HEALTH - The African Mirror

Apr

14

2021

Superstars for Covid concert

COVID-19

GLOBAL singers Jennifer Lopez and H.E.R. will star in a global streaming and broadcast special on May 8 to raise money for COVID-19 vaccines, following last year's "One World - Together at Home" fundraiser in which locked-down stars including Lady Gaga performed from their homes. "VAX LIVE: The Concert to Reunite the World" will be hosted by singer Selena Gomez and also feature the Foo Fighters and Eddie Vedder, according to organiser Global Citizen, an international advocacy group. "This is really an opportunity to call on world leaders to make sure that the 27 million heroic healthcare workers around the…

Jul

06

2021

By The African Mirror

IMF chief warns of ‘dangerous divergence’ recovery

COVID-19

THE head of the International Monetary Fund has warned of a "dangerous divergence" between wealthy and developing countries as they seek to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Kristalina Georgieva said that strong growth in wealthy countries like the United States was "good news" but developing countries were being held back by slow vaccination rates. "That is danger for the coherence of growth and it is also a danger for global stability and security," she told the Paris Peace Forum where the heads of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank also spoke. WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala similarly expressed concerns,…

Jul

06

2021

By The African Mirror

Ivory Coast sends mobile clinics to speed up COVID vaccinations

COVID-19

IVORY Coast has begun sending mobile clinics to markets and other busy areas in its main city Abidjan in an effort to turbocharge the vaccination campaign against COVID-19. After administering fewer than 800,000 doses since vaccinations began in March - enough for a single dose for just 3% of the population - Ivorian health authorities are now aiming to inoculate a million people in Abidjan over the next 10 days. While acknowledging that will be a tall order, they hope to pick up the pace by targeting some of Abidjan's most frequented places, especially its vast open-air markets where most…

Apr

13

2021

By The African Mirror

Coronavirus pandemic ‘a long way from over’

COVID-19

CONFUSION and complacency in addressing COVID-19 means the pandemic is a long way from over, but it can be brought under control in months with proven public health measures, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said. So far some 780 million vaccines have been administered globally, but measures including wearing masks and maintaining physical distancing must be applied to reverse the trajectory. "We too want to see societies and economies reopening, and travel and trade resuming," Tedros told a news briefing. "But right now, intensive care units in many countries are overflowing and people are dying – and it's totally…

Apr

13

2021

By The African Mirror

Botswana probes vaccine-related deaths

COVID-19

BOTSWANA is investigating the deaths of two among thousands of people who had been given doses of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine to see if there is any link, the health ministry said. The southern African country has so far administered about 31,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the only vaccine it has started rolling out. India donated 30,000 doses of the vaccine that were manufactured by the Serum Institute of India (SII), and Botswana bought 33,000 doses that were made in South Korea from the global vaccine distribution scheme COVAX. The two people who died had taken the shots made in…

Jul

05

2021

By The African Mirror

HIV generic drug for babies distributed in Africa, says UNITAID

HEALTH

AID agencies have distributed a strawberry-flavoured tablet for children living with HIV in six African countries, the first generic pediatric version of a key anti-retroviral, according to the global health agency UNITAID. UNITAID and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) funding procured 100,000 packs of the dolutegravir formulation across Nigeria, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Benin, UNITAD's spokesman Herve Verhoosel said in a statement to Reuters. Some 1.8 million children worldwide live with HIV, but only half receive any treatment, often hard to administer due to the bitter taste or incorrectly dosed by crushing adult pills. Some 100,000 children die of…

Apr

12

2021

By The African Mirror

‘South African variant may evade protection from Pfizer vaccine’

COVID-19

MAAYAN LUBELL THE coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa may evade the protection provided by Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is very low and the research has not been peer-reviewed. The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease. It matched age and gender, among other characteristics. The South African variant, B.1.351, was found to make…

Apr

12

2021

By The African Mirror

Cameroon receives 200 000 doses

COVID-19

CAMEROON took delivery yesterday of 200 000 doses of China's Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines, the first vaccines to arrive in the country, which will enable it to inoculate frontline workers as it battles rising cases of coronavirus, the health ministry said. The Central African nation has been hit hard by a second wave of the pandemic. The health ministry has so far reported over 61,700 cases with 919 deaths since the outbreak. Reuters data shows that daily average numbers of coronavirus-related deaths reported in Cameroon has reached a new high of more than 53. The health ministry said in a statement…

Jul

04

2021

By The African Mirror

South Africa approves China’s Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine

COVID-19

TIM COCKS SOUTH Africa has approved China's Sinovac vaccine against COVID-19, the acting health minister has announced, as the country faces a crippling third wave of infections that has paralysed hospitals and brought its death toll to 60,000. "I would like to express gratitude to our regulatory authority for their sense of urgency, which included reducing turnaround time to process applications for registration of ... (the) COVID-19 vaccine," Mamoloko Kubayi said in a statement. The surge in infections in Africa's most industrialised nation has overwhelmed hospitals, especially in the main city of Johannesburg, and left overworked healthcare personnel struggling to…

Jul

04

2021

By The African Mirror

How COVID-19 measures have affected food safety in East Africa

HEALTH

FOODBORNE diseases are thought to impose a health burden on society comparable to the “big three”: malaria, HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis. FLORENCE MUTUA, Scientist, International Livestock Research Institute DELIA GRACE, Professor Food Safety Systems at the Natural Resources Institute (UK) and contributing scientist ILRI, International Livestock Research Institute ERASTUS KANG'ETHE, Professor, University of Nairobi Common foodborne diseases affect tens of millions of people every year. They include salmonellosis, which causes stomach upsets, norovirus, which can cause severe vomiting and diarrhoea, and listeriosis, which can cause severe infections of the bloodstream and brain. Children and people with weak immune systems are affected…