Health archive

Getty Images Few things matter more to us than our eyesight. We fear losing it even more than some life-threatening conditions. Yet for many New Zealanders, access to routine eye care remains out of reach. This is despite the wide-ranging impacts of vision loss for both individuals and society. It l...

WHO Member States have agreed to extend negotiations on the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement, with discussions to resume in late‑April ahead of its scheduled consideration by the World Health Assembly (WHA) in May.

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, today concluded the first day of his two-day State visit to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, underscoring the strong partnership between WHO and Jordan across the areas of universal health coverage (UHC), mental he...

Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded a weeklong round of negotiations on draft annex for Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) – a key component of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. The fifth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the WHO Pandemic Agreement (IG...

Joint statement by the UNFPA Executive Director, UNICEF Executive Director, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women Executive Director, WHO Director-General, and UNESCO Director-General on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation   In 2026 alone, an estimated 4.5...

Attila Csaszar/Getty When it comes to health care in Australia, the mouth is too often considered separate to the rest of the body. Medicare doesn’t cover a trip to the dentist in the same way it covers other types of health care. But for many Indigenous people, health is viewed holistically, where...

Australia was the only continent free of H5N1 bird flu, until last week when a brown skua was found in Cape Le Grand National Park in Western Australia, about 700km from Perth, with the virus. Within days, authorities identified at least 16 other dead birds. Bird flu can rarely spread to humans in...

Solovyova/Getty Images A coronial inquest is this week examining the death of Melbourne wellness influencer Stacey Warnecke after a freebirth at her home in September. About 25 minutes after her son Axel was born, Warnecke had a postpartum haemorrhage (severe blood loss after birth) and without time...

Inverse Couple Images/Getty Images Health usually accounts for one of the largest expenditures in annual budgets, as it did in Budget 2026. But the focus on year-on-year increases does not tell us how New Zealand’s health spending compares historically or with other countries – and most importantly,...