News in Brief 14 December 2023 |

This is the News in Brief from the United Nations. 

Gaza flooding latest disaster to hit desperate Palestinians

Heavy rains created new misery in Gaza as UN humanitarians repeated deep concerns on Thursday over the deteriorating health situation in the Strip, amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and fighting with Palestinian armed groups.

UN humanitarian affairs coordination office OCHA said that many areas in the enclave have been flooded, “worsening the struggle of displaced Palestinians”.

Almost 1.9 million people in the enclave have been uprooted by the violence and more than half have sought safety in the southern town of Rafah. UN Palestine refugee agency shelters in the south of the Strip are nine times over capacity and scores of people live outdoors, exposed to the harsh weather, or in makeshift shelters.

OCHA said that in the overcrowded shelters, sewage cannot be managed. Combined with the flooding and the accumulation of waste, the conditions have attracted insects, mosquitoes and rats, further compounding risks of disease spread.

Earlier this week the Gaza health authorities said that they had documented 360,000 cases of infectious diseases in shelters and that the actual numbers could be higher.

Countries must stop e-cigarette boom among youth: WHO

E-cigarettes, which pose serious health risks, are being “aggressively marketed” to young people and in large parts of the world there are no rules in place to protect children from their harmful effects, UN health agency WHO warned on Thursday.

WHO said that 88 countries have no minimum age at which e-cigarettes can be bought and 74 countries have not implemented any e-cigarette regulations.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on countries to ramp up prevention measures, saying that “kids are being recruited and trapped at an early age to use e-cigarettes and may get hooked to nicotine”. 

Children aged 13 to 15 worldwide are using e-cigarettes at rates higher than adults, WHO research has found, and in the United Kingdom the number of young users has tripled in the past three years.

The UN health agency said that the products generate carcinogenic substances, increase the risk of heart and lung disorders and can affect brain development.

WHO also warned that the tobacco industry “funds and promotes false evidence” to argue that e-cigarettes reduce harm, while at the same time “heavily promoting these products to children and non-smokers and continuing to sell billions of cigarettes”.

Decline in vaccine coverage prompts measles surge in Europe, Central Asia: UNICEF

Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease which weakens children’s immune systems and can be fatal, is up by a staggering 3,200 per cent this year compared to last in Europe and Central Asia, UN Children’s Fund UNICEF said on Thursday.

Some 30,600 cases have been confirmed in the region so far in 2023 and UNICEF warned that numbers are expected to rise further due to gaps in immunity as vaccination rates have dropped.

“There is no clearer sign of a breakdown in immunisation coverage than an increase in cases of measles”, UNICEF’s director for the region Regina De Dominicis said, calling for urgent public health measures to protect children from the dangerous disease. 

The highest rates of measles cases in Europe and Central Asia have been recorded in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Romania. An estimated 931,000 children in the region missed out entirely or partially on routine immunisation from 2019 to 2021. 

UNICEF highlighted that the rate of immunisation with the first dose of the measles vaccine dropped from 96 per cent in 2019 to 93 per cent in 2022. The UN agency attributes the drop in coverage to shrinking demand for vaccines “in part fuelled by misinformation and mistrust” during the COVID-19 pandemic, disruption to health services and weak primary healthcare systems among other factors.

Dominika Tomaszewska-Mortimer, UN News.