Zimbabwe News

The quality of vaccines is critical for good immunization outcomes. Vaccine quality determines uptake, safety and effectiveness of vaccines. This ultimately influences capacity of health systems to reduce morbidity and mortality due to vaccine preventable diseases.

by Tatenda Chimbwanda

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the world’s deadliest infectious killer. Each day, over 4000 people lose their lives to TB and close to 30,000 people fall ill with this preventable and curable disease. Global efforts to combat TB have saved an estimated 58 million lives since the year 2000. In Zimbabwe it is estimated that about 30,000 people fall ill of TB each year and about 4,600 of these, die.

Zimbabwe has made tremendous progress in reducing maternal mortality. The maternal mortality rate reduced from 651 per 100 000 live births (ZDHS 2015) to 462 deaths per 100,000 live births (MICS 2019). Despite the reduction, the maternal mortality rate is still unacceptably high.

Zimbabwe's Director of Epidemiology and Disease Control in the Ministry of Health and Child Care,  Dr Portia Manangazira has been recognised as one of the women leaders who have taken on the fight against typhoid.

Zimbabwe’s health information is now easily accessible following the validation exercise to approve and enter it into the African Health Observatory (AHO) in December 2019.

Over the years, HIV control strategies and approaches in Zimbabwe have evolved to address the changes in the epidemic and according to new evidence.

The HIV epidemic in Zimbabwe has evolved over the years. The overall HIV prevalence for adults aged 15-49 has fallen to 14.0% in 2016, from 18.1% in 2005 (source: Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey).

Zimbabwe is set to roll out a Shorter, Highly-effective, Oral Regimen for Rifampicin-resistant Tuberculosis (SHORRT therapy) which reduces the length of treatment for Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) from nearly two years, to, nine to 12 months and brings a major improvement in treatment outcomes and quality of life of patie

The Ministry of Health and Child Care with support from World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated on Wednesday 12 June 2019 a belated World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) and International Day against drug Abuse and Illicit trafficking.