Category: Medical

Gunmen kidnapped up to eight people, including the one-year-old child of a nurse, from a hospital’s staff residential quarters in northwest Nigeria, while assailants simultaneously attacked a nearby police station, police and hospital officials said.

Kaduna state has been hit by a wave of kidnappings for ransom by armed men. Zaria, where the National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Centre hospital is located, has been particularly hard hit, and the attack was the third on the hospital.

The attack in the early morning hours of Sunday lasted for roughly an hour, hospital spokesperson Maryam Abdulrazaq told Reuters.

She said six people had been abducted: two nurses, one with her one-year-old child, a laboratory technician, a security guard and one other staff member. Police gave the number of hostages as eight.

“So far, [there was] no ransom demand,” Abdulrazaq said. “We have not heard from the bandits since they took them away.”

In a separate statement, Kaduna police spokesman Muhammed Jalige said that a “large number” of armed men from the same group attacked the divisional police headquarters at roughly the same time “in an attempt to overrun the officers on duty.”

Jalige said police repelled the attack after a heavy exchange of gunfire, injuring some of the attackers. Police recovered dozens of shell casings from rifles and machine guns.

He said officers from tactical, anti-kidnapping and other units were working to rescue those kidnapped from the hospital.

Kidnappings for ransom have become endemic in northern Nigeria. More than 800 students have been abducted since December, at least 150 of whom remain missing.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization is calling for urgent action to stem the rapid spread of COVID-19 across Africa, which is being fueled by a surge of more contagious variants of the disease.

Latest reports say COVID-19 cases in Africa have been rising by 25% every week for the past six weeks, bringing reported cases there to more than 5.4 million, including 141,000 deaths.

WHO regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, warns the rampant spread of the more contagious alpha, beta, and delta variants is raising the pandemic threat across the continent to a new level.

"The speed and scale of Africa’s third wave is like nothing we have seen before," said Moeti. "Cases are doubling every three weeks, compared to every four weeks at the start of the second wave. Almost 202,000 cases were reported in the past week and the continent is on the verge of exceeding its worst week ever in this pandemic.”

In the same period, WHO reports deaths have risen by 15% across 38 African countries to nearly 3,000. The jump is largely due to the highly transmissible coronavirus variants, which have spread to dozens of countries. The most contagious delta variant has been found in 16 countries. It reportedly has become the dominant strain in South Africa.

Moeti says more people are falling ill and requiring hospitalization, even people younger than 45 years. She says evidence is growing that the delta variant is causing longer and more severe illness.

With Africa’s lack of life-saving vaccines, Moeti says it is important for people to practice public health measures, such as wearing masks, social distancing, and frequent handwashing to prevent the disease from spreading.

"With WHO’s guidance, countries are taking action to curb the rise in cases," said Moeti. "All countries in resurgence in the region have put limits on people gathering to help with physical distancing. …They are using nuanced, risk-based approaches, informed by the local epidemiology, in an effort to avoid nationwide lockdowns that we know cause great harm to livelihoods, particularly for low-income households.”

Vaccines are proving highly effective against the COVID-19 variants and in ending devastating surges of severe cases of the disease. They are widely available in the world’s richest countries, but not Africa.

Moeti is urgently appealing to countries to share their excess doses to help plug the continent’s vaccine gap, saying Africa must not be left languishing in the throes of its worst wave yet.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned Thursday that the African continent is facing a surging third wave of COVID-19 cases, driven by new and faster variants of the coronavirus that causes it.

During a virtual briefing, WHO Regional Director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said new cases have increased by an average of 25 percent in Africa for six straight weeks, to almost 202,000 in the week ending on June 27. She said deaths rose by 15 percent across 38 African countries to nearly 3,000 in the same period.

Moeti said this wave is being driven by more contagious COVID-19 variants, “raising the threat to Africa to a whole new level.” She said among the 14 African countries now in resurgence, 12 have detected variants of concern, including nine with the Delta variant, originally identified in India.

Meanwhile, she said the Alpha and Beta variants have been reported in 32 and 27 countries respectively.

Moeti said hygiene, social distancing and mask wearing can certainly help slow the spread, but globally, it has been shown that vaccines offer the best path toward ending devastating surges.

Just over 1% of Africans are now fully vaccinated, compared to 11% of people globally, and over 46% of people in the United States and Britain.

Earlier Thursday, in interviews with the Associated Press, African Union Vaccine Envoy Strive Masiyiwa blasted Europe and international suppliers for failing to deliver promised vaccine.

Masiyiwa said that while Europe has promised to sell vaccines to Africa, so far, it has not followed through. He said, “The fact of the matter is the EU has vaccine factories. It has vaccine production centers across Europe. Not a single dose, not one vial has left a European factory for Africa.”

African CDC Director John Nkengasong said the WHO-managed international vaccine cooperative COVAX had promised to deliver 700 million vaccine doses to Africa by December. But to date, Africa has received just 65 million doses overall and fewer than 50 million doses have arrived through COVAX.

However, both leaders did announce that the first shipments of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, with U.S. support, will begin arriving next week.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization has expressed concern about Uganda's approval of a locally made herbal treatment for COVID-19 amid a third wave of cases.

The WHO has not approved the substance for COVID-19 treatment, but Ugandan pharmacists say they have little choice because drugs authorized for emergency use in developed countries are not available.

Uganda’s drug authority said Tuesday that it had approved the herbal medicine, Covidex.

Dr. David Nahamya, executive director of Uganda’s drug authority, said the approval followed a two-week scientific evaluation of the medicine's safety and efficacy.

“Covidex has been notified to be sold in licensed drug outlets for supportive treatment in management of viral infections but not as a cure of COVID-19,” Nahamya said.

The WHO consulted researchers from nine African countries, including Uganda, in March about the use of traditional medicine to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Dr. Solome Okware of the WHO’s Uganda office said Covidex wasn’t among the traditional medicines that were evaluated.

“WHO has not received any information about this product,” Okware said.

Bases for approval

Nahamya reassured Ugandans that the manufacturer, Jena Herbals Uganda, had increased production and that the herb would be available for all who needed it, under medical supervision.

He added that the approval was based on initial assessments, published literature and safety studies conducted by the innovator.

“The product has been formulated from herbal plants that have been traditionally used to alleviate symptoms of several diseases," Nahamya said. "To further the efficacy of the drug for other uses, NDA [Uganda's National Drug Authority] has advised the manufacturer to conduct random controlled clinical trials, which are the highest level of evidence to ascertain any claims of treatment.”

Okware said that in collaboration with the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the WHO developed master and generic protocols to provide guidance to members for developing clinical trials to assess claims of effective treatment for COVID-19.

“Many plants and substances are being proposed without the minimum requirements and evidence of quality, safety and efficacy," Okware said. "The use of products to treat COVID-19 which have not yet been robustly investigated can be harmful if the due process is not followed.”

'Local solutions'

Dr. Samuel Opio, secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society of Uganda, said that while there were concerns about misuse of Covidex by the public, its approval was a positive step.

"Whatever is currently being approved [for] emergency use in the U.S. are not available in Uganda," Opio said. "So the issue of lack of a treatment, the issue of inaccessibility to even what is approved for emergency use, means that we need to also look for local solutions to the global challenges, and herbal treatment is one area.”

Uganda recently received 175,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine but is inoculating only frontline workers. With just 856,025 people vaccinated in the country, many members of the public have resorted to using Covidex to treat COVID-19 symptoms.

Source: Voice of America

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday that the delta variant of the novel coronavirus has been identified in at least 85 countries and “is the most transmissible of the variants identified so far . . . and is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated populations.” He also said, “As some countries ease public health and social measures, we are starting to see increases in transmission around the world.”

“It’s quite simple: more transmission, more variants. Less transmission, less variants,” the WHO chief said. “That makes it even more urgent that we use all the tools at our disposal to prevent transmission: the tailored and consistent use of public health and social measures, in combination with equitable vaccination.

Meanwhile, health officials say a new strain of the delta variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, has emerged in almost a dozen countries, including India, the United States, and the U.K. The new variant has been dubbed Delta Plus. Authorities fear Delta Plus may be even more contagious the delta variant. Scientists are just beginning to study the new strain.

Australia’s biggest city has been ordered into a two-week lockdown because of a growing number of COVID-19 cases. Health authorities in Sydney are fighting to contain an outbreak of the highly infectious delta variant. Stay-at-home orders will also apply to other areas in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state. It is the first lockdown in Sydney since December. Australia has consistently maintained very low rates of coronavirus transmission. The latest outbreak is linked to a limousine driver at Sydney airport.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Saturday that the global count of COVID-19 cases has reached more than 180 million. The U.S. continues to have the most infections with 33.6 million, followed closely by India with 30.1 million and Brazil with 18.3 million.

Johns Hopkins said 2.8 billion vaccines have been administered.

Source: Voice of America