'Thousands' of Ebola deaths likely unreported: WHO expert

"There are lots of missing deaths in this epidemic," Christopher Dye, WHO's strategy chief, told AFP, estimating that around 5,000 fatalities could be missing from the count.

This assessment, he said, was based on the knowledge that the fatality rate in the epidemic centred in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone stands at about 70 per cent. But with total reported cases of infections reaching 13,042, that suggests that many of the deaths were going unrecorded.

Dye said the likely explanation was that many people were burying the dead in secret, possibly to avoid having authorities interfere with burial customs like washing and touching the deceased widely blamed for much of the transmission.

The UN's health agency has created confusion with its latest figures of Ebola cases and deaths, which have shown shrinking numbers. The toll provided Wednesday night showed 4,818 deaths, down from 4,951 reported on October 31, while the number of reported cases fell to 13,042 from 13,567.

This does not mean that the epidemic is over or that people have stopped dying from the deadly virus, Dye said, explaining instead that the drop in numbers was linked to a shift in the way WHO uses different databases to calculate the overall numbers.

"Many, many people are still dying of Ebola," he said. Up until recently, WHO had used  several different databases from each of the affected countries to calculate the overall number of cases and deaths.

The different sources however meant that the numbers did not always progress in a consistent manner, fluctuating according to what data was available from the separate databases.

To avoid the fluctuations, the agency had shifted to only using data from each of the countries' situation reports, based on daily counts of patients and deaths district by district.

Source: MP News in Hindi and Chhattisgarh Hindi News

Climate change threatens global health security: UNEP

"Climatic changes also affect temperatures and regional climates, the conditions on which, for instance, in the continent of Africa, mosquitoes may spread from one region to another," Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Friday.

The UNEP chief spoke ahead of Sunday's release in Copenhagen of the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Diseases will move as the world warms and we may in many parts of the world indeed see either the return or the arrival of diseases that in recent times have simply not occurred in those regions," he said.

That development, he said, will add "extra stress to the health infrastructure, the health system and ultimately the health and well-being of these populations in those countries".

Awareness of the link between climate and health has prompted environmental scientists to forge closer links with international bodies focused on health, Steiner said.

"That is why my colleague, Margaret Chan, who heads the World Health Organisation, convened a meeting in Geneva on climate change and health," he said.

"And her conclusion was that a climate agreement in Paris is not just only a climate change agreement, it is also a global health agreement, because clearly the connection between environmental change arise from global warming and greater health risk factors is very direct in many different respects," Steiner said.

Source: MP News in Hindi and Chhattisgarh Hindi News