This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

Ukraine: UN’s Tedros urges Russia to stop the war amid ongoing attacks

A month since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, people’s health needs there are dire and getting worse, UN health agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.

The situation is particularly critical in Mariupol and elsewhere, Tedros said, where the World Health Organization (WHO) has not been able to dispatch a humanitarian convoy because of the ongoing violence.

Other Ukrainian cities have received 150 tonnes of medical supplies from the WHO hub in Lviv in western Ukraine but access to many locations “remains blocked”.

Tedros issued an appeal to Russia “to stop the war”, before condemning ongoing attacks on hospitals, patients and medical staff:

“WHO has now verified 64 attacks on health care since the start of the war and we are in the process of verifying further attacks. Attacks on health must stop. Health systems, facilities and workers are not and should never be a target.”

UN weather agency to spearhead 5-year early warning plan, boosting climate action

UN chief António Guterres set an ambitious five-year global deadline on Wednesday to ensure that people worldwide are protected by early warning systems against extreme weather and climate change.

Marking World Meteorological Day, Mr. Guterres said that “early warnings and action save lives”.

He added that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) would lead the effort and present an action plan in November, at this year’s UN climate conference (COP 27), in Egypt.

Mr. Guterres warned that “human-caused climate disruption is now damaging every region” and that it was unacceptable that one-third of the world’s people are still not covered by early warning systems.

This mainly involves least developed countries and small island developing States and the situation is even worse in Africa, where 60 per cent of people lack early warnings on storms, heatwaves, floods and drought.

UN health agency appeals to reverse gains lost in fight against TB

World TB Day is marked on 23 March, and this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for urgent investment in the fight against tuberculosis, “to save millions more lives”.

Although TB is preventable and curable, it remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious killers.

Each day, it claims more than 4,100 lives, and close to 28,000 people fall ill after becoming infected – and this, despite the fact that 66 million lives have been saved since the year 2000.

The need for global action is more urgent than ever, the WHO said, as the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed years of progress in preventing TB transmission, meaning that for the first time in over a decade, TB deaths increased in 2020.

Conflicts across Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East have made vulnerable populations more susceptible to TB, underscoring the need to ensure that commitments made by global leaders to end TB are met.

The UN health agency said that global spending on TB diagnostics, treatments and prevention in 2020 was less than half of the annual global target of $13 billion. For research and development, an extra $1.1 billion per year is needed.

Seeds of change in Kenya as farmers lead way on tobacco-free farms

In Kenya, a sustainable agriculture project has helped farmers move away from the harmful practice of growing tobacco in favour of a healthier alternative, the UN said on Wednesday.

The scheme offers training to tobacco farmers so that they can switch to alternative crops that are easier to harvest, such as beans.

So far, growers have sold 135 tonnes of beans to the World Food Programme (WFP), providing them significantly more income than from tobacco farming.

Growing beans has the added advantage that they are full of iron, which helps to counter numerous heath and development problems among children and pregnant women.

“The project has seen farmers’ health improve, increased school attendance from children previously working on the farms, and better crops for the environment replacing tobacco,” said UN agencies WHO and FAO, who noted that tobacco farmers and their families are exposed to serious health risks from the nicotine that is absorbed through the skin when handling wet tobacco leaves, exposure to heavy use of pesticides, and to tobacco dust.

Daniel Johnson, UN News.