Category: Medical

The United States is sending more than 4.8 million coronavirus vaccine doses to four African nations, the White House told VOA on Wednesday.

White House officials said the 55-member African Union determined the allocations. Landlocked Chad, one of the world’s poorest nations, will get 115,830 doses; populous U.S. ally Egypt will receive 3,634,020 doses; West Coast oil producer Gabon is to get 101,790 doses and East Coast bulwark Kenya will receive 990,990 doses.

The donated Pfizer vaccine doses should all arrive in the countries by Friday or Saturday, White House officials said. That vaccine requires two shots for full immunity, and American authorities have recommended that certain high-risk groups should receive booster shots of that vaccine after their initial course.

The move follows an announcement earlier in the week that the United States would allow the African Union to purchase an allotment of 33 million doses of the two-shot Moderna vaccine that were originally intended for the United States.

“As the president has said, the virus knows no borders, and it is going to require every company and every country to step up and take bold, urgent action to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives,” said Natalie Quillian, White House deputy COVID-19 response coordinator. “We are grateful to have helped negotiate this encouraging step forward between Moderna and the African Union that will significantly expand access to vaccines on the continent in the near term. This is an important action, as we continue to expand manufacturing capacity now and expand access to mRNA vaccines with some of the hardest-hit parts of the world.”

U.S. officials have been criticized for urging booster shots for vulnerable Americans while vaccination rates are low in the developing world. The White House casts the controversy over booster shots as a false choice, claiming that the United States can help vaccinate the world while also protecting Americans.

Critics say wealthy countries are not moving fast enough.

“At our current pace, it could take over a decade until low-income countries reach the 70% vaccination target,” said Tom Hart, acting CEO at the anti-poverty ONE Campaign. “We can’t end this pandemic anywhere if the vaccine isn't everywhere. The world needs an escape plan, not just life preservers thrown out in the dark.”

According to projections by an Oxford University COVID-19 database, Our World in Data, only one nation in sub-Saharan Africa -- the tiny enclave nation of Lesotho -- is on track to meet the target of inoculating 40% of their population with at least one dose of the vaccine by the end of this year.

Source: Voice of America

Health care activists in Cameroon are visiting homes, markets and farms this month, encouraging women to get free screenings for breast cancer. The central African state says the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer has risen sharply over the past year because many women delayed screenings for fear of COVID-19 infections. The push to increase screenings is part of this year's breast cancer awareness month in October.

Civilians, mostly women, visit various neighborhoods in Yaoundé asking people to go to hospitals for free breast cancer screening.

Each group of a dozen people includes medical staff members, representatives of healthy living organizations, cancer patients and their family members.

Among those participating is 24-year-old Amin Ruth Tabi of the Noela Lyonga Foundation, a Cameroon-based NGO. The foundation's main objective is giving hope to persons who have lost hope either due to frustration, stress or ill health.

Tabi says she wants to stop people from dying from breast cancer.

"Every female seven to ten days after menstruation is supposed to conduct a breast self-examination to look for abnormal nodules, redness, fluid coming from the nipples, orange skin appearance on the breast because breast cancer is treated well and quickly when it is noticed at an early stage," she said.

Cameron's Health Ministry said several thousand women came out in at least 11 towns including the capital Yaoundé, the commercial capital Douala and the English-speaking western towns of Kumba, Buea, Limbe, and Bamenda Kumbo.

Claudette Mani, 36, says she was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2020. She says thanks to prompt medical intervention and assistance from NGOs, her life was saved.

"I was so isolated, I was so weak, looked very bad and I felt like it was the end of the world," she said. "At first just from my looks you will know that I have a problem, but now I am healthy, strong, and looking good. They [humanitarian groups] brought in doctors, educated us on how to feed ourselves, how to do exercises, to stay strong, eliminate the fact from our heads that we have this breast cancer and be focused on our dreams."

Cameroon's Association of Cancer Patients says breast cancer patients suffer from prejudices. Family members often think breast cancer is some sort of divine punishment for wrongdoing. The association says because of either illiteracy or lack of financial means, families abandon members diagnosed with breast cancer.

Cameroon's Health Ministry says screening programs with mammography can lead to earlier diagnosis, and that coupled with effective treatment, will lead to reductions in breast cancer mortality.

Cameroon reports that in 2019, 3,000 of the 5,000 patients diagnosed with breast cancer died. In 2020, the number of breast cancers diagnosed rose to over 7,000 with close to 5,000 deaths.

Professor Paul Ndom is president of Cameroon’s National Committee for Cancer Prevention.

Ndom says many people neglect going to hospitals for consultation because breast cancer is not painful at its early stages. He says people at high risk of developing breast cancer are women who smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, women who are not physically active and women who refuse to visit hospitals for fear they will be exposed to COVID-19 infections.

Ndom said the government of Cameroon subsidizes treatment for people diagnosed with breast cancer.

The October Breast Cancer Awareness month campaign was launched by the American Cancer Society and Imperial Chemical Industries to encourage women to get regular screening for breast cancer. The month-long activities educate women to reduce their breast cancer risks, be screened and seek medical attention if a suspicious lump is detected.

Source: Voice of America

Uganda has kickstarted a trial for the injectable HIV drugs cabotegravir and rilpivirine. Researchers and those living with HIV say the trial will likely end pill fatigue, fight stigma, improve adherence and ensure patients get the right dosage.

The two drugs have been in use as tablets. The World Health Organization last year licensed their use as injectables.

While the two injectables already went through trials in Europe and North America, this will be the first time they are tested in an African population for efficacy and safety in an African health care system.

Uganda is one of three African countries, along with Kenya and South Africa, which got approval from the WHO to carry out the trials. However, Kenya and South Africa have yet to acquire approvals to start their trials, expected by the end of the year.

Uganda and Kenya will both have three trial sites and there will be two in South Africa, with a total of 512 participants -- 202 from Uganda, 160 from Kenya and 150 from South Africa.

Dr. Ivan Mambule, the lead project researcher at the Joint Clinical Research Center, says participants will need one injection every two months.

“We are going to choose participants who are already on ART [anti-retroviral treatment] and are stable on ART. And we will randomize them to either continue on their normal treatment, which is the pill that they’ve been taking, or to switch them to this injectable. The injection is on the buttock,” he expressed.

Uganda has 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Barbara Kemigisa who is living with HIV and founded the Pill Power Foundation working with rural women, says the injectable drugs will increase adherence to treatment and ensure people get the right dosage.

“One of the things that affects adherence is the fact that people have to hide medicine. In the village, people are hiding medicine in the kitchen roof, in trees, in bushes, in a baby’s shoe…If someone is wrapping the medicine in like five plastic bags and digs a hole in the garden and keeps the medicine there, by the time someone is taking that medicine, it’s no longer medicine, it's poison,” Kemigisa points out.

Nicholas Niwagaba, who has worked with young people living with HIV welcomes the trial, saying it will reduce the pill burden and fight stigma.

“Young people feel like, this is a lot of pills to take. Those who are on the first line, they will have to take one tablet a day. There are those who are on second line and they have to take more than one pill and they have to take it in the morning and in the evening. And of course, this requires you to have actually a balanced diet which is really a challenge for most of young people especially those from vulnerable communities,” he says.

According to the WHO, there are 25.7 million people living with HIV in Africa. With only the pill currently available to manage the scourge, this injectable may come as a relief for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Source: Voice of America

WASHINGTON —

Millions more Americans are closer to getting a COVID-19 booster as influential government advisers on Thursday endorsed extra doses of all three of the nation's vaccines and opened the possibility of choosing a different company's brand for that next shot.

Certain people who received Pfizer vaccinations months ago already are eligible for a booster, and now advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say specific Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients should qualify, too. And in a bigger change, the panel allowed the flexibility of "mixing and matching" that extra dose, regardless of which type people received first.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized such an expansion of the nation's booster campaign on Wednesday, but the CDC, guided by its advisory panel, has the final word on who should roll up their sleeves. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was expected to rule soon.

"We're at a different place in the pandemic than we were earlier" when supply constraints meant people had to take whatever shot they were offered, noted CDC adviser Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University.

She called it "priceless" to be able to choose a different kind of shot for the booster if, for example, someone might be at risk for a rare side effect from a specific vaccine.

There still are restrictions on who qualifies for a booster and when. Starting six months past their last Pfizer vaccination, people are urged to get a booster if they're 65 or older, nursing home residents, or at least 50 and at increased risk of severe disease because of health problems. Boosters also were allowed, but not urged, for adults of any age at increased risk of infection because of health problems or their jobs or living conditions. That includes health care workers, teachers, and people in jails or homeless shelters.

The CDC panel backed the same booster qualifications for Moderna recipients. Moderna's booster will come at half the dose of the original two shots.

As for the single-shot J&J vaccine, a COVID-19 booster is recommended for all recipients at least two months after vaccination. That's because the J&J vaccine hasn't proved as protective as the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer options.

The panel didn't explicitly recommend that patients get a different brand than they started with, but it left open the option — saying only that a booster of some sort was recommended. And some of the advisers said they would prefer that J&J recipients receive a competitor's booster, citing preliminary data from an ongoing government study that suggested a bigger boost in virus-fighting antibodies from that combination.

About two-thirds of Americans eligible for COVID-19 shots are fully vaccinated, and the government says getting first shots to the unvaccinated remains the priority. While health authorities hope boosters will shore up waning immunity against milder coronavirus infections, all the vaccines still offer strong protection against hospitalizations and death.

The CDC's advisers wrestled with whether people who didn't really need boosters might be getting them, especially otherwise healthy young adults whose only qualification was their job.

Dr. Sarah Long of Drexel University voiced concerns about opening those people to rare but serious side effects from another dose if they already were adequately protected.

"I have my own concerns that we appear to be recommending vaccines for people who I don't think need it," added Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington.

But she stressed that the vaccines work and that moving forward with the recommendations makes sense for the sake of being clear and allowing flexibility when it comes to boosters.

Despite the concerns of some members, the panel vote ended up being unanimous.

The vast majority of the nearly 190 million Americans who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 have received the Pfizer or Moderna options, while J&J recipients account for about 15 million.

Source: Voice of America

COVID-19 deaths in Somalia were at least 32 times higher than the figures reported by the government during the early months of the pandemic, according to a new study.

The study, published by the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, estimates that between 3,200 to 11,800 people died from the effects of COVID-19 between March and September 2020 in the capital, Mogadishu.

In that period, the Somali government reported 99 deaths and 3,864 positive cases throughout the country.

Somalia reported its first case of COVID-19 on March 16, 2020. To date, the overall death toll given by the Somali government stands at 1,180, and the number of positive cases is at 21,269 in the country.

Researchers say there has been a considerable undercount in cases among the Somali population.

"It was not sufficient to assume, as many people had, that Somalia has just been a very lucky country," said Abdihamid Warsame, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who was among the researchers.

Researchers used satellite images of graves from 2016 to September 2020, as well as interviews and other data collected on the ground to reach the conclusion.

Looking at information, there was a substantial increase after COVID-19 arrived in Somalia, Warsame told VOA Somali.

"Having looked at other potential sources of deaths, for example other outbreaks or any other event, we could not find anything else that could account for a large increase in deaths," he said.

But not everyone in Somalia fully supports the results of the research.

Somalia country representative for the World Health Organization Dr. Mamunur Rahman Malik says the study lacks some degree of precision.

"I think this number is fine, it is a scientific way of doing things, but may not be truly representative of what deaths or what number of deaths that have actually occurred during this pandemic," he told VOA Somali.

He says the truth might be in between the low fatality number given by the government and the higher figures from the research.

Warsame says he is not arguing all new burials from March to September 2020 translate into deaths and a direct result of COVID-19, but says the pandemic had an impact on the population, which accounted for other deaths.

"During COVID-19 the usage of health services declined, the vaccination decreased, the use of maternal child services decreased, so these could all potentially lead to spike in deaths," he said. "Therefore, COVID-19 could have both direct and indirect impact on deaths."

Malik says the death toll figure given by the government is only based on people who have died of COVID-19 in health facilities. He said the registration system to capture deaths among the community does not exist in Somalia.

"The problem is that there is no definitive registration system for deaths in Somalia, and that is the biggest limitation that we are dealing with," he said.

Source: Voice of America