Anti-torture committee calls for comprehensive mental-health law and protections for foreign-national children in Türkiye - Council of Europe

GENEVA, Oct. 15: Childhood obesity is emerging as a major global public health challenge, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to call for a comprehensive approach that combines healthier eating habits, regular physical activity, behavioural support and emotional care. In its first global guidelines on childhood obesity, released on October 7, the WHO outlined a broader strategy for addressing the condition among children and adolescents. The recommendations recognise that weight-related health problems are influenced by several interconnected factors and cannot be addressed effectively through dietary restrictions alone.

A major new Lancet Commission has listed 17 interlinked catastrophic threats that could shape global health through 2100. Zooming out to take a bird’s eye view of the possible threats, the Commissioners have counted amongst them — pandemics, obesity, antimicrobial resistance, nuclear conflict, and artificial intelligence. Driven by the motive to move away from the intense focus on certain domains, the default mode that health care governance and activism has taken so far, the Commission took upon itself the task of freeing the world from being bogged down with single issues, though the benefits of that have been aplenty, the time had come to go beyond. Launched at the recent World Health Summit in Berlin, the report urges global leaders to stop treating these issues in isolation, and start viewing them as deeply interconnected economic, environmental, and national security challenges.

Among cancer patients, the high financial cost of cancer care is a prevalent problem. This financial burden is also associated with potentially harmful behavioral strategies that patients might use to cope with costs, such as delaying or forgoing treatment and skipping medications. Collectively, researchers refer to this impact as financial toxicity.