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Building healthy bridges towards peace: WHO launches $1 billion appeal

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“This appeal is a call to stand with people living through conflict, displacement and disaster to give them not just services, but the confidence that the world has not turned its back on them,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The 2026 appeal seeks to respond to 36 emergencies worldwide, including 14 “grade 3” crises requiring the highest level of organizational response at a time of stinging funding cuts as humanitarian and health financing is experiencing its sharpest decline in a decade, the agency said.

“Around one quarter of a billion people are living through humanitarian crises that have stripped away safety, shelter and access to healthcare [while] global defence spending now exceeds $2.5 trillion a year,” Tedros said at the launch in Geneva.

‘Not charity’

With the requested resources, WHO can sustain lifesaving care in the world’s most severe emergencies while “building a bridge towards peace”, said the lead agency for health response in humanitarian settings, which coordinates more than 1,500 partners across 24 crisis settings globally, ensuring that national authorities and local partners remain at the centre of emergency efforts.

“It is not charity,” the WHO chief said.

“It is a strategic investment in health and security. Access to healthcare restores dignity, stabilises communities and offers a pathway toward recovery.”

Priority response areas

As global humanitarian financing continues to contract, the 2026 appeal comes at a time of converging global pressures as protracted conflicts, escalating climate change impacts and recurrent infectious disease outbreaks drive increasing demand for health emergency support.

WHO’s priority emergency response areas will include Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

Efforts will also address ongoing outbreaks of cholera and mpox.

‘Forced to make difficult choices’

“Renewed commitments and solidarity are urgently needed to protect and support the people living in the most fragile and vulnerable settings,” WHO said.

With shrinking funding, WHO and other humanitarian partners have been “forced to make difficult choices” to prioritise the most critical interventions, the UN agency said, adding that what remains are the most impactful activities, including:

  • keeping essential health facilities operational
  • delivering emergency medical supplies and trauma care
  • preventing and responding to outbreaks
  • restoring routine immunisation
  • ensuring access to sexual and reproductive, maternal and child health services in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

Emergency services reach millions

Early, predictable investment enables WHO and partners to respond immediately when crises develop, reducing death and disease, containing outbreaks and preventing health risks from escalating into wider humanitarian and health security emergencies with far greater human and financial costs, the agency said.

In 2025, WHO and partners supported 30 million people funded through its annual emergency appeal. These resources helped to:

  • deliver lifesaving vaccination to 5.3 million children
  • enable 53 million health consultations
  • support more than 8,000 health facilities
  • facilitate the deployment of 1,370 mobile clinics

Last year, humanitarian funding fell below 2016 levels, leaving WHO and partners able to reach only one third of the 81 million people originally targeted to receive humanitarian health assistance.

Find out more about WHO’s efforts here.

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Insufficient sleep in teenagers leads to obesity: Study

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Adolescents who sleep less than eight hours a night are more likely to be overweight or obese compared to their peers with sufficient sleep, said a new study presented at ESC Congress 2022.

Shorter sleepers were also more likely to have a combination of other unhealthy characteristics including excess fat around the middle, elevated blood pressure, and abnormal blood lipid and glucose levels, said the study by Jesús Martínez Gómez, a researcher at the Cardiovascular Health and Imaging Laboratory, Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), Madrid, Spain.

“Our study shows that most teenagers do not get enough sleep and this is connected with excess weight and characteristics that promote weight gain, potentially setting them up for future problems,” said study author Gómez. “We are currently investigating whether poor sleep habits are related to excessive screen time, which could explain why older adolescents get even less sleep than younger ones.”

Sleep/en.wikipedia.org

This study examined the association between sleep duration and health in 1,229 adolescents in the SI! Program for Secondary Schools trial in Spain. Participants had an average age of 12 years at baseline with equal numbers of boys and girls.

Sleep was measured for seven days with a wearable activity tracker three times in each participant at ages 12, 14 and 16 years. For optimal health, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises sleeping 9 to 12 hours a night for 6 to 12 year-olds and 8 to 10 hours for 13 to 18 year-olds.3 To simplify the analysis, the study used 8 hours or more as optimal. Participants were categorized as very short sleepers (less than 7 hours), short sleepers (7 to 8 hours), and optimal (8 hours or more).

Overweight and obesity were determined according to body mass index. The researchers calculated a continuous metabolic syndrome score ranging from negative (healthier) to positive (unhealthier) values that included waist circumference, blood pressure, and blood glucose and lipid levels.

At 12 years of age, only 34% of participants slept at least 8 hours a night, and this dropped to 23% and 19% at 14 and 16 years of age, respectively. Boys tended to get less sleep. Teenagers who got the most sleep also had better quality sleep, meaning they woke up less during the night and spent a higher proportion of the time in bed sleeping compared to those with shorter sleep. The prevalence of overweight/obesity was 27%, 24% and 21% at 12, 14 and 16 years of age, respectively.

Compared with optimal sleepers, overweight/obesity was 21% and 72% more likely in very short sleepers at 12 and 14 years, respectively. Short sleepers were 19% and 29% more likely to be overweight/obese compared with optimal sleepers at 12 and 14 years, respectively. Similarly, both very short and short sleepers had higher average metabolic syndrome scores at 12 and 14 years compared with optimal sleepers.

Mr. Martínez Gómez said: “The connections between insufficient sleep and adverse health were independent of energy intake and physical activity levels, indicating that sleep itself is important.”