Countries around the world are under constant threat from infectious diseases and conflict, and increasingly face threats related to natural disasters and climate change. While COVID-19 continues, so do other disease outbreaks and health emergencies.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect all areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Research is ongoing to examine risks faced by pregnant women; upholding women’s rights to a positive pregnancy and intrapartum and postnatal experience is crucial, while observing protocol to avoid infection with COVID-19. People across the world are facing challenges in accessing contraception and abortion information and services, including fertility care services, and pre-existing services and supply chains have in many cases been severely disrupted. Access to sexual health care is being challenged in many settings, including for managing the complications of female genital mutilation (FGM), accessing cervical cancer screening and treatment services, and vaccinating against HPV. With restrictions on movement, as well as greater stress and challenges to employment and finances, women and their children are at increased risk of violence, often finding themselves locked in with their abusers and unable to reach out to resources for help, or finding that pre-existing resources are no longer available.
While progress has been seen in improving sexual and reproductive health services in some crisis settings, important gaps remain, which have been further exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The critical importance of scientific evidence to guide planning and action cannot be overstated in order to meet the sexual and reproductive health needs of women and girls, as well as men and boys, living in health emergencies.
The WHO Health Emergencies Programme’s Clinical Unit has launched the Global Clinical Platform to collect patient-level anonymized data on the clinical characteristics and management of COVID-19; assess variations across subgroups; identify associations between clinical characteristics of COVID-19 and clinical outcomes; and describe temporal trends in clinical characteristics. HRP developed the web-based data platform for WHO and provided data management, data curation, and statistical support throughout 2021. Clinical data on approximately 500,000 hospitalized COVID-19 cases globally are available in the database and can be visualised through a dashboard; approximately 11,000 records are for pregnant women.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, concerns for a diverse range of health issues are being raised worldwide. In order to address questions related to concerns about blood clots due to COVID-19, and combined oral contraception, the WHO Questions and Answers hub on contraception and family planning and COVID-19 was updated. It now explains that, according to currently available evidence, most women of childbearing age with COVID-19 will likely be asymptomatic or have mild COVID-19 symptoms and should continue to take combined hormonal contraception (CHC).
Access the Q&A on COVID-19 and contraception to find out more: https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-contraception-and-family-planning
WHO hosts the Global Health Cluster within the WHO Health Emergencies Programme. Currently there are over 700 health cluster partners – 49 of which work globally – across 23 National Health Clusters. HRP has been supporting the Global Health Cluster in implementing a project to improve the capacity of health cluster partners to deliver SRH services, and especially family planning and safe abortion care, in: Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh; Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); and Yemen. This project was completed successfully in July 2021, and the lessons learned as well as impact results will inform future health and policy guidance.
When emergencies occur, coordination is necessary to prevent gaps and avoid overlaps in the response to needs. In Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, United Nations (UN) and non-UN humanitarian organizations work together to coordinate service provision. WHO coordinates the heath emergency response and has integrated GBV into its strategic planning. One major component of this work is to develop shared targets, indicators, and monitoring tools to ensure that health service providers are aligning their efforts across the entire relief effort. Thanks to the support of HRP, WHO has adapted an assessment tool to measure health facility preparedness to deliver GBV-related services in emergency settings and uses this to routinely monitor quality of care among health providers in Cox’s Bazar. Context-specific capacity building and action plans are subsequently developed to make sure that service quality improvements are implemented and monitored across the health response.
Following several reports which described the presence of Zika virus RNA in body fluids other than blood – including urine, semen, saliva, vaginal and rectal secretions with variable sensitivity – HRP co-funded a study on the persistence of Zika virus in sweat and other body fluids. The study findings showed an unusual – and as yet not investigated – shedding of the virus through eccrine glands. This research is important as such findings can have a significant impact on measures taken to prevent virus transmission.
Access the article: https://www.scielo.br/j/mioc/a/Qsn69ZkmqQwfhLCsdQB93YR/?format=pdf&lang=en
