When Gauden Galea (Malta, 1960) was studying medicine at the University of Malta, he was drawn to the idea of implementing measures to improve the health of an entire population instead of focusing on a single patient. And he has dedicated the last thirty years of his career to defending and working for this idea. Today he is one of the most authoritative voices in prevention and public health at the World Health Organization (WHO), from where he has led the fight against chronic non-communicable diseases on a global scale. Furthermore, he has been a key figure in responding to international health crises, such as during the covid pandemic.

A physician and anthropologist, Dr. Vânia de la Fuente-Núñez led the WHO's campaign against ageism and in 2021 was one of the authors of the UN's first state of the art report. She has written The age trap (Ediciones B) and runs a consultancy to advise governments and entities in the fight against age stereotypes and encourage them to promote policies to healthy aging.

Five years and three months have passed since the first Spanish victim died from a then-unknown infection called COVID-19. The WHO formally approved the first Global Pandemic Agreement this Tuesday. Ghebreyesus concluded.

Deaths among women during pregnancy or childbirth have fallen by 40% over the past century, but the numbers are still staggering. In 2023, 260,000 women lost their lives worldwide during pregnancy, childbirth, or the immediate postpartum period. That's one maternal death every two minutes on average, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which fears the numbers will rise again due to cuts in international health cooperation being made by various countries, led this year by the United States.

By 2050, breast cancer cases will increase by 38% and patient mortality will rise by 68%, according to a projection by the International Agency for Research on Cancer – an organization that depends on the World Health Organization (WHO) – published this Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. This means that by mid-century, the agency estimates that there will be 3.2 million new cases of breast cancer detected and another 1.1 million associated deaths.

On more than one occasion the death of an employee from working more than one day without interruption has been in the news. In some cases, it has even been as long as 72 hours, as in the case of a 21-year-old intern who was doing an internship at the Bank of America. A five-year long investigation carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), and published Friday by the United Nations, confirms the harmful effects of long working hours.

In an article published simultaneously by newspapers around the world, 24 heads of government - including Spanish President Pedro Sánchez, French Prime Minister Emanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel - call for a global anti-pandemic treaty. The leaders insist that covid-19 is the biggest challenge since the Second World War and recall that the question is not "whether there will be another health crisis, but when". They call for "building a stronger international health architecture that protects future generations".

The covid-19 has made Europe realize, as it happens in the fable, that instead of wearing a new dress, the emperor was naked. This was confirmed on Tuesday by the experts who were commissioned by the European branch of the World Health Organization (WHO) to rethink priorities in the light - or darkness - of the pandemic. "Covid-19 has revealed that our health, financial, economic and social services systems are not prepared and do not have the resources to deal effectively with such a situation", says the first report of the pan-European commission headed by former Italian Prime Minister and former European Commissioner Mario Monti.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) labelled the health crisis caused by the coronavirus as a pandemic. It had already been a month and a half since the organisation had declared a "public health emergency of international concern," but it was not until then that most governments began to take the restrictions more seriously. Covid was already in 114 countries, some 118,000 cases had been detected and nearly 4,300 people had lost their lives. But Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's president, called the pandemic a "fantasy" and, disobeying his health ministry, opted to hold a mass rally, maskless and waving to his supporters.

Violence against women is a true global pandemic, according to data presented this afternoon by the World Health Organization (WHO), in the most ambitious global study that has been carried out so far. At least one third of women on the planet (about 736 million) suffer or have suffered physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partner or others. The data is even more frightening when you consider that the violence starts very early: one in four women between the ages of 15 and 24 who have had sex will have experienced violent behaviour from a partner by the time they are 25, the report concludes.

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has urged countries to manufacture their own vaccines by waiving patents, to combat the shortage of doses. The head of the UN agency recalls that countries that have the capacity to manufacture vaccines can ignore patents, a possibility provided for by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in emergency situations. In this sense, he welcomes the initiative raised by South Africa and India before the WTO to waive patents on vaccines, treatments and other medical products for covid-19 until the end of the pandemic.

Cases of the British variant already account for 25% of infections in Catalonia, with much higher incidences in other regions in Spain. The variants are here to stay and, in the face of the detection of the first cases of the South African variant, which spreads 20%, 30% or even 70% faster and resistant to some vaccines to some vaccines, the Ministry of Health admits that it could end up gaining a foothold in Spain. That is why the director of the Centre for Coordination of Alerts and Health Emergencies, Fernando Simón, has warned on Monday that despite the general decline in all indicators in Spain we should avoid being overconfident when de-escalating measures, because the longer the restrictions are maintained - he spoke of weeks and not months - the more guarantees that variants do not end up causing a significant amount of new covid-19 cases.

The Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) experts who have travelled to the region of Wuhan to investigate the origin of the coronavirus the Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) experts who have travelled to the Wuhan region to investigate the origin of the coronavirus have announced Tuesday that there is no evidence that came out of a laboratory. "It is an extremely unlikely pathway," said Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the WHO mission, who added that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in good condition and that laboratory errors are "extremely strange." The WHO will not further investigate this hypothesis: "It will not require further studies as part of the work to determine the origins of the virus".