Category: Medical

Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders says tens of thousands of people in Cameroon’s western regions have been deprived of lifesaving healthcare since December, when authorities stopped their services. Cameroon accused the aid group of being too close to anglophone separatists, which the group denies.

Doctors Without Borders says over 1.4 million people in Cameroon’s restive western regions need humanitarian support, with access to healthcare extremely limited.

The coordinator for the group’s operations in Central Africa, Emmanuel Lampaert, said that’s due to insecurity, lockdowns, and the targeting of health facilities.

He said mortality among vulnerable groups, such as women and children, has increased, and the government’s suspension of their support since December has made the situation even worse.

“Humanitarian and health needs have surges due to the armed violence and notably for the population and several hundreds of thousands of them who have to flee their houses, and who have barriers to access health care. Concretely speaking, this means suffering from malaria or diarrhea for children in the bush, women in labor who are unable to reach health facilities, people suffering from acute respiratory infections, women victims of sexual violence and so on,” said Lampaert.

Cameroon’s government in 2020 accused Doctors Without Borders of being too close to separatists who are fighting to create an independent English-speaking state in the majority French speaking country.

Lampaert denied the accusation and said their only goal is to save lives.

“Responding to urgent health needs is our mere and only concern. Viruses, bullets, and infections do not care which side of the crisis one is on and neither do the Doctors Without Borders. That is our DNA and that is the DNA of principled humanitarian medical action,” he said.

When contacted by a reporter, Cameroon officials would not say when the aid group, known by its French initials MSF, might be allowed to resume work in the western regions.

Cameroon’s health ministry last week reported about 30 percent of hospitals in the regions are no longer functioning due to separatist attacks.

The health ministry said several hundred health care workers have fled the separatist conflict areas in the past month alone.

Philip Ambe is a government health worker who fled flighting in the northwest town of Bafut last Sunday.

Speaking from the town of Dschang, he said MSF’s work was professional and authorities should allow them to resume saving lives.

“The government does not need to stay mute on this issue [over asking MSF to resume work] again. The situation is very pathetic. People can no longer live in the comfort of their bedrooms. People were kidnapped. Some are in the bush. It is moving from bad to worse. The only way out is dialogue so that things should come back to normal.”

MSF was one of the few groups offering free emergency care to Cameroon’s northwest and southwest populations since 2018.

MSF says community health workers it supported last year conducted over to 150,000 consultations for communities in both regions.

And a free ambulance service it initiated transported over a thousand women in labor to hospitals.

Violence erupted in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions in 2017 when teachers and lawyers protested alleged discrimination at the hands of the French-speaking majority.

The military reacted with a crackdown and separatist groups took up arms, claiming that they were protecting civilians.

The U.N. says 3,000 people have since been killed and more than 750,000 displaced both internally and to neighboring Nigeria.

Source: Voice of America

A bomb blast killed dozens of people Tuesday at a market in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, as new fighting flared up in areas outside the regional capital, Mekelle.

The bomb went off in the town of Togoga west of Mekelle at about 1 p.m. local time. There were conflicting reports on whether the blast was the result of a plane dropping a bomb or artillery shells hitting the market.

Local medical officials that at least 43 people were killed, with dozens of others wounded.

Berhan Ghebrehiwet, who sells coffee for a living, said her hand was wounded during the attack.

“First they bombed the market and later they continue bombing the houses. My hand was injured from the bombing. I am suffering a lot and it is causing me great pain,” she told a reporter for VOA’s Horn of Africa Service at Hyder Hospital in Mekelle.

Health workers said Ethiopian soldiers blocked ambulances from reaching the scene of the attack.

Negasi Berhane, a Mekelle resident who suffered leg injuries in the attack, said he saw three people die in front of him, with many others left to suffer.

Ambulance driver Kahsu Tsegay told VOA he unsuccessfully tried five times to transport injured civilians to the hospital. The driver said he was barred from transporting wounded people on the grounds they had tried to help Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters.

Reuters news agency says an Ethiopian military spokesman, Colonel Getnet Adane, denied the military was blocking ambulances.

Later Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it helped the Ethiopian Red Cross Society and other parties evacuate wounded people from Togoga and transport them to a hospital in Mekelle.

“We cannot stress enough how vital it is for the medical mission to be respected and protected at all times,” ICRC official Nicolas von Arx said in a statement.

The U.S. State Department released a statement Wednesday, saying, “We strongly condemn this reprehensible act.” It said it was “gravely concerned” by the reports of the airstrike on the market.

State Department spokesman Ned Price urged Ethiopian authorities to “ensure full and unhindered medical access to the victims immediately.”

Ethiopian defense forces commander General Berhanu Jula denied the military attacked the market. The general said the attack was targeting an armed group, not civilians.

Asked if he saw armed people during the bombing, Mekelle resident Negasi said he only saw civilians.

On Tuesday, residents said new fighting had erupted elsewhere in Tigray. Residents said TPLF fighters had entered towns north of the capital, only to withdraw within hours.

Tigray has been embroiled in conflict since November, when the Ethiopian military launched an offensive to oust the ruling TPLF. Eritrea’s military has been helping Ethiopian troops battle the TPLF in the ongoing dispute.

Thousands of people have been killed and some 2 million others have fled their homes to escape the violence since fighting erupted.

Source: Voice of America

The World Bank announced a partnership with the African Union Tuesday to finance the acquisition and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine for 400 million people in Africa.

In a remote news conference via Zoom, World Bank Managing Operations Director Axel van Trotsenburg said the World Bank is providing $12 billion to not only acquire but deploy 400 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — a single dose shot — in support of the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) initiative.

The announcement comes a day after African finance ministers and the World Bank Group met to fast-track vaccine acquisition on the continent and avoid a third wave of COVID-19.

Van Trotsenburg said the bank is making the financing available in an effort to address the imbalance in vaccine access between the world’s wealthy and not-so-wealthy nations.

He said, “Less than one percent of the African population has been vaccinated. Africa has been marginalized in this global effort to get a vaccine. We have to correct this unfairness; and given that this is a global pandemic, we need global solutions and global solidarity.”

The project will be a big step toward helping the African Union meet its goal to vaccinate 60% of the continent’s population by 2022.

Van Trotsenburg said the regional effort complements the work of the World Health Organization-managed COVAX vaccine cooperative and comes at a time of rising COVID-19 cases in the region.

The World Bank has already approved operations to support vaccine roll outs in 36 countries. By the end of June, the World Bank expects to be supporting vaccination efforts in 50 countries, two thirds of which are in Africa.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA – African health officials are urgently appealing for vaccines to combat a third wave of COVID-19 surging across the continent.

The World Health Organization reports the number of African COVID-19 cases has exceeded 5 million and the disease has killed 136,000 people.

WHO regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti says cases have been increasing over the past four weeks. She says new cases in the past week have risen by nearly 30% across the continent and deaths have increased by 15%.

She says five countries—South Africa, Tunisia, Zambia, Uganda, and Namibia—account for 76% of new coronavirus infections in Africa.

“Africa is in the midst of a full-blown third wave. The sobering trajectory of surging cases should rouse everyone to urgent action,” said Moeti. “We’ve seen in India and elsewhere how quickly COVID-19 can rebound and overwhelm health systems. Public health measures must be scaled up fast to find, test, isolate and care for patients and to quickly trace and isolate their contacts.”

Moeti says it is urgent that Africa quickly receive more vaccines as the circulation of more contagious variants across the continent is accelerating. She says the Delta variant, the most virulent strain, has been reported in 14 African countries, and the Beta and Alpha variants have been found in more than 25 countries.

She says 12 million people in Africa now are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. She welcomes the receipt of vaccine doses from the WHO COVAX sharing facility and from government donations that has made this possible.

However, she says those 12 million people represent less than 1% of Africa’s 1.3 billion population.

“At the continental level, we are seeing a rise in cases similar to the first wave peak in July 2020 and about 50% of the second wave peak in January 2021. … Africa needs millions more doses here and now to curb the third wave, and best practice approaches will be key to make the most of the available vaccines,” said Moeti.

WHO says Africa needs 200 million vaccine doses by the end of September to inoculate 10% of the population against the coronavirus. The European Union has pledged to donate 100 million doses to low-income countries and the United States has said it would provide 80 million doses to poorer countries.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization officially announced Saturday the end of Guinea’s second Ebola outbreak, which was declared in February and claimed 12 lives.

At 16 confirmed cases and seven probable infections, according to WHO figures, the limited size of the flare-up has been credited to experience from the 2013-16 epidemic, which killed more than 11,300 people, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“I have the honor of declaring the end of Ebola” in Guinea, WHO official Alfred Ki-Zerbo said at a ceremony in the southeastern Nzerekore region, where the disease surfaced at the end of January.

International rules meant that Guinea had to wait 42 days — twice the virus’s incubation period — without a new case before declaring the epidemic over.

That wait was over Friday, weeks after the last person was declared cured on May 8, a senior health ministry official told AFP.

Health Minister Remy Lamah also declared the outbreak finished “in the name of the head of state,” President Alpha Conde.

Saturday’s event in a health ministry building was attended by around 200 people, including local religious and community leaders.

“We must also thank the communities who pitched in to overcome the disease,” the WHO’s Ki-Zerbo said.

Previous resistance

During last decade’s outbreak, reluctance and outright hostility toward anti-Ebola infection control measures led some people in Guinea’s forested southeast to attack and even kill government employees.

“Community engagement, effective public health measures and the equitable use of vaccines” had this time been key to overcoming Ebola, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

The U.N. body said it had delivered about 24,000 vaccine doses to Guinea and that 11,000 people at high risk had received shots, including more than 2,800 frontline workers.

“We’ve beaten Ebola but let’s remain vigilant” read a banner unfurled at Saturday’s ceremony.

“We must stay alert for a possible resurgence and ensure the expertise in Ebola expands to other health threats such as COVID-19,” WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moeti said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement that genetic sequencing showed links between the previous outbreak and the latest epidemic.

This year’s outbreak could have been caused by “persistent infection in a survivor from the West Africa outbreak” back then, the CDC said, emphasizing “the necessity for strong and ongoing survivor programs,” as well as more research.

Ebola causes severe fever and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding. It is transmitted through close contact with bodily fluids, and people who live with or care for patients are most at risk.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA – Ahead of World Refugee Day, the World Food Program is appealing for international support for millions of destitute refugees, many of whom are facing hunger because money to feed them has dried up.

The World Food Program assists more than 115 million people in 80 countries. Currently, it has received just 55 percent of the $15.3 billion it needs to implement its life-saving operations this year.

To make ends meet, it has been forced to make draconian cuts in food rations for millions of refugees across eastern and southern Africa, as well as the Middle East. WFP spokesman Tomson Phiri says in eastern Africa alone, nearly three-quarters of refugees have had their food rations cut by half.

“In Southern Africa, refugees in Tanzania who depend entirely on WFP assistance have had their rations cut by almost one-third,” said Phiri. “Significant funding shortages for the Syria Regional Refugee Response mean 242,000 refugees in Jordan may be cut off from assistance at the end of August unless more funding is received.”

Phiri says the WFP urgently requires $4.5 billion over the coming six months to restore those benefits.

“If we do not get money, we may be forced to prioritize further or even to suspend activities. This will affect vulnerable groups depending on WFP support, particularly malnourished children,” said Phiri. “You have other vulnerable groups or other populations of concern. Pregnant and expecting mothers, nursing mothers. They are all parts lumped together in that category that we refer to as refugees.”

The U.N. refugee agency says a record number of more than 80 million refugees and internally displaced people have been forced to flee their homes because of war, violence, and persecution. It says most of those forcibly displaced live precariously on the margins of society, with little hope of returning home any time soon.

As nations prepare to commemorate World Refugee Day, the World Food Program is urging donors not to turn their back on the most vulnerable people when they need their support more than ever.

Source: Voice of America