People can protect themselves from ticks by wearing appropriate clothing, including long trousers and closed footwear, when hiking or camping in countries or areas at risk. The whole body should be inspected daily and attached ticks removed as soon as possible. The consumption of unpasteurized dairy products should also be avoided in those areas.

Most infections remain asymptomatic. In case of clinical illness, the incubation period for tick-borne encephalitis lasts 2–28 days (most commonly 7–14 days) and is followed by 1–8 days of general cold symptoms, such as fatigue, headache and general malaise, usually combined with fever of ≥38 °C.

Tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) is an important cause of viral infections of the central nervous system in eastern, central, northern and increasingly western European countries, and in northern China, Mongolia, and the Russian Federation. Tick-borne encephalitis virus is a member of the family Flaviviridae.

Approximately 10 000–12 000 clinical cases of tick-borne encephalitis are reported each year, but this figure is believed to be significantly lower than the actual total number of clinical cases.

Nearly all cases of tetanus occur in people who have never been vaccinated or in adults who have not kept up to date on their booster shots. 

Signs and symptoms of tetanus appear anytime from 3 to 21 days after tetanus bacteria enter the body through a wound. Most cases occur within 14 days.

Symptoms can include:

etanus can be prevented through immunization with tetanus-toxoid-containing vaccines (TTCV), which are included in routine immunization programmes globally and administered during antenatal care contacts. 

To be protected throughout life, WHO recommends that an individual receives 6 doses (3 primary plus 3 booster doses) of TTCV. The 3-dose primary series should begin as early as 6 weeks of age, with subsequent doses given with a minimum interval of 4 weeks between doses. 

ustainable development is a broad term to describe policies, projects and investments that provide benefits today without sacrificing environmental, social and personal health in the future. These policies are often described as green because they focus on limiting the impact of development on the environment. However, the benefits of sustainable development are also felt across a wide cross section of human health and well-being, including reductions in pollution- and environment-related disease, improved health outcomes and decreased stress.

Many sustainable development strategies can offer significant wins for health, climate and the environment, and the benefits can be seen almost immediately. For example, many health and development goals can be achieved simultaneously by tackling air pollution, which is responsible for an estimated 7 million premature deaths annually. Polluting emissions include powerful short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs)—particularly black carbon, ozone and methane—which are very harmful to health but have only brief atmospheric lifetimes.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs, also known as the Global Goals) are 17 goals with 169 targets that all UN Member States have agreed to work towards achieving by the year 2030.

They set out a vision for a world free from poverty, hunger and disease.

Health has a central place in SDG 3 “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”, underpinned by 13 targets that cover a wide spectrum of WHO’s work.

Almost all of the other 16 goals are related to health or their achievement will contribute to health indirectly.

Much can be done to prevent suicide. WHO recommends four key interventions which have proven to be effective:

Close to 800 000 people die by suicide every year. Furthermore, for each suicide, there are more than 20 suicide attempts.

Suicides and suicide attempts have a ripple effect that impacts on families, friends, colleagues, communities and societies.

Suicides are preventable. Much can be done to prevent suicide at individual, community and national levels. 

What you can do

Up to two billion people around the world lack access to necessary medicines, vaccines, medical devices including in vitro diagnostics,  and other health products, which creates a vacuum that is too often filled by substandard and falsified products. This problem is growing as global supply chains become more complex, meaning products manufactured in one country may be packaged in a second country and distributed across borders to be marketed or sold to consumers in a third.