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The Ministry of Health (MoH) yesterday confirmed that another person who was infected with COVID-19 has died, increasing the country’s death toll from the virus to 478.
The article Region Nine cook is latest confirmed COVID fatality appeared first on Stabroek News.
A November 26 letter from the presidency asked the head of Uganda's national drug authority to 'work out a mechanism' to clear the importation of the vaccines.
China has about five COVID-19 vaccine candidates at different levels of trials. It was not clear what vaccine was being imported into Uganda.
One of the frontrunners is the Sinopharm vaccine developed by the Beijing Institute of Biological Product, a unit of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group (CNBG).
On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates said the vaccine has 86% efficacy, citing an interim analysis of late-stage clinical trials.
China has used the drug to vaccinate up to a million people under its emergency use program.
On Tuesday, Morocco said it was ordering up to 10 million doses of the vaccine.
Record cases
Uganda on Monday registered 701 new COVID-19 cases, the highest-ever daily increase, bringing its national count to 23,200.
The new cases were out of the 5,578 samples tested for the novel coronavirus over the past 24 hours, the country's health ministry said in a statement.
Tuesday's tally was 606, the second-highest ever number of new infections, bringing the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the east African country to 23,860.
Health authorities have blamed ongoing election campaigns which have drawn huge crowds for the rise in infections.
Yet at the same time, some of the very health challenges African countries have wrestled with for decades have given us a clear understanding of what needs to be done, and how to do it.
By early May, 43 African countries had full border closures, 53 had closed institutions of learning, 54 had limited public gatherings, 26 had instituted the compulsory use of face masks, 32 had instituted night-time curfews and 18 had imposed nation-wide lockdowns
The African Union developed a comprehensive Joint Continental Strategy to guide cooperation between member states and set up a Covid-19 Response Fund.
The deployment of community health workers to do screening, testing, contact tracing and case management is happening in many African countries, and draws heavily on our experience with HIV and TB.
Whether it is in repurposing health protocols used with other infectious disease outbreaks, rapidly deploying health care workers to communities, or in launching mobile Covid-19 testing labs to improve national testing capacities, Africa is working proactively to overcome this global threat.
Though it is clear we will continue to rely on the support of the international community and international financial institutions to bolster the existing continental effort and build economic resilience, African countries are holding their own.
In the following article Dr. Clarence Spigner, Professor of Public Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, describes the life of the first patient to die of Ebola on U.S. soil and the larger crisis of Ebola in West Africa. He views it as a consequence of a long history of disease, poverty, and underfunded health care systems in the West African nations of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia which are at the center of the 2014 epidemic.
On September 20, 2014, a forty-two year-old Liberian native, Thomas Eric Duncan, arrived in Dallas, Texas from a plane flight that originated in Monrovia, Liberia. Duncan came to the United States ostensibly to reunite with his estranged teenaged son and the boy’s mother, Louise Troh, who had at one time been his girlfriend in Liberia. Troh and her son lived in Dallas.
Unknown before that point, Duncan entered the international public consciousness because he had flown from the hot zone of the Ebola virus outbreak then occurring in West Africa. On March 30, 2014, Liberia reported two cases of people with the Ebola disease. Six months later on September 30, over 3,000 people had died from Ebola in West Africa including more than 1,000 in Liberia alone. Duncan, who would be the first reported case of Ebola in the United States and as of this writing, the only fatality, was symptom-free and not contagious when he left Liberia by way of Brussels, Belgium and Washington, D.C.
The deadly Ebola disease has symptoms similar to the mosquito-borne infectious malaria. Both malaria and Ebola are endemic to Africa, though malaria is now far more widespread and dangerous. So is West Nile Disease which like malaria is mosquito-borne and was first identified in 1937 in the East African nation of Uganda.
Unlike those diseases, Ebola is spread by physical contact with an infected person or animal. The virus is not airborne. The rapid spread of Ebola and the even more rapid spread of fear of a worldwide distribution of the Ebola virus comes from the knowledge that diseases like
Conakry is the largest city and the capital of Guinea. Located on coastal islands and a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, it is also the nation’s chief port. In 2011 its population was estimated at approximately 1,786,000 people.
The city was founded in 1884 on Tombo Island by French settlers although its political control remained in dispute until Great Britain officially ceded to island to France, which was consolidating its control over the entire colony of Guinea. Conakry was founded on land belonging to the Susu (Soussou) people. The name “Conakry” originally referred to a nearby Susu fishing village. Conakry became the capital of French Guinea in 1904 and was the seaport terminus of the only railroad in the colony.
The layout of the city was influenced by the early French settlers. Conakry is divided into quarters with a number of large tree-lined boulevards inspired by Paris and other French cities. Originally the city was only on Tombo Island but has since expanded to include the Iles de Los and the Kaloum Peninsula which is connected to Tombo Island by a causeway.
The climate of Conakry is tropical with temperatures ranging from 70 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and high humidity throughout the year. Most of the surrounding area is swampland.
In 1958 when Guinea gained its independence from France, Conakry had only about 50,000 people. After independence, the city grew rapidly to 600,000 in 1980 and to its nearly two million people today. Since independence the majority of Conakry’s population has been made up of people belonging to the Peuhl, Malinke, and Susu nations, virtually all of whom are Muslim. Conakry is also home to many refugees fleeing the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Most of the population of Conakry lives in poverty and suffers a high risk of contracting a variety of diseases including malaria, and AIDS. It is estimated that only 3.6% of the total population lives past the age of 65.
Conakry’s economy is mostly dependent on trade due to Tombo Island’s natural
The history of endemic diseases, epidemics and pandemics in Africa shows, contrary to a stubborn belief, that the continent has had a long experience of biomedicine - its theory, techniques, and modes of action.
During and after this period, Africa played an essential role in the discovery and treatment of many diseases such as malaria, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis and plague (Packard 2007; Webb 2013).
The spread of biomedicine in Africa did however take place in an oppressive colonial context, providing the colonial regime with some of its most effective instruments of control: displacement of populations, cordons sanitaires, collective diagnoses, forced treatment, fertility and birth control policies, and invasions of the privacy of the body of the colonized peoples (Hunt 1990; Summers 1991; Thomas 2003).
Other diseases linked to the economy and colonial upheavals, such as the industrial epidemics of silicosis and tuberculosis, spread among migrant workers in the diamond and gold mines of South Africa (Packart 1989; McCullock 2012).
Thanks to the contacts of the Karks and the training they gave to many doctors and researchers who spent time as interns at their Polela clinic, the community centres were a success, spreading to South Africa and the rest of the world, especially in the United States.
Tens of millions of people in Africa could become destitute as a result of COVID-19 and its catastrophic impact on fragile economies and health systems across the continent, human rights chiefs from the United Nations and the African Commission warned on Wednesday.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, and Chairperson of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, Solomon Dersso, issued a joint call for urgent measures to mitigate the ripple effects of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable.
Poverty, lack of social protection, limited access to water, poor sanitation infrastructure, pre-existing disease burden, conflict and overstretched health systems, have created heightened risk for spreading the disease.
Ms. Bachelet and Mr. Dersso called for equitable access to COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, urging creditors of African countries to freeze, restructure or relieve debt.
\"It is a matter of human rights necessity that there must be international solidarity with the people of Africa and African Governments,\" they said.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) has said that it is possible that the baby who recently died while infected with COVID-19 may have contracted the virus at the West Demerara Regional Hospital (WDRH).
The article CMO says infant who died with COVID could have been infected at hospital appeared first on Stabroek News.
But as cases increase, a May report by the Partnership for Evidence-Based Response to COVID-19 (PERC), a public-private partnership initiative on COVID-19 in AU countries, found that certain misconceptions about coronavirus infections exist among Africans.
The survey, which was conducted between March 29 and April 17, 2020, pools its data from \"social, economic, epidemiological, population movement, and security data\" from 28 cities across 20 AU countries to measure the \"acceptability, impact and effectiveness of public health and social measures for COVID-19.\"
Titled \"Responding to COVID-19 in Africa: Using data to find a balance\", the report finds that governments who fail to adapt their public health and social measures (PHSMs) to local needs risk unrest and violence among their population.
The report urged African governments, before considering reopening society, to build public health capacity to test, trace, isolate and treat cases.
PERC member organizations party to the report include: Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies; the World Health Organization; the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team; and the World Economic Forum.
With brothels and guest houses closed, sex workers in countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Senegal and Botswana, are being compelled to work alone, risking their personal safety on the streets, in clients' residences or even in their own homes.
KESWA has recorded 80 incidences of violence against sex workers by clients, neighbours and police in the first of the month of the pandemic compared to a monthly average of 25 incidents before COVID-19 hit Kenya in mid-March, she added.
Already criminalised, stigmatised, and blamed for the high prevalence of AIDS in Africa, sex workers have also become more susceptible to punitive measures by police enforcing COVID-19 regulations in many countries.
Grace Kamau, regional coordinator for the African Sex Workers Alliance, said police in countries such as Uganda, Kenya Ivory Coast, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa, were raiding brothels and bars, assaulting and arresting sex workers.
A survey of 884 sex workers in Kenya conducted by KESWA found more than 65% of respondents could not get condoms and medication for HIV, such as anti-retroviral drugs, due to price hikes on public transport linked to COVID-19 restrictions.
The article Market prices appeared first on Stabroek News.
It has issued an impassioned appeal to malaria-endemic countries not to compromise on the delivery of malaria control activities and healthcare services as they battle COVID-19.
African governments - with the support of the relevant stakeholders - must therefore take a leading role in ensuring that there are minimal disruptions to the delivery of appropriately tailored essential malaria control activities and services.
South Africa has adopted an innovative strategy to ensure the continuation of its malaria test and treat campaign.
And African governments and international organisations like the WHO must lobby hard to ensure that there's no downscaling in the production of tests and treatments for non-COVID-19 infections like malaria.
In the interim, countries should consider stockpiling supplies of malaria rapid diagnostic tests, malaria treatment and essential malaria control commodities.
On 20 May, the official committee to fight the coronavirus said three of its workers were threatened at knifepoint, part of what the government last Friday described as \"rising cases\" of abuse of virus campaigners.
When official figures were quoted to him – the DRC has documented more than 3 300 cases rising at the rate of more than a hundred a day, almost all of them in Kinshasa, with 72 dead – Hussein was dismissive.
Many people surviving on day-to-day jobs have borne the brunt of emergency measures that President Felix Tshisekedi introduced on 20 March.
The deaths from Covid-19 include around a dozen people at the apex of power in the DRC, according to official figures.
\"Scientifically, there is still no proof that has come forward to say anything other than that Covid-19 caused the deaths that we have regretfully seen in the president's circle,\" Tshisekedi's spokesperson, Tharcisse Kasongo Mwema Yamba Y'amba, told state broadcaster RTNC, which asked him about the rumours.
Globally and daily, hundreds of thousands of wildlife rangers patrol wide areas, encountering all manner of plants, animals and signs of poaching like bushmeat snares or elephant carcasses.
The data rangers collect, and their intimate knowledge of the protected areas they patrol, constitute a treasure trove of valuable information that can guide the management of biodiversity.
Over and above these immediate results, we believe that the real value of our research lies in what it has taught us about the deep knowledge which rangers have of their areas, the wildlife within them, and how poachers work.
Before building our models, we individually interviewed several rangers and protected area managers to help us better understand the behaviour of three key agents: poachers, elephants, and the rangers themselves.
Our work shows that rangers are far more than the people who take on poachers at the frontline of conservation; they are also ecologists with a deep understanding of the areas they patrol.
Dar es Salaam — The dengue viruses (DENVs) which thrive in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that are highly prevalent in Tanzania and other parts of the world are continually spreading and causing dengue fever, yet many cases of the disease may have gone unnoticed in the country as attention was turned to Covid-19 pandemic.
However, what came to his mind at the time was a possible coronavirus infection--not malaria, not dengue fever or any other disease.
Symptoms resurface, tests positive for dengue
\"This week, I began feeling the same symptoms of headache, fever, sweat, loss of appetite and general malaise.
The government has been working on the \"Tanzania National Contingency Plan for Prevention and Control of Dengue Fever, May-October 2019\" and mid last year, health minister Ummy Mwalimu said efforts were ongoing to control vector-borne diseases, including those attributed to mosquitoes.
I believe this is the case for dengue fever as well,\" says a mosquito biologist and Director of Science at Ifakara Health Institute Dr Fredros Okumu.
Washington, DC — Almost 50 responders from the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners arrived today in Mbandaka in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), along with 3600 doses of Ebola vaccine and 2000 cartridges for lab testing, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told media in an online briefing.
It is a reminder, he said, that \"we continue to monitor and respond to many other health trials resume
Turning to COVID-19, Tedros announced that the Executive Group of the Solidarity Trial, which is comparing treatment options, has endorsed a recommendation to resume testing the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine.
Today's briefing outlined some of the responses in just the past week including:
A new report on suspected cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, the severe illness appearing in children thought to have been exposed to the virus;
Guidance on maintaining essential health services; controlling the spread of COVID-19 at border crossings between countries; recommendations for mass gatherings; and a protocol for surveillance of infections among health workers;
A discussion of ethical considerations for the use of digital technologies in tracking COVID-19; and
updated guidelines on the clinical management of patients with COVID-19, from screening to discharge.
At the regular press briefings, journalists pose questions to Tedros and a multi-national team of top WHO officials, such as American infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for COVID-19; Irish communicable/infectious disease epidemiologist Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO's Health Emergencies Programmes; and Indian paediatrician and clinician Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO's chief scientist.
In response to a question from AllAfrica about an issue on the minds of many health professionals and policy planners – whether an unchecked spread of the virus in countries around the world could lead to dangerous mutations – Van Kerkhove said that there are a large number of scientists looking at more than 40,000 full genome sequences of the virus that are being shared with researchers around the world.
While Russia, for a time, appeared to escape a serious coronavirus outbreak, the situation there has changed drastically during these two months of April and May, - passing Germany and France to become the third most-infected country in the world, according to The Moscow Times.
Despite its internal difficulties, Russia has been offering coronavirus assistance to a number of Africa countries.
Russian Foreign Ministry said a number of African countries have requested Moscow's assistance in combating the coronavirus.
These requests are carefully studied and the situation in a particular country is taken into account,\" it reported, adding that coronavirus spread rates were relatively low in African countries, with the exception of Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa.
Russia's Sputnik News, under the headline, \"Tunisia Asks Russia for Respirators, Masks, Medical Equipment Amid Pandemic\" quoted the Tunisian Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Tarak ben Salem who said: \"This request for assistance is a part of friendly relations between Tunisia and Russia.
President Hage Geingob last week said Namibia is on the verge of achieving total HIV/AIDS epidemic control in line with the triple 90 goals, with the country's HIV response standing at 94:96:95.
The US government through its President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) last year committed nearly N$1.2 billion (US$82 million) for HIV programmes rolled out throughout Namibia.
\"The cooperation agreement between Namibia and the government of the United States through Pepfar continues to materially support our HIV/AIDS management programmes, which has enabled us to achieve these gains,\" further elaborated the head of state.
Since the beginning of Pepfar in Namibia, the US government has invested nearly US$1.2 billion (N$17.8 billion) on HIV programmes in Namibia.
The United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS in 2013 set the 90-90-90 goals to ensure 90% of people who are HIV infected are diagnosed, 90% of those diagnosed be on antiretroviral treatment, and 90% of those who receive ARVs to be virally suppressed.
A surge in violence in the two months since April has seen nearly 200,000 people displaced from their homes in Ituri province, northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), say Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams working in the region.
Currently, DRC is second only to Syria for the number of internally displaced people within its borders.Relief web
MSF is calling on national and international organisations to step up their assistance to the displaced people.
\"The violence is systematically targeting villages and health centres in order to prevent the people who fled from returning,\" says Benjamin Courlet, MSF's field coordinator.
MSF has been providing medical assistance to people in Ituri region since the conflict began.
As well as caring for the wounded, MSF teams provide treatment for common but deadly endemic diseases, including malaria, severe respiratory infections, diarrhoeal disease and measles, in hospitals, health centres and community health centres in areas where displaced people have settled around Nizi, Drodro and Angumu.
MINISTER of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton has credited the Government's policy measures, including early planning and response to perceived threats, in enabling the country to flatten the coronairus (COVID-19) curve up to this point.
Dr Tufton, in a digital presentation to the 73rd World Health Assembly (WHA) on Tuesday, said that Jamaica's response was grounded in the five strategies of the country's COVID-19 Plan.
Dr Tufton pointed out that the resulting increased public awareness, early detection of cases, along with the primary health care establishment, enabled the country to mobilise response teams into communities for case investigation and contact tracing.
He said the WHA that past responses to public health emergencies, such as measles and malaria, and the experience gained have enhanced the country's contact tracing capabilities, and early implementation of these measures from the detection of the first imported case have had positive results.
Minister Tufton thanked PAHO and the WHO for the assistance provided and from which the country continues to benefit in strengthening laboratory services through increased testing capacity, which he noted, has helped to bolster the country's response to the pandemic.
Most people on the globe are very frightened of the Covid-19 pandemic which has swept across the world.
Roman soldiers who had been at war in the east brought home a bad virus, which killed over a 100 000 people in the period AD165-180.
During the Russian Plague, 1770-1772, the virus depleted St Petersburg and triggered riots against Archbishop Ambrosias who tried to stop people from going to churches to worship, 100 000 people died.
During the pandemic of 1889-1890 many people died and that virus spread abroad.
If a historical time lapse of a virus is calculated from the known periods humans were infected by these pandemics, minus the unknown Miazoqou case mentioned above, the average time for a virus to completely disappear is 3.8 years.
Nearly 1,200 people received their Covid-19 vaccine jab in one day says an El Menzah vaccination centre official in Tunis.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) yesterday confirmed the detection of 36 more cases of COVID-19 from the results of 556 tests that were done.
The article 36 more COVID-19 cases recorded appeared first on Stabroek News.
The Ministry of Health this afternoon confirmed the deaths of two senior citizens who tested positive for COVID-19, taking the total number of deaths from the pandemic in Guyana to 166.
The article Senior men, 70 and 85, die of COVID-19 appeared first on Stabroek News.
WASHINGTON–At least 22 states, including Oklahoma, have obtained a total of more than 10 million doses of malaria drugs to treat COVID-19 patients despite warnings from doctors that more tests are needed.
At least 22 states and Washington, D.C., secured shipments of the drug, hydroxychloroquine, according to information compiled from state and federal officials by The Black Chronicle.
The federal Food and Drug Administration last month warned doctors against prescribing the drug, hydroxychloroquine, for treating the coronavirus outside of hospitals or research settings because of reports of serious side effects, including dangerous irregular heart rhythms and death among patients.
The rest of the cities and states received free shipments from drug companies or the U.S. government over the last month.
“If he [President Trump] hadn’t amplified the early and inappropriate enthusiasm for the drug, I doubt if the states would have even been aware of it,” said Dr. Kenneth B. Klein, a consultant from outside of Seattle, who has spent the last three decades working for drug companies to design and evaluate their clinical trials.
