Africa > Health

Health in Africa

  • Ebola is an infectious and generally fatal disease.

    GUINEA, 2015/08/27 Ebola is an infectious and generally fatal disease. It's marked by fever and severe internal bleeding, spread through contact with infected body fluids. The nations of Sierra Leone and Guinea on Africa's West Coast have been particularly hard hit with about 4 000 people dying since the start of the outbreak a couple of years ago. The writer participated in the recent Writing for Social Change Workshop in Kampala - an annual event of The African Women's Development Fund (AWDF) in collaboration with FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers Association. Five years ago I was sexually assaulted and I call myself a survivor. I live in a country where this word survivor is thrown around like confetti. Just an extra term for world consumption. A euphemism for scars, underneath which lurks the pain of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak that hit Sierra Leone.
  • Nigeria: Poultry Products Contaminated With Corps

    NIGERIA, 2015/08/18 The Kaduna national Police Command on Friday paraded 34 residents of Mando for exhuming ‎toxic poultry products at a dump site located along Birnin Gwari road, Kaduna. The Federal Operating Unit (FOU) Zone 'B' of The Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) had on Thursday destroyed ‎ over 6,000 cartoons of imported poultry products worth about N35 million seized at Gadan Wali near Wawa town in Niger National. This followed the ban by the Federal Government on importation of poultry products to protect the poultry industry in the country. Speaking to newsmen before the suspected scavengers were paraded by the Kaduna National Police Command PRO, DSP Zubairu Abubakar, PRO of the Customs FOU, Kaduna, Ado Idris said the poultry products were toxic.
  • Plan Cameroon Reinforces Healthcare Assistance

    CAMEROON, 2015/08/14 Plan Cameroon and the Ministry of Public Health have signed a framework agreement to reinforce healthcare and other facilities to Cameroonians particularly those in the rural areas. The Country Director of Plan Cameroon, Bell'Aube Houinato signed on behalf of the organisation while the Minister of Public Health, Andre Mama Fouda signed for Cameroon. Through the convention, André Mama Fouda said the activities of Plan Cameroon throughout the country will be better executed and evaluated for the benefit of the people. The Minister added that Plan's actions fall within government's activities to meet up with the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which focus on reducing child mortality; improving maternal health and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases inclunding ensuring environmental sustainability.
  • West Africa: Handwashing in W. African Schools Protects Children, Families From Ebola

    AFRICA, 2015/08/13 Handwashing and giving out soap in schools in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have helped to keep classrooms Ebola-free this year but schools need to remain vigilant next the summer holidays, the U.N. children's agency said on Wednesday. UNICEF said there had been no reported cases of students or teachers contracting Ebola at a school this year in the three worst-hit nations in West Africa, where the virus has killed nearly 11,300 people since the outbreak began in late 2013. In Liberia, where there have been as a lot of as 4,800 deaths, two schools were decontaminated as a precaution next one student died in June and an extra became infected in July.
  • Sierra Leone: Ebola s Victims of the Future

    SIERRA LEONE, 2015/08/13 For the last 13 years, Sierra Leone has seen a dramatic decrease in its maternal mortality rate, due in large part to the introduction of free health care for pregnant women. One of the majority devastating and from presently on rarely acknowledged impacts of the Ebola epidemic is that it threatens to undo all this good work. It's not just the loss of additional than 220 health workers, inclunding a lot of midwives, to the virus, with little training or wiggle-room in the fragile health system to replace those skills. It's as well the lingering fear of hospitals and doctors part the local people, which remains traumatised by an outbreak that has claimed almost 4,000 lives and still sees new infections each week, albeit small numbers.
  • GSK invests $365m in ongoing development of malaria vaccine

    AFRICA, 2015/07/28 GSK, a British Multinational Pharmaceutical Company, has announced that the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency has adopted a positive scientific opinion for its malaria candidate vaccine MosquirixTM. The drugs manufacturer has so far invested $365 million into the vaccine’s development. The drug is as well known as RTS, S, in children aged 6 weeks to 17 months.
  • Merck ,Partnership with University of Nairobi and Kenya Women Parliamentary Association ,Infertile Women in Africa

    KENYA, 2015/07/23 Merck (http://www.merckgroup.com) in collaboration with Kenya Women Parliamentary Association and University of Nairobi has successfully kicked off “Additional than a Mother” Campaign as part of Merck Fertility Capacity Advancement Program. “Merck Additional Than A Mother Campaign will not only provide medical education and awareness for medical students and general practitioners but will as well support governments to define policies to improve access to safe and effective fertility care, address the need for interventions to reduce stigmatization and social suffering of infertile women and raise awareness about male infertility and the necessity for a team approach to family building part couples”. Explained by Rasha Kelej , Vice president and chief of World Business Social Responsibility and Market Development. Through this campaign Merck will address together with local stakeholders, the key challenges that are associated with resource-constrained settings such as prevention of Infertility, education & self-development, ART/IVF regulation, geographic barriers, reproductive rights and over-people and limited resources arguments.
  • Israelis perform lifesaving surgery on 10 Tanzanians

    ISRAEL, 2015/07/21 An Israeli delegation of 20 doctors, nurses and medical technicians has returned from Tanzania next performing lifesaving heart surgery on additional than 10 local children and examining hundreds additional with congenital heart defects. The delegation traveled to the eastern African country under the auspices of Wolfson Medical Center’s Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) organization. Some of the youngsters who were examined will be brought to Israel in a few months to undergo cardiac surgery at Wolfson.
  • South Africa: Handful of Civil Society Organisations Allegedly Invited to Food Policy Consultations

    SOUTH AFRICA, 2015/07/18 Activists have alleged that only five civil society organisations were invited to today's public consultation on government's new food policy. This comes just weeks next additional than 20 organisations and individuals called on government to hold nationwide public consultations on its new policy to curb hunger. In August, government gazetted its new plan to address hunger and food insecurity. At the time, government noted policymakers were in the advanced stages of drafting an accompany implementation plan set to begin last month.
  • Ebola-Stricken Nations Need $700 Million to Rebuild Healthcare

    GUINEA, 2015/07/18 Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone need a further $696 million (£446.13 million) in donor funding to rebuild their battered health services over the next two years in the wake of the deadly Ebola epidemic, senior World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Monday. WHO Assistant Director General for Health Systems and Innovation Marie-Paule Kieny said that donors had pledged $1.4 billion of an estimated $2.1 billion required by the three nations before December 2017. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will host an international Ebola recovery conference in New York on Friday to raise additional funds for reconstruction.