23 January 2024, Geneva – The WHO Executive Board, currently holding its 154th session in Geneva, has appointed Dr Hanan Balkhy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean. This follows her nomination by the WHO Regional Committee for the Eastern Mediterranean on 10 October 2023. Dr Balkhy takes up her...

23 January 2024 – The WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region has some of the highest and fastest-growing rates of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) globally, owing to widespread antibiotic misuse and overuse. Nearly 1.3 million people are already dying as a direct result of AMR worldwide. High rates of drug resistance undermine many health efforts and make...

15 January 2024 Good afternoon from WHO’s Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean in Cairo, Egypt. We are now at the 100-day mark since the hostilities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory escalated. In this short period of time, Gazans – previously waking up every day in their beds to get ready to go to school or work, have...

New mass displacement of Palestinians fleeing fighting, health facilities crammed with people seeking refuge, food. Photo credit: WHO 27 December 2023 – Gaza: World Health Organization teams have undertaken high-risk missions to deliver supplies, with partners, to hospitals in Northern and Southern Gaza witnessing intense hostilities in their...

A WHO expert explains the R programming language tool during the training. Photo credit: WHO/Health Emergency Information and Risk Assessment Unit25 December 2023, Cairo, Egypt – Data management skills can help experts to better handle health emergency data and respond to public health challenges. To strengthen data management in health...

People displaced from their homes waiting for food at Al-Shaboura Camp, in the centre of Rafa, Gaza on 17–18 December 2023. Photo credit: WHO 21 December 2023  – Hunger is ravaging Gaza, and this is expected to increase illness across the Strip, most acutely among children, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and older people. In new estimates...

Dr Richard Peeperkorn, WHO Representative on the occupied Palestinian territorySean Casey, WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator Yesterday, 20 December 2023, in another high-risk joint mission, a team from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN partners, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),...

20 December 2023 – WHO and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) continue to work together to improve cancer surveillance systems in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region. The aim is to improve reporting and surveillance systems and the quality of cancer-related data – ultimately to contribute to cancer control. Such efforts...

19 December 2023 Thank you all for joining us. This is my last media briefing before the year ends, and I am speaking to you today with the heaviest heart as I, like all of us here, witness unimaginable suffering. Our region of over half a billion people is home to 38% of the global population in need of humanitarian aid, which means over 140...

17 December 2023 — WHO staff participated in a joint UN mission to Al-Shifa Hospital in north Gaza on 16 December to deliver health supplies and assess the situation in the facility. Partners on today’s mission included OCHA, UNDSS, and UNMAS. The team delivered medicines and surgical supplies, orthopedic surgery equipment, and anesthesia...