Juba, 16th December 2010: As Southern Sudan heads towards a January 9th referendum on secession, it is battling to contain its biggest kala azar outbreak in eight years. The severity of this outbreak is just one symptom of the wider medical humanitarian crisis facing the region, warns the international emergency aid agency, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which includes abysmal lack of healthcare, chronic malnutrition, regular outbreaks of preventable diseases, and insecurity that displaces communities and destroys lives. Kala azar, or visceral leishmaniasis, is a neglected tropical disease contracted through the bite of a parasite-carrying sandfly, and is endemic in Southern... Continue Reading
By Novell Zwange – MONTCLAIR – Nuvo Group USA, a organisation that specialises in the creation and manufacturing of innovative developmental products that are designed to create shared experiences between parents and their children, yesterday announced the launch of Ritmo Connect, a complimentary audio recording service for expectant parents to record and play messages to their unborn child. Many expectant parents are using Ritmo Pregnancy to share music with their developing baby in the womb. However, a growing number of Ritmo Pregnancy customers, such as expectant dads, deployed military servicemen, couples using a Surrogate and Expectant grandparents are finding that... Continue Reading
Geneva, 15 December 2010 – The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has announced its rejection of ambitious proposals to turn back the AIDS epidemic in several high-burden sub-Saharan African countries. Countries whose proposals were rejected have been left with no option but to reapply for funding, but the Global Fund board decided it will be at least one year before these funding decisions are made. Today’s rejections will hamper scale up of HIV treatment and implementation of state-of-the art strategies to prevent the spread of the virus, according to international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).... Continue Reading
By: Frides Laméris, Netherlands – While much suffering is going on in Congo due to a recent outbreak of polio, few people realize that this suffering of the many polio victims, may be partly due to the vaccination campaign itself. Congo is a country which has an unfortunate history with this disease and polio vaccination campaigns. Already in the late fifties of the previous century the Polish-American scientist Hillary Koprowski, rivaling with Jonas Salk and Bruce Sabin in developing an effective polio vaccine, invented by mistake a polio vaccine, that caused some hundred thousands of Congolese people to become sick and/or... Continue Reading
BRAZZAVILLE, 10 December 2010 (IRIN) – The number of people killed by an outbreak of wild polio virus in the Republic of Congo has reached 200, officials said, as the second of three rounds of mass vaccination began. “The first phase was a great success with a coverage rate of 105 percent. This rate reflects the fact that we identified 4,135,000 people and ultimately 4,300,000 people were immunized,” said the Minister of Health and Population, Georges Moyen. “Since 2 December, the country has more reported cases of deaths from acute flaccid paralysis,” said Moyen, stating that the current balance is... Continue Reading
