Here’s the latest news about a global outbreak of H5N1 bird flu that started in 2020, and recently spread among cattle in U.S. states and marine mammals across the world, which has health officials closely monitoring it and experts concerned the virus could mutate and eventually spread to humans, where it has proven rare but deadly.

LONDON, April 18 (Reuters) - The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.

The Geneva-based U.N. health agency released a technical document on the topic on Thursday. It said it was the first step towards working out how to better prevent this kind of transmission, both for existing diseases like measles and for future pandemic threats.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that northern Gaza has been left without a functional hospital due to a lack of fuel, staff and supplies.

Only nine out of 36 health facilities were partially functional in the whole of Gaza, according to the WHO. All these facilities are concentrated in the enclave's south.

"There are actually no functional hospitals left in the north," Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative in Gaza, told reporters via video link from Jerusalem.

The World Health Organization said it lost communications with its contacts in Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza.

"As horrifying reports of the hospital facing repeated attacks continue to emerge, we assume our contacts joined tens of thousands of displaced people and are fleeing the area," it said.

The WHO added it "has grave concerns for the safety of the health workers, hundreds of sick and injured patients, including babies on life support and displaced people who remain inside the hospital. The number of inpatients is reportedly almost double its capacity."

Two different arms of the World Health Organization are expected soon to release separate reports on aspartame, the sweetener used in Diet Coke, Pepsi Zero Sugar and other diet sodas. 

Beverage industry experts say they expect one of the groups to reaffirm its decadeslong assessment that aspartame is safe. They expect the other group, called the International Agency for Research on Cancer, to identify aspartame as a possible cancer hazard.

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The head of the World Health Organization warned that the world must prepare for the next pandemic, which could be “even deadlier” than the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday, director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sounded an alarm that the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over.

“The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains,” Tedros said. “And the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains.”