scholarly journals COVID-19 and its possible impact on the UN system

Author(s):  
Yaryna Zhukorska

In the article, the author analyzes the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the activities of the UN system. Draws attention tothe ineffectiveness of the UN itself, WHO, as well as the activities of the Security Council and the General Assembly during this period.Draws a parallel with the Spanish flu of the early twentieth century and explores its impact on the development of international orga -nizations.The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the priority for any state is primarily national interests, not common ones. The existenceof international law and international mechanisms has simply been forgotten in the context of protecting national interests. Internationalorganizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization have proved ineffective and inflexible and tooslow to deal effectively with today’s threats.In fact, during the pandemic, the UN failed to reach a consensus on joint action in a critical international situation. The Secretary-General has openly stated that he expects the problem to be resolved and concrete measures to be taken by the G-20.As for WHO, its actions have been somewhat slow, but it has responded to information from Member States.According to the WHO, the main reason for such a rapid spread of the virus was the reluctance of states to heed the recommendationsof the WHO.There is currently no alternative to health cooperation other than WHO. Despite the shortcomings in its operation, which haveemerged in the face of such a large-scale and rapid threat, it is appropriate to improve decision-making in such situations, as well as toprovide additional leverage over Member States. Collective security must come first here, not the sovereign interests of an individualstate, be it China, the United States or Germany.The main problem for both the UN and WHO has been the imperfect decision-making mechanism. On the issue with the UN –the right of veto in the Security Council, WHO – the recommendatory nature of the decisions. Considers the possibility of grantingsupranational powers to the UN in key areas where the issue of collective security must clearly prevail over national interests. Jointaction must be the only right solution for the international community in combating today’s threats. And the national interest in suchcases must come after collective security.

Author(s):  
Richard Gowan

During Ban Ki-moon’s tenure, the Security Council was shaken by P5 divisions over Kosovo, Georgia, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Yet it also continued to mandate and sustain large-scale peacekeeping operations in Africa, placing major burdens on the UN Secretariat. The chapter will argue that Ban initially took a cautious approach to controversies with the Council, and earned a reputation for excessive passivity in the face of crisis and deference to the United States. The second half of the chapter suggests that Ban shifted to a more activist pressure as his tenure went on, pressing the Council to act in cases including Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and Syria. The chapter will argue that Ban had only a marginal impact on Council decision-making, even though he made a creditable effort to speak truth to power over cases such as the Central African Republic (CAR), challenging Council members to live up to their responsibilities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOFIA M. SANTILLANA FARAKOS ◽  
RÉGIS POUILLOT ◽  
GORDON R. DAVIDSON ◽  
RHOMA JOHNSON ◽  
INSOOK SON ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT We assessed the risk of human salmonellosis from consumption of shelled walnuts in the United States and the impact of 0- to 5-log reduction treatments for Salmonella during processing. We established a baseline model with Salmonella contamination data from 2010 to 2013 surveys of walnuts from California operations to estimate baseline prevalence and levels of Salmonella during preshelling storage and typical walnut processing stages, considered U.S. consumption data, and applied an adapted dose-response model from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization to evaluate risk of illness per serving and per year. Our baseline model predicted 1 case of salmonellosis per 100 million servings (95% confidence interval [CI], 1 case per 3 million to 1 case per 2 billion servings) of walnuts untreated during processing and uncooked by consumers, resulting in an estimated 6 cases of salmonellosis per year (95% CI, <1 to 278 cases) in the United States. A minimum 3-log reduction treatment for Salmonella during processing of walnuts eaten alone or as an uncooked ingredient resulted in a mean risk of <1 case per year. We modeled the impact on risk per serving of three atypical situations in which the Salmonella levels were increased by 0.5 to 1.5 log CFU per unit pretreatment during processing at the float tank or during preshelling storage or posttreatment during partitioning into consumer packages. No change in risk was associated with the small increase in levels of Salmonella at the float tank, whereas an increase in risk was estimated for each of the other two atypical events. In a fourth scenario, we estimated the risk per serving associated with consumption of walnuts with Salmonella prevalence and levels from a 2014 to 2015 U.S. retail survey. Risk per serving estimates were two orders of magnitude larger than those of the baseline model without treatment. Further research is needed to determine whether this finding reflects variability in Salmonella contamination across the supply or a rare event affecting a portion of the supply.


1991 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

This essay is about the response by the United Nations system to financial pressures in the 1980s and early 1990s. These pressures resulted from two developments: the decision of the main contributing states to adopt a policy of zero growth in real terms in the budgets of the organizations; and the additional withholdings by the United States which resulted from the Kassebaum Amendment to the Senate Foreign Relations Act of August 1985. This required a 20 per cent underpayment by the United States of its assessed financial contributions until a range of reforms in budgetary procedures, judged acceptable by the US Administration, had been introduced. The impact of the resulting financial squeeze is considered with particular reference to three Specialized Agencies: the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 705-712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Domingues Ugá ◽  
Célia Maria de Almeida ◽  
Célia Landmann Szwarcwald ◽  
Cláudia Travassos ◽  
Francisco Viacava ◽  
...  

The article analyzes the World Health Organization Report for 2000, with emphasis placed on the methodology used to analyze the indicators utilized to compare and classify the performance of the health systems of the 191 member countries. The Report's contribution was the compromise of monitoring the performance of the health systems of member countries, but because of the inconsistent way it was elaborated, and the utilization of questionable scientific evaluation methodologies, the Report fails to give a clear picture. A criterion-based methodology revision is imposed. The main problems in evidence are the choice of individual indicators of disparity in health that discount the population profile, the inadequate control of the impact of social disparities over the performance of the systems, the evaluation of the responsibility of systems that are only partially articulated to the right of the citizens, the lack of data for a great number of countries, consequently having inconsistent estimations, and the lack of transparency in the methodological procedures in the calculation of some indicators. The article suggests a wide methodological revision of the Report.


Blood ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 104 (8) ◽  
pp. 2263-2268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack M. Guralnik ◽  
Richard S. Eisenstaedt ◽  
Luigi Ferrucci ◽  
Harvey G. Klein ◽  
Richard C. Woodman

Abstract Clinicians frequently identify anemia in their older patients, but national data on the prevalence and causes of anemia in this population in the United States have been unavailable. Data presented here are from the noninstitutionalized US population assessed in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1988-1994). Anemia was defined by World Health Organization criteria; causes of anemia included iron, folate, and B12 deficiencies, renal insufficiency, anemia of chronic inflammation (ACI), formerly termed anemia of chronic disease, and unexplained anemia (UA). ACI by definition required normal iron stores with low circulating iron (less than 60 μg/dL). After age 50 years, anemia prevalence rates rose rapidly, to a rate greater than 20% at age 85 and older. Overall, 11.0% of men and 10.2% of women 65 years and older were anemic. Of older persons with anemia, evidence of nutrient deficiency was present in one third, ACI or chronic renal disease or both was present in one third, and UA was present in one third. Most occurrences of anemia were mild; 2.8% of women and 1.6% of men had hemoglobin levels lower than 110 g/L (11 g/dL). Therefore, anemia is common, albeit not severe, in the older population, and a substantial proportion of anemia is of indeterminate cause. The impact of anemia on quality of life, recovery from illness, and functional abilities must be further investigated in older persons.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gisselquist

Introduction: In March 2020, less than three months after China reported a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the United States (US) government budgeted money to support development of Covid-19 vaccines. By mid-December 2020, two had been developed, tested, and received the US government’s experimental use authorization. Given evidence that vitamin D supplements and live vaccines for tuberculosis, polio, and measles reduce risks for acute respiratory infection, many experts hypothesized they might reduce risks for Covid-19 infection. Expedited randomized controlled trials, as done for Covid-19 vaccines, could have assessed their protection against C19 no later than end-July 2020. Methods: On 21 April 2021, I searched trial registries maintained by the US National Institutes of Medicine and the World Health Organization for trials with ≥400 participants to assess vitamin D or live vaccines to prevent Covid-19 infections (all or symptomatic). On 10-13 November 2021, I searched PubMed and medRxiv for results reported from these trials.Results: In April 2021, I found 32 trials (9 for vitamin D and 23 for live vaccines) proposing to assess the impact of these interventions on rates of new Covid-19 infections (all or symptomatic). Only 10 trials proposed to begin by June 2020, and only one to end in 2020. My search on 10-13 November 2021, almost 11 months after the US approved the first two Covid-19 vaccines, found results reported from only one of the 32 trials (live measles vaccine significantly reduced new symptomatic infections). Conclusions: If health experts had demonstrated similar urgency in assessing vitamin D supplements and live vaccines for tuberculosis, polio, and measles as in developing Covid-19 vaccines, trials could have reported by end-July 2020. Depending on what trials reported, these interventions could have prevented a large percentage of more than 600,000 Covid-19 deaths reported in the US from August 2020 through November 2021. Delay in assessing vitamin D has racial implications as well, since vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 deaths in the US have been far more common among Blacks and Hispanics compared to Whites. Going forward, depending on what trials report, these interventions could help people live with Covid-19 as an endemic virus.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Frizka Fitriana ◽  
Ema Utami ◽  
Hanif Al Fatta

The corona virus outbreak, commonly referred to as COVID-19, has been officially designated a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). To minimize the impact caused by the virus, one of the right steps is to develop a vaccine, however, with the vaccination for the Indonesian people, it is controversial so that it invites many people to give an opinion assessment, but the limited space makes it difficult for the public to express their opinion, because Therefore, people choose social media as a place to channel public opinion. Support vector machine algorithm has better performance in terms of accuracy, precision and recall with values ​​of 90.47%, 90.23%, 90.78% with performance values ​​on the Bayes algorithm, namely 88.64%, 87.32%, 88, 13%, with a difference of 1.83% accuracy, 2.91% precision and 2.65% recall, while for time the Naive Bayes algorithm has a better performance level with a value of 8.1 seconds and the Support vector machine algorithm gets a time speed of 11 seconds with a difference of 2, 9 seconds. With the results of sentiment analysis neutral 8.76%, negative 42.92% and positive 48.32% for Bayes and neutral 10.56%, negative 41.28% and positive 48.16% for SVM.


10.2196/19934 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. e19934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alireza Hamidian Jahromi ◽  
Anahid Hamidianjahromi

Since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic, significant changes have occurred in the United States as the infection spread reached and passed its exponential phase. A stringent analysis of COVID-19 epidemiologic data requires time and would generally be expected to happen with significant delay after the exponential phase of the disease is over and when the focus of the health care system is diverted away from crisis management. Although much has been said about high-risk groups and the vulnerability of the elderly and patients with underlying comorbidities, the impact of race on the susceptibility of ethnic minorities living in indigent communities has not been discussed in detail worldwide and specifically in the United States. There are currently some data on disparities between African American and Caucasian populations for COVID-19 infection and mortality. While health care authorities are reorganizing resources and infrastructure to provide care for symptomatic COVID-19 patients, they should not shy away from protecting the general public as a whole and specifically the most vulnerable members of society, such as the elderly, ethnic minorities, and people with underlying comorbidities.


10.2196/18810 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. e18810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Ohannessian ◽  
Tu Anh Duong ◽  
Anna Odone

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic, with over 720,000 cases reported in more than 203 countries as of 31 March. The response strategy included early diagnosis, patient isolation, symptomatic monitoring of contacts as well as suspected and confirmed cases, and public health quarantine. In this context, telemedicine, particularly video consultations, has been promoted and scaled up to reduce the risk of transmission, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Based on a literature review, the first conceptual framework for telemedicine implementation during outbreaks was published in 2015. An updated framework for telemedicine in the COVID-19 pandemic has been defined. This framework could be applied at a large scale to improve the national public health response. Most countries, however, lack a regulatory framework to authorize, integrate, and reimburse telemedicine services, including in emergency and outbreak situations. In this context, Italy does not include telemedicine in the essential levels of care granted to all citizens within the National Health Service, while France authorized, reimbursed, and actively promoted the use of telemedicine. Several challenges remain for the global use and integration of telemedicine into the public health response to COVID-19 and future outbreaks. All stakeholders are encouraged to address the challenges and collaborate to promote the safe and evidence-based use of telemedicine during the current pandemic and future outbreaks. For countries without integrated telemedicine in their national health care system, the COVID-19 pandemic is a call to adopt the necessary regulatory frameworks for supporting wide adoption of telemedicine.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-5
Author(s):  
Oleksandra-Mariia Dzhavadian

Introduction In Ukraine, the first place among mental disorders (over 40%) - those that arise as a result of drug and alcohol addiction. In 2nd place - disorders due to organic impressions of the brain, 3 - disorders of intellectual development, 4 - schizophrenic disorders. 5 - neurotic, anxiety disorders, including depression. Although according to the WHO, Ukraine ranks in the world one of the first places in the incidence of depression. At the end of 2016, 261240 patients with mental disorders in Ukraine had a disability group (Order of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, 2017). Purpose The purpose of the paper is to analyze the relationship between mental health of population and social advertising. And to show the importance of the impact of social advertising on health (not only physical but also and mental). To explore global social advertising campaigns on mental health of population. Results and Discussion  The World Health Organization (WHO) gives the following definition of health: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being." It includes three components: the absence of disease; the work of the organism is coordinated and allows to fully perform all functions; a state of harmony within oneself and with each other in the physical and social environment. Accordingly, mental health is an important part of it. If these three indicators are normal, then a person becomes stress-resistant, able to work, productive and active in public life. It also depends on the emotional state whether a person is able to perform certain social roles, to realize and manage their own emotions, to be open to development and learning (World Health Organization, 2020). The level of quality of life, labor productivity, active social position, unity, social peace and stability depend on the state of mental health, which has a positive effect on the economic and social development of the country. The World Health Organization website has a report on the 2013 meeting: “The World Health Organization has approved a Comprehensive Plan of Action in the field of mental health for the period 2013-2020 and extended until 2030. The plan aims to implement global and national actions to strengthen mental well-being, prevent mental disorders, and provide medical care. This plan is aimed at achieving 4 objectives, one of which includes at the primary level comprehensive integrated health and social care, which responds quickly to change (World Health Organization, 2013). One of the types of primary prevention in social work is social advertising. After all, quite a few people seek help in the right institutions. This may be due to shame, non-recognition of the problem or problem situation, ignorance of one's rights, or information about the possibility of receiving assistance that can be provided by the state or a specialized organization. It is through social advertising that you can influence the mental health of society, informing about activities, organizations, laws, programs, services and much more that will help people strengthen themselves or help loved ones. As a result, more people will be informed and at least a percentage of situations will be avoided, because people in difficult emotional states are more exposed. In Ukraine, the development of social advertising is not very high, because many organizations do not pay attention to non-profit campaigns, and the state, due to many factors, cannot afford the significant cost of social advertising. Most developed countries have their own programs and projects to combat various diseases, such as "She Entrepreneurs", "Ispire2Entreprise", "Educate!". These are programs to combat cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, vaccination support, campaigns for the right treatment of people with disabilities, members of national, racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. For example, campaigns against risky behavior cover the three most relevant topics: smoking, drug use and excessive or illegal alcohol use (Platforma, 2015). Conclusion Thus, timely detection and resolution of problems will not worsen human health and prevent its violation. It is the right social advertising on mental health that can correct this. If enough people, especially those at risk, are informed, many negative consequences can be avoided. It is possible that the state of our country's economy does not allow sufficient funding for the social sphere, but the inspiration of our people creates special opportunities and a strong basis for the future. World practice sets a good example to follow and helps our country to develop social initiatives, in particular in social advertising as one of the tools of prevention in the social sphere


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