Massive global failure’ led to COVID-19 deaths, reversal of UN goals, report finds

-says WHO acted ‘too cautiously, slowly’ and must be reformed

(SciDev.Net) - Global failures on multiple levels led to a “staggering death toll” from COVID-19 and the reversal of advances made towards UN development goals, a report by the Lancet’s Commission on the pandemic says.

“Too many governments have failed to adhere to basic norms of institutional rationality and transparency,” the commissioners wrote in the report published 14 September in the Lancet medical journal, calling for better multilateral cooperation to draw an end to the health crisis and tackle future threats. The virus has killed more than 6.5 million people and infected 606 million since the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A study published May in BMJ Global Health found that people living in developing countries are nearly twice as likely to die from the disease compared with people living in highincome countries.

“This staggering death toll is both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels,” said the 45page Lancet report, addressed to UN member states, UN agencies and others groups, including the G20 and G7.

It said the WHO had acted “too cautiously and too slowly” in matters like warning about the human spread of the virus, announcing a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, backing face mask use, and acknowledging airborne transmission. The WHO said in a published response that, while many of the Commission’s recommendations were aligned with its own assessments, the report also carried “several key omissions and misinterpretations”.

Funding

The Commission criticised a lack of international funding for low- and middleincome countries (LMICs) to tackle COVID-19 as well as failure to secure sufficient international supplies and equitable distribution of medicines, protective gear and vaccines.

“Developing countries are inherently more vulnerable to global shocks than high-income countries,” said Jeffrey Sachs, chair of the Lancet Commission and a professor at Columbia University in New York, US.

Sachs told SciDev.Net: “Effective responses to the pandemic, in terms of public health measures, for example vaccine coverage, and medical care, require financial and health-system resources that are mostly lacking in poorer countries.”

The report looked at the first two years of the pandemic with input from 28 international experts and in consultation with more than 100 others.

In the majority of countries, according to the Commission, the COVID-19 pandemic distracted “resources and policy attention” away from long-term targets, reversing progress towards the SDGs.

Established in 2015 by the UN General Assembly, the SDGs comprise 17 interlinked international goals targeted to be achieved by 2030 to end poverty and make sure that “no one is left behind”.

A group of 57 lowincome countries – as defined by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – face a financing gap of $300–$500 billion per year to achieve the SDGs, “and this gap has increased as a result of the pandemic”, says the report.

South-East Asia saw huge variations in its capabilities in relation to health systems, as well COVID-19 treatment, transmission and deaths, the Commission said.

In the first year of pandemic, countries like Malaysia and Bangladesh witnessed sharp increases in infections compared with Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand, where contact tracing, face masks, and physical distancing were effectively implemented.

Africa might have seen large waves of COVID-19 infection. However, most cases in the region were not reported, in part because they did not cause severe disease,

(ISGlobal) - A study published in the journal Environmental Pollution has found an association, in children aged 9‑12, between exposure to air pollutants in the womb and during the first 8.5 years of life and alterations in white matter structural connectivity in the brain. The greater the child’s exposure before age 5, the greater the brain structure alteration observed in preadolescence.The study was led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation.

Tracts or bundles of cerebral white matter ensure structural connectivity by interconnecting the different areas of the brain. Connectivity can be measured by studying the microstructure of this white matter, a marker of typical brain development. Abnormal white matter microstructure has been associated with psychiatric disorders (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety and autism spectrum disorders).

In addition to the association between air pollution and white matter microstructure, the study also found a link between specific exposure to fine particulate matter the report suggested. In South America, confirmed new cases reached 60 per million population in May 2020, “and then never decreased below that rate until the end of 2021”, it adds.

Gopal Sankaran, professor of public health at the West Chester University, US, told SciDev.Net that the COVID-19 pandemic took the world by surprise and lowincome countries were no exception.

Surveillance

Lack of well-established health infrastructure, an overstretched health workforce, and inadequate surveillance contributed to the failure to mount and sustain an effective pandemic response, he said.

Study suggests link between exposure to air pollution, alterations in brain structure

(PM2.5) and the volume of the putamen, a brain structure involved in motor function, learning processes and many other functions. As the putamen is a subcortical structure, it has broader and less specialised functions than cortical structures. The study found that the greater the exposure to PM2.5, especially during the first 2 years of life, the greater the volume of the putamen in preadolescence.

“A larger putamen has been associated with certain psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders),” says Anne-Claire Binter, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study.

“The novel aspect of the present study is that it identified periods of susceptibility to air pollution” Binter goes on to explain. “We measured exposure using a finer time scale by analysing the data on a month-by-month basis, unlike previous studies in which data was analysed for trimesters of pregnancy or childhood years. In this study, we analysed the children’s exposure to air pollution from conception to 8.5 years of age on a monthly basis.