizing the WHO organization in question is based in France. Maybe they're still angry about the "freedom fries" thing, but actually examining the nuances of the French language will help us understand what's going on. If you don't speak French, don't worry I got you covered. Ce n'est pas si difficile de tout n'inquiétez vous pas. Vous allez voir . Sit back, grab a baguette, and let's find out how dangerous red meat really is. I'm Christopher Labos, and this is Medscape's On Second Thought . Bonjour, tout le monde! Now, meat doesn't seem like it should be a complex topic to study, but it is. Many people around the world eat animals, but we don't all eat the same animals. For example, this is a cow, often used to make hamburger and steak. And this is Tobi, God's perfect angel who gets a more elaborate birthday party than I do each year. He is my son, and I would throw myself in front of a moving car for him. By necessity, when we do medical research on meat, we are lumping together a whole lot of a different human behavior, with people eating different types of animals based on where they live. There's no real alternative, and frankly, you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Most credible research will at least separate out red meat from white meat. But most people don't really know what the difference is. If you thought pork was white meat, you're wrong. You think that because of a marketing slogan. In 1987, the National Pork Board paid for the marketing campaign "Pork. The Other White Meat." They were basically trying to position pork as an alternative to chicken. People also usually think veal or deer is white meat. They think the difference between white and red meat has something to do the age of the animal, whether its free range, or the color of the meat. But it doesn't. Chefs and restaurants say all kinds of things, but the real definition is simple: Mammals are red meat, and birds are white meat. Now, there's another thing we need to explain. We have red meat, but we also have processed red meat. Processed red meat is when red meat is transformed in some way — and that doesn't mean cooking. If you just take a piece of steak and cook it on your barbecue or in the oven, that's not processed meat. Processing is doing things like salting the meat, smoking it, or curing it. Processed meat includes items like bacon, sausages, hot dogs, salami, corn beef, and smoked meat. So, when we talk about red meat and health risks, we are primarily talking about processed red meat. And the people talking about this are the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC). IARC is a WHO organization, and their mandate is to promote international research on cancer — particularly its cause. One of their programs is a monograph program that evaluates the evidence of the carcinogenicity of specific exposures. Here's where a knowledge of French is going to come in handy. IARC likes to look at something called the hazard, rather than the risk. In fact, every time they have a press conference, they spend about 5 minutes explaining the difference to people, which begs the question: Why not just study risk and be done with it? In English, those words seem pretty much like synonyms. And with the way most people use them, they essentially are. But in French, they are slightly different. Le risque et le hasard don't quite mean the same thing in French. To be fair, their definitions are technically different in English, as well — as those of you who read the dictionary for fun already know. A risk is the probability that something harmful will happen. A hazard is a potential source of harm. For example, a grenade is a hazardous thing to have on your desk, but the risk of it exploding is quite low… unless you pull the pin. IARC is researching hazard. They are evaluating whether something is associated with cancer, not how risky that something is. IARC categorizes everything into groups: carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic, possibly carcinogenic, or not classifiable. There is technically a "not carcinogenic" group, but there's nothing in there. Well, there was one substance in there for a bit, but they removed it. Comment below if you know what that substance is. Here's a hint: You find it in yoga pants. So, IARC has never found anything that doesn't cause cancer. When they go hunting for heffalumps and woozles, they find heffalumps and woozles. To be fair, which I am under no contractual obligation to be, they are a WHO agency, and they are tasked to review substances that are of interest to world governments. As such, they are not going to review stuff that is clearly unrelated to cancer… but still. They put a lot of stuff in Group 1, the (definitely) carcinogenic group. Tamoxifen is in Group 1, and as most of you know, tamoxifen treats breast cancer. It has saved countless lives. Calling it a carcinogen sounds a bit daft, but it is associated with abnormal uterine bleeding and an increased risk of uterine cancer. And the data is pretty uncontroversial, right? Thus, IARC says, 'We are certain this association is true, therefore it goes in Group 1.' But what's the risk of tamoxifen causing uterine cancer? It's 0.3% on the absolute risk scale. It's basically zero and a heck of a lot lower than the breast cancer risk. Clearly, you should take the drug if you have ER-positive breast cancer. So, this is the problem. IARC is saying how certain they are that something is dangerous, but not how dangerous something is. Conclusive data will land a substance into Group 1: carcinogenic. Strong but not conclusive data goes into Group 2a: probably carcinogenic. If there's only some evidence, contradictory evidence, or maybe just animal data, you get sorted into Group 2b: possibly carcinogenic. And Group 3 is used when there's not much data to work off of. Generally, their system works okay. They put tobacco, asbestos, and gamma radiation in Group 1, which makes sense. But then also put stuff like birth control pills, estrogen, and tamoxifen in Group 1. Sure, there is a small increased risk of breast cancer with birth control pills if you have a family history, but it's a pretty small risk and frankly negligible for the general population — plus, it's largely outweighed by the decrease in ovarian cancer risk that comes with using birth control pills. But IARC isn't doing that type of nuanced calculation. They say, 'Estrogen causes breast cancer. The pill has estrogen. The link is proven. The pill goes into Group 1.' So, it was IARC that reviewed all the data about processed red meat and declared it a Group 1 carcinogen. Fun fact: Unprocessed red meat was only put in Group 2A because the data was less solid. For anybody grilling a steak right now, this doesn't apply to you. But not everybody agreed with IARC. The Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium was a group of researchers who also reviewed the data on red meat and came to a completely different conclusion. Their analysis was motivated by two things: 1) the funding they received from the beef industry (this is why we can't have nice things), and 2) they dismissed much of the research because it comes from observational cohorts, not randomized controlled trials. In food science, randomized controlled trials are hard to conduct, because telling people what to eat is often met with "make me." Regardless, the NutriRECS Consortium conclusion was, 'Keep eating meat, as the data is uncertain because most of it is observational.' This conclusion is a bit reductionist to me, because we have a lot of observational data pointing toward health risks associated with processed red meat, and I have a hard time believing all the stuff added to processed red meat is doing us any favors. But let's take the IARC assessment at face value. They are convinced by the hazard or the hasard. But what's the risk? The cancer risk is most clear cut for colon cancer, which is pretty logical. Your lifetime risk of colon cancer is about 4%, assuming you're of general risk with no family history or genetic risk factors. It's actually 4.2% for males and 4.0% for females, according to the 2022 Cancer Statistics from the American Cancer Society. But let's say 4% for everyone — just for simplicity. The IARC report estimated that eating an extra 50 g of processed meat per day, every day, increased your risk of colorectal cancer by 18%. Take 4%, multiply it by 1.18, and you get 4.72%. So, let's say 5% if we're rounding. All this to say, if you eat hot dogs every day of your life, your risk of getting colon cancer goes up by 1 percentage point on the absolute scale. Now, on first instinct you might say, "Pfff, that's nothing. Pass the bratwurst." But 1% on the absolute scale is not trivial. That's thousands of cases per year. Millions of cases over the course of your lifetime in a country of 300 million people. It has some important public health implications. Is the risk high enough for us to stop killing and eating Bambi's mother? Hard to say. It's not negligible, but it's not astronomical either. And there are economic and environmental factors to keep in mind — issues that are often forgotten when we talk about medicine. I will stress one point, though. The IARC estimates of 1% absolute risk increase are about daily consumption of processed meat. You don't need to eat jerky every day of your life. For Medscape, I'm Dr Christopher Labos… with Tobi.
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10 hours ago
- Forbes
Humanitarian Workers Risk Their Lives To Protect Children In Gaza
In the middle of the brutal conflict in Gaza, humanitarian workers embarked on the mission of a lifetime: vaccinate 600,000 children against polio in an active war zone. A new documentary offers a stark portrait of conflict's toll on children's health — and a tribute to the courage of all humanitarian workers who put their lives on the line to save and protect children in crises. The ideal conditions for a major disease outbreak There's a reason the vast majority of polio cases occur in children living in fragile, conflict-affected and vulnerable countries. Overcrowded conditions and lack of access to safe water, sanitation and health care are the perfect conditions for the spread of deadly diseases. Children under 5 are particularly at risk. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, over 80 percent of Gaza's health, water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged by Israeli military operations. The vast majority of the population, including over a million children, has been displaced, many families multiple times. In July 2024, Gaza's Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed what public health experts had long feared: the highly contagious poliovirus had been identified in sewage samples collected by UNICEF in Khan Younis and Deir al Balah, putting displaced people living in close quarters without adequate water and sanitation at heightened risk of contracting the lifelong crippling disease. On Aug. 22, 2024, the first case of polio in the Gaza Strip in 25 years was confirmed. New documentary chronicles heroic efforts of humanitarian workers in Gaza A new half-hour documentary film, "Gaza's Silent Threat", follows Dr. Younis R. Awadallah, UNICEF's longtime top public health specialist in Gaza, and Fairuz Abuwarda, UNICEF Coordinator in Gaza, as they lead a high-stakes immunization campaign to protect vulnerable children from the spread of polio in September 2024. Learn more: Polio Vaccines Protect Children in Gaza Strip Watch the new documentary film: To eliminate polio, every child in every household must be vaccinated Delivering vaccines in an active war zone is one of the most complex and urgent challenges faced by humanitarian workers, demanding extraordinary skills, courage and resilience. Amid recurrent security threats, through logistical obstacles and with limited access to health services, humanitarian workers delivered for children across Gaza. Their courage underscores a vital truth: when humanitarian principles are upheld, and when workers are protected and granted safe, timely access, lives can be saved, even in the most fragile settings. Nowhere in Gaza is safe Today, that fragility has deepened. More than 18,000 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. Child malnutrition has reached emergency levels; one in three people are going days without food. Only a trickle of aid bas been allowed into Gaza since May, after a total blockade that lasted nearly 11 weeks. Trucks filled with therapeutic food and other lifesaving supplies are lined up at border crossings, waiting permission to enter. Over 1,000 people have reportedly been killed while seeking food; aid convoys have come under attack. Humanitarian workers themselves are collapsing from hunger. Related: Pressing for More Access, UNICEF Delivers Urgently Needed Supplies to Gaza A call for principled action and international accountability "Gaza's Silent Threat" not only pays tribute to the courage of families and health workers striving to care for one another in devastating circumstances. It's also a powerful testament to the impact of war on children's health, reinforcing the urgent need for principled action and international accountability. "We need to remember that humanitarian pauses are not a ceasefire. We hope that the parties can agree on a ceasefire and the return of all remaining hostages by Hamas and other armed groups. This has gone on for far too long," said UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban, who recently returned from a five-day mission to Gaza and Israel. "What is happening on the ground is inhumane. What children need — children from all communities — is a sustained ceasefire and a political way forward." Your support for UNICEF is more important than ever. Please donate.
