What should the African health workforce know about disasters? Proposed competencies for strengthening public health disaster risk management education in Africa.

Background: As part of efforts to implement the human resources capacity building component of the African Regional Strategy on Disaster Risk Management (DRM) for the health sector, the African Regional Office of the World Health Organization, in collaboration with selected African public health training institutions, followed a multistage process to develop core competencies and curricula for training the African health workforce in public health DRM. In this article, we describe the methods used to develop the competencies, present the identified competencies and training curricula, and propose recommendations for their integration into the public health education curricula of African member states.

Methods: We conducted a pilot research using mixed methods approaches to develop and test the applicability and feasibility of a public health disaster risk management curriculum for training the African health workforce.

Strengthening health disaster risk management in Africa: multi-sectoral and people-centred approaches are required in the post-Hyogo Framework of Action era.

Background: In November 2012, the 62nd session of the Regional Committee for Africa adopted a comprehensive 10-year regional strategy for health disaster risk management (DRM). This was intended to operationalize the World Health Organization's core commitments to health DRM and the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 in the health sectors of the 47 African member states. This study reported the formative evaluation of the strategy, including evaluation of the progress in achieving nine targets (expected to be achieved incrementally by 2014, 2017, and 2022).

Inequities in the global health workforce: the greatest impediment to health in sub-Saharan Africa.

Health systems played a key role in the dramatic rise in global life expectancy that occurred during the 20th century, and have continued to contribute enormously to the improvement of the health of most of the world's population. The health workforce is the backbone of each health system, the lubricant that facilitates the smooth implementation of health action for sustainable socio-economic development. It has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the density of the health workforce is directly correlated with positive health outcomes.

Health inequities, environmental insecurity and the attainment of the millennium development goals in sub-Saharan Africa: the case study of Zambia.

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a series of 8 goals and 18 targets aimed at ending extreme poverty by 2015, and there are 48 quantifiable indicators for monitoring the process. Most of the MDGs are health or health-related goals. Though the MDGs might sound ambitious, it is imperative that the world, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, wake up to the persistent and unacceptably high rates of extreme poverty that populations live in, and find lasting solutions to age-old problems.

The effects of diethylcarbamazine citrate, antihistamines and corticosteroid derivatives on skin reactivity to Onchocerca supernatants.

A single dose of promethazine or of betamethazone, either alone or compounded with dexchloropheniramine, was found to inhibit skin wheal formation in onchocerciasis patients challenged with Onchocerca supernatants. The mean wheal diameter developing 24 hours after drug administration ranged between 40-60% less than the original pre-treatment diameter but this effect had been abolished or was significantly less by 48 hours. Diethycarbamazinecitrate had only a 20% inhibitory effect on the wheal diameter of the skin reaction.