South Africa needs to urgently look to countries such as Rwanda, Thailand and Brazil, where they have employed community health workers (CHWs) to deliver a range of primary health care services that dramatically reduced mortality, public health expert Professor David Sanders told the National Health Assembly (NHA). Speaking during a plenary session, Sanders said by extending the scope of what CHWs could do and by supporting properly selected and trained individuals, the country could make a very real impact on maternal and child mortality.

One year after South Sudan declared independence, many humanitarian needs remain unmet. Communities lack access to basic health-care services. The situation is particularly difficult in northern regions close to the border with Sudan. Recent fighting in this area has had a direct impact on the availability and price of food, contributing to an increase in child deaths from malnutrition. 'In Malakal Teaching Hospital, there has been a dramatic rise in child malnutrition admissions over the past three months, since fighting escalated,' said Melker Mabeck, the head of the delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in South Sudan.

Only 13 diseases or infections transmitted from animals to humans like tuberculosis (TB) and Rift Valley fever, are responsible for around 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. In the least developed countries, 20 per cent of human sickness and death was due to zoonoses - diseases that had recently jumped species from animals to people - according to a new study by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, Kenya, the Institute of Zoology in Britain, and the Hanoi School of Public Health in Vietnam. The World Health Organization (WHO) has noted that at least 61 per cent of all human diseases, and 75 per cent of emerging infectious diseases, are zoonotic or caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus or other communicable disease agent picked up from an animal source.

Nigeria’s health services halved the maternal mortality rate between 1990 and 2010, but in parts of the predominantly Muslim north, which is less socio-economically advanced, women are 10 times more likely to die in childbirth than in the oil-rich, predominantly Christian south. Maternal health personnel are calling for more appropriate interventions to bridge the gap. Reasons for the divide mirror those in many West African states: too few referral facilities and health practitioners - especially midwives - and inadequate antenatal equipment; too few clinics and poor roads that make accessing clinics difficult and expensive; poverty and cultural barriers to visiting hospitals.