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Hepatitis Taking a Toll in Millions, WHO

Medical experts are calling for global action to tackle the viruses that cause the liver disease hepatitis.

The first worldwide estimates in drug users show 10 million have hepatitis C while 1.3 million have hepatitis B.

Writing in the Lancet, experts say only a fraction of those who could benefit are receiving antiviral drugs.

Only one in five infants around the world are vaccinated against hepatitis B at birth, they say.

The figures, published in the Lancet, show about 67% of injecting drug users in the world have been exposed to hepatitis C, while around 10% have come into contact with hepatitis B.

In the UK, around half of injecting drug users have been infected with the hepatitis C virus, while the rate for exposure to hepatitis B is 9% – the highest in western Europe.

The research was led by Prof Louisa Degenhardt of the Centre for Population Health, Burnet Institute, Melbourne, Australia, and Paul Nelson from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

They say: “The public-health response to blood-borne virus transmission in injecting drug users has mainly centred on HIV.

“Maintenance and strengthening of the response to HIV in injecting drug users remains crucial, but the significance of viral hepatitis needs to receive greater attention than it does at present.”

Commenting on the study in the Lancet, Dr Joseph Amon, of Human Rights Watch, New York City, US, said: “This study provides us with a first step and powerful data to draw attention to the problem of viral hepatitis in people who use drugs.

“The next step is to challenge governments to act, and hold them accountable for implementation of rights-respecting and evidence-based programmes.”

Health risks

Hepatitis is caused by five main viruses – A, B and C, and, more rarely D and E.

Hepatitis B is the most common, and can be passed from mother to baby at birth or in early childhood as well as through contaminated injections or injected drug use.

Hepatitis C is also spread through using unsterile needles and less commonly through unsafe sex or sharing razors or toothbrushes.

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Africa’s Evil: An Examination

Africa’s evil scene

The eccentric atmosphere following the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s President, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity (short of genocide) in Darfur open the obscurities of evil in Africa for the past 50 years.

In some sort of grim moment, al-Bashir and the ICC are quarrelling over the darkness in Darfur, where the United Nations estimates that over 300,000 people (and still counting) have died in the past six years of the conflict. So, what have al-Bashir being doing in the past years to have prevented such evil? And al-Bashir, with a cold-shoulder, denies the ICC charges and dismisses any ruling by the ICC as insignificant and rejects the chilling pains, horrors, darkness, and deaths hovering over Darfur.

Africans, who have over the past 50 years seen other horrifying evils across their borders, are a bit relieved over the al-Bashir indictment – at least, for now, psychologically. Al Bashir’s formal arrest and trial will add up to the updating on Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s ex-warlord Thomas Lubanga and Chad’s Hissène Habré. And as Clifton Crais meditates in Politics of Evil, Africans, with the help of the international community, are capable of fighting evils that have destroyed their progress as they did against one of the great evils of the 20th century – South Africa’s apartheid.

For the past decades, from Idi Amin’s Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s Central African Republic (CAR), Samuel Doe’s Liberia, Foday Sankoh’s Sierra Leone, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia to Juvénal Habyarimana’s Rwanda, stains of deadly ethnicity, threats, frightening tension, harassments, massacres, witchcraft, human sacrifices, genocides, deaths, civil wars, famine, murders, floods, locusts and other natural disasters have visited Africa.

With fast developing global communication gadgets, Africa’s evils are being tracked day in, day out by satellites, video clips, radio, mobile phones, photographs, and computers, showing vivid clarities of the heavy suffering of the people of Darfur, CAR’s north-east region, Chad’s Zaghawa and Tama ethnic groups and the DRC’s eastern region. Video clips released by the British-based Aegis Trust show a Sudanese government soldier saying he was forced to rape at gunpoint by a senior officer and other doers said such acts were intended to make babies of a different race.

Now and then, an evil, a true chasm.

An evening newscast would tell the natural tribulations – the Supreme Being (God)’s anger and nature – locusts’ outbreak in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, Niger and Burkina Faso, the floods in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia, the deaths by cholera in Zimbabwe, and ebola outbreak in the DRC. As Darfur shows, it would add up to moral evils – the horrors accomplished by Africa’s “Big Men” and their foreign accomplices. After Darfur, Liberia and Sierra Leone, anything new about Africa’s evils? Hackings in apartheid South Africa? The simultaneous assassination of Guinea-Bissau’s President Bernardo Vieira and Chief of its Armed Forces, Gen. Tagme na Waie, on purely tribal hatred? A baby, called Mercy, left to die in Ghana’s Upper West region for allegedly being a witch? Or the constant kidnappings in Nigeria’s fidgety Niger Delta region where pregnant women are raped to death? Its being awhile in 2005 when the charity Medecine Sans Frontieres reported that almost 500 cases of rape against women, children and men in Darfur – the horror is still going on.

From genocide, rape, human sacrifices, floods, moral evils, cannibalism to juju-marabout mediums and witchdoctors messing up families, Africa has seen all evils and appears to have explored all sorts of evil deeds. Villages and farms burned in Sierra Leone and Liberia during their civil wars were evils made noticeable. The evil turned people’s shelters and livehood upside down, with some committing suicide as a result.

Despite highly developed high-tech war gadgets, the genocide in Rwanda saw the use of crude weapons – machetes. In Conspiracy to Murder – the Rwandan Genocide, Linda Melvern explains how machetes were purposely imported from Egypt and France to commit the genocide in an atmosphere of frightful tribalism. In the Liberian civil war, both President Samuel Doe and then rebel leader Charles Taylor used sophisticated weapons and demonized each other as evil. Doe had Taylor as evil, Taylor had Doe as evil. After Doe’s murder and with Taylor confronted with new war as President, Taylor came down as the evil one by rebel forces. Liberian women organized protests that helped push Taylor into exile in Nigeria and later on his on-going trial at The Hague on eleven counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other slaughter.

Is there more or less evil in Africa today?

Is there more or less evil in Africa today than 50 years ago? As Ghana and Benin Republic exemplify, the past years have brought the triumph of democratic order and freedoms against long years of detestable military juntas and insomniac one-party systems. In Ethiopia and Benin Republic communism collapsed; in South Africa apartheid was toppled; the end of the Cold War freed Africa as the threatre of Superpower rival that left Somalia burnt down and Liberia in the gutter. But state violence persists in most African states – in the style of CAR’s Bokassa, Guinea’s Sekou Toure and Mobutu’s Zaire.

Across Africa, democracy and freedoms are flowering, though with pains, announcing the beginning of history, with mass communications and global prosperity knocking down the old order. Africa can take satisfaction from the progress of Ghana, Cape Verde, Senegal, Tanzania, Benin, South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius, without disparagement, that reason, the rule of law, freedoms, human rights and democracy are pushing out some of its evils into the Atlantic and the Indian oceans and enlightening the continent.

But as Somalia, CAR, the DRC and Darfur show some parts of Africa are concurrently darker. The amputations in Sierra Leone and the dismembering of people in Liberia during their respective civil wars not only announced that each African era reveals its own evils but also the sorting out of different darkness. In some parts of Africa evil may be changing its priorities and intentions but pretty much of it remain the same – human sacrifices remains the same, and is increasing in Gabon over the past twenty years, where Jean-Elvis Ebang Ondo, a school teacher, has been waging national campaigns against human sacrifices after his 12-year-old son and a friend were ritualistically killed, their dismembered bodies washed up on a Libreville beach.

From the African culture to the practices of their nation-states, evil does exist – Africans do not argue about that, they know all about the horrors evil brings, as new killing-fields, from DRC, Darfur to Somalia, show, the level of horrors still shock even the most hardened observers, revealing how violent, corrupt, atrocious and vicious Africa’s evil perpetrators can be. Natural evils or the hands of the Supreme Being? The 2000 catastrophic flood in Mozambique that made many homeless, about 800 people killed, over 1,400 km² of arable land destroyed and over 20,000 head of cattle lost, the worst in 50 years, shows nature’s impulses and brutalities that go past reasoning.

But though Africans know evil exist, they do not give it too much credit, to do that is to give more power to evil than good. Africans acknowledge that their cultural universe is a battleground between evil and good forces, the outcome not in doubt, where good triumph over evil, over witchcraft and demons. As the re-marking of Uganda by Yoweri Museveni shows after Idi Amin’s cataclysm, Africans know evil is temporary but good is permanent. From the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, Africans, who are one of the most forgiving of humanity, do not allow their lower instincts and tragedies grow-up as the dominant idea. To do that is to make evil equal to the Supreme Being. What passes for evil, such as a baby called Mercy abandoned to die in Ghana’s Upper West region, for allegedly being a witch, may be mere ignorance that can be corrected with public human rights education. Guinea-Bissau’s dark metaphysics can be managed by the regional body ECOWAS seeing it as outlandish accidents or absolute stupidity.

Or, for the matter of evil challenging the Supreme Being, Zambia’s ex-Roman Catholic Archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, talks of the fact that in African tradition, development occurs only when the metaphysical is balanced with the physical. And where there is no balance, crises occur. Here darkness isn’t empowered; the darkness hasn’t the same power as the light.

But as Africans deal with evil, the issue is being moved out of their metaphysics into the intellectual framework, into the human agency, into the ICC, into the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions across Africa, into the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, into the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and the growing democracies, the rule of law and freedoms across the continent. This means evil as an African dilemma will be solved more intelligently outside the African cosmological context.

This moves the evil discussions out of African fatalism and “na god mak am” (God has destined it) syndrome, as the Sierra Leonean would say, to the holistic, making the evil-doers responsible for their actions, as human agencies, and not some demons, evil spirits influencing malevolent perpetrators. When in DRC’s Ituri province between June 2007 and June 2008, 6,766 cases of rape were reported, according to the UN, with 43% involving children, the evil debate was being addressed outside demonology to the intellectual framework, to the real world. Despite that, as Lance Morrow explains in Evil: An Investigation, evil is amorphous, intellectually unmanageable, an anonymous, hideous charm, difficult to comprehend, and no explanation as to what it is despite attempts by geo-politics and sociobiology to do so.

Continue reading “Africa’s Evil: An Examination”

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The Somalia Debacle

The situation in Somalia calls for reflection. It demands from other African countries, the need to be proactive in their planning process. No one could basically tell why the problem seems a hydra-headed one: from piracy to militancy, kidnapping, insurgency and, now the greatest of all- famine that has been sacking the two regions in the South Central Somalia. Media report has it that over 12,000 persons have been displaced from their homes to the nation’s capital-Mogadishu, as many more thousands are spewing-out to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia without food and water and transportation. And the Transitional government and the world stand-still and helpless because Al-Shabab, Somalia’s most fearsome and deadliest insurgent group remained on the prowl.

Unfortunately, as the people are fleeing the famine region, they are been assaulted and the women are been raped while children die in their thousands! According to the UN, the scourge may in no distant time spread to other regions if nothing is done urgently to arrest the situation by wealthy nations and other aids agencies. Thus, the world supra body has declared famine in Somalia after about 19 years. Besides, Mr. J.J Rawlings, the AU representation has declared that if we do not act urgently, Africa would have many children to bury in the ensuing weeks. Somalians are trekking kilometers upon kilometers, escaping the food shortage in their land. Who is to blame for the severity of the food shortage?

While the situation is blamed on nature, its most complex dimension is hinged on the Al-Shabab militant group that had been at war with the Transition government since 1992. Consequent upon this, there has been no government, no state police, no functional infrastructure and other basic necessities that make life meaning to citizens. The Al-Shabab militants’ strongholds are the worse-hit regions because they have barred food supplies from NGOs into these regions few years ago while they continue their heinous activities. Their illicit operations in the sea coast of Somalia has been hindering smooth movement of vessels and the crew men that have attracted international attention in the last two decades, yet the situation is more worrisome now that the food shortage is being heightened by the same group which had blocked the innocent population’s access to food supplies. Notwithstanding, the ban Al-Shabab has lifted on the food agencies and NGOs is tenuous and not all-compassing. What is the guarantee that the group would not kidnap aid workers, and confiscate food as they are famished too?

Certainly, Somalia is a failed-state. It does not have the capacity to curtail the situation all alone. The United Nations, other donor agencies have been doing their best to salvage the condition by making food and water available to the famished population in Mogadishu and those in refugee camps in Kenya. Nevertheless, many more are left stranded in remote areas. What are the other countries doing to help? Horrible footages of malnourished and dead children from Somalia are terrible enough to spur other African nations into action to help their dying neighbor.  It is not about waiting for the world to take a step first. They must act now. The African Union (AU) must live up to its role as an umbrella body which oversees activities of its constituent members. Having their representative in the person of the former president of Ghana, Mr. J.J. Rawlings is not enough. There is need for profound empowerment.

Essentially, the whole of East Africa is susceptible to the same scenario playing out in Somalia. The Somalia’s example should prompt their neighboring nations to take proactive and preemptive measures to tackle the situation head-on. They must not play the lie-and-wait game. Planning for food sufficiency through new technological innovations, making use of the natural resources and embracing good governance would go a long way to put off the imminent problem. While it is appreciated that the US and UN, have done much to bring peace to Somalia particularly, and other African nations; they could do more by assisting in the best innovative ways to tackle the Al-Shabab extremists group, so that Somalia can assume the status of a responsible nation- state with the capability to respond to its tasks as a sovereign nation that would require the least of assistance from other nations.

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Nurse Struggles to Save Starving Somali Children

KATHARINE HOURELD

DADAAB, Kenya — Nurse Serat Amin works in the world’s largest refugee camp treating the stream of starving children coming into Kenya from famine-struck Somalia, and although he has painful memories of the children who have died, watching the weak get stronger gives him the courage to carry on.

“You can see if a child is getting better just from the face of the parent,” he said. “Making a difference is what keeps me here.”

Amin works at a stabilization ward at the International Rescue Committee hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp, where dozens of tiny children with stick-thin limbs and oversize heads loll on plastic mattresses. Mothers use their fringed shawls to flap the humid aid around their babies’ faces while patient nurses poke intravenous needles into tiny hands. Amin, walking about the ward in his yellow T-shirt, knows them all.

“Most come in here very sick. Mihag was unconscious when he came,” said Amin, speaking of a tiny 7-month-old the same size as an infant. “But today he is picking up a bit.”

The child, which weighed as much as a newborn when he arrived, has put on 3.5 ounces (100 grams) in the past few days. The wailing babies are weighed in a wicker basket suspended from the ceiling.

The U.N. says parts of Somalia held by Islamist rebels are suffering from famine, and a total of 11.3 million people in the Horn of Africa need aid. Amin said the situation is the worst he’s seen it – they’ve had up to 42 babies in his ward for malnourished babies at a time, a sevenfold increase at the hospital since the beginning of the year. The hospital is just one of three treating Somalis refugees in Dadaab camp.

Most of the children are also suffering from pneumonia and other diseases after hunger weakened their immune systems. That’s particularly painful for Amin: his own cousin lost his eyesight after suffering from malnutrition and measles. It’s what led him into nutritional medicine in the first place.

Now the wards are full of hungry babies with medical complications. On Friday, there were eight more patients than beds, so women had to share overnight.

“I’ve asked UNICEF to come with some tents so we can set them up outside and start treating more people,” said Amin.

The children come in with two types of malnutrition: marasmus, or straightforward starvation where the child is so thin its skin stands up in folds when pinched, and kwashiorkor, where the child has had food but no protein or nutrients.

Habiba Dubow’s son Abdirahman is one year old and weighs nearly 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms). He should weigh 22 pounds (10 kilograms). He is so thin his tiny ribs are clear through his skin and they barely lift with his breathing. When his mother takes his shirt off, his limbs flop back onto the bed and his eyes roll back in his head until only the whites are showing. He is too weak to cry.

“We walked here for 20 days after we lost all our cattle,” she said. “He got sick on the way.”

The kwashiorkor children often have peeling skin or sores, swelling of the limbs or stomach and reddish hair, like Hamud Mohamed Abdi. The 2-year-old also weighs only half what he should for his age, but doctors say he is improving and might go home next week if he can get extra food every day. His parents are rail-thin themselves.

The weakest children can’t even hold onto their mothers’ breasts to get milk and are fed through tubes in their noses. The U.N. says it is the worst emergency in Somalia since the famine in the early 90s that triggered an international intervention that ended after two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters were shot down.

“This influx of severe cases we have not seen before,” Abdi said.

Most have recently arrived in Kenya from Somalia, a war-ravaged nation which has not had a stable central government for more than 20 years. The refugees arrive on foot, or packed into dented minivans, praying that gunmen won’t rob them or rape their daughters before they arrive at the overflowing camp, where nearly 400,000 people have sought refuge.

Among them was a couple who arrived at Amin’s ward with twins. One had taken sick on the journey and was barely clinging to life. He slipped away in just a few hours. Amin said it made him want to cry for all day. From time to time he sees the parents, and he always makes a point of going to speak with them.

“The situation goes with you when you go home,” he said. “I think that for every life we save in this hospital, there are so many more behind them we can’t reach.”

The U.N. has warned that routes out of Somalia are turning into ‘roads of death’ after parents were forced to leave dead children along the roadside. The ones who make it to Kenya but are too hungry, too sick or too weak to survive are buried in a small sandy graveyards near the hospital compound.

Most graves have no markers apart from thorny branches piled on top of the mounds. Plastic trash bags catch in the thorns, fluttering in the wind. The earth on many of them is fresh but the small sandy hills soon drift back into the ground. nearby children play football or fly small kites made from twigs and discarded plastic bags.

But most children survive with treatment, even those whose own parents have already let go.

“There was a child we treated last year – Aden – we had to treat him intensively for seven days. We didn’t know if he would make it. His father and grandmother said, why are you taking him? He is already almost dead. Now he’s walking around and his dad is talking about school,” said Amin.

“Sometimes you are walking in the camp and someone calls you by your name and you don’t recognize them, but they come up and thank you for helping their child

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East Africa Drought Solution Runs Deep

By Bekele Abaire and Sara A. Fajardo

Ethiopians remember keenly the devastating losses of the drought in 1984 and the more recent one in 2000. The numerous pastoralist communities in Ethiopia know that lack of access to water will kill their livestock and destroy the very fabric of their culture.

The East African drought of 2011 that is hitting Kenya and Somalia so hard is also proving to be one of the worst that Ethiopia has faced in 50 years. Currently more than 4.5 million people in Ethiopia alone are facing severe hunger due to the La Niña-induced rainfall shortage. The work that CRS has been carrying out in Ethiopia for more than 50 years is paying off in this drought.

One particularly hard-hit area is eastern Ethiopia near the lowlands of the Somali region. A common sight is pastoralists traveling across the barren landscape in search of water for their livestock. As the sources dry up, desperation is taking hold. Their animals, losing weight and producing less milk, are further weakened as the pastoralists are forced to move them up to six miles a day to find drinking water. In the worst cases, their herds die from thirst, starvation and exhaustion.

“When people hear the word drought, they automatically assume that there is no — or very little — water in an area. And while it is true that we’re dealing with the aftermath of poor rain seasons, the truth is that there is water in Ethiopia,” says Bekele Abaire, CRS water and sanitation program manager. “There is a solution to this problem of recurrent drought that has left millions to face severe hunger. The challenge is that the water runs below the surface in underground caverns as deep as 1,000 feet. This water is difficult but not impossible to access.”

During the past 8 years, CRS — with generous funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.N. Office for the Coordination of International Affairs, and donations from concerned Catholics and others of goodwill — has helped fight the effects of recurrent drought in Ethiopia.

“We brought in rigs to drill wells 1,000 feet into the earth. A recent visit to the field revealed that 95 percent of 28 wells we’ve constructed are still operational,” Abaire says. “These sites were built to serve up to 5,000 people in any given community, but we’re finding that the need is so severe that up to 10,000 are now flocking to these water points.”

Pastoralists travel in search of water. Drought, though, often forces them to stay in one place, their livestock dies off, or they move to cities to buy food. The strains of urban life are debilitating to them both psychologically and culturally. Taking these factors into account, a CRS water and sanitation team studied the migratory path of pastoralist communities to create a system that would meet their needs for water and help maintain their nomadic traditions.

“We’ve drilled wells along the route pastoralists often travel. The goal was to provide water without encouraging any given group to settle in one spot,” Abaire says. “It’s an approach that includes a drinking trough for livestock, water for human consumption, showers, and washbasins for women to do their laundry.”

The difference between communities with water sources and those without is remarkable. The livestock are plumper and produce more milk, which, in turn, means that the people themselves are nourished better. People in these areas rely less on food aid and more on their own means. Water is prized here. It is never squandered.

“Most years our system works beautifully. Pastoralists migrate and access water easily.” Abaire says. “A concern of ours now, however, is that, because of the current drought, many of them are settling near water points out of fear that they will not be able to access more. This puts a strain on the existing resources.”

Much more work needs to be done. Water is there, but more wells need to be built. Yet, few rigs in Ethiopia have the capacity to drill deep enough to access the water. Abaire says that the solution won’t come overnight, but, if planned right and with adequate resources, it can happen.

Bekele Abaire is a water and sanitation program manager with CRS. He is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Sara A. Fajardo is CRS’ regional information officer for eastern and southern Africa. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

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Liberia and its 164 Independence: What Do They Have to Celebrate?


Liberia, the oldest independent African Country with the age of 164 years has not made any substantive progress to have a wide celebration. The country continues to have political confusion marked with unprepared multi-party democracy, ethnic tension, selfish interest over public concern and the common wealth is mostly taken to the Americas and other parts of the world while majority of the people in the country suffered abject poverty. Since independence, on July 26, 1847, most of the national leaders preferred keeping their families in the United States of America, thus creating huge capital flight for a small economy that continues to be fragile.

Liberia’s political order emerged as an over-centralized and predatory order that turned increasingly repressive as pressures for inclusion intensified over the years. It ultimately collapsed under such pressures as external support declined with the ending of the cold war (sawyer, 2004). For the most part, the country has experienced eighteenth violent conflict ranging from 1822 up to 2003 (Levitt, 2005). These violent conflicts have made the society to be acculturated to the “culture of violence”. For instance, in some cases whenever there is an accident in the street where a driver hit somebody especially in a crowded area, when the police doesn’t come around faster on the spot, there will be mob action that could lead to the death of the driver. These wars further broke down the weak and impaired system of governance, led to the death of many Liberians, the destruction of properties and created too much ethnic tension in the country especially among the indigenous and the settlers or the Americo-Liberians. It was appalling that some of those Liberians who were involved in planning and executing the conflict from 1979 up to 2003 refused to apologize to Liberians during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing. Worse of all, the country is witnessing its former President, Charles Taylor being investigated in the Hague for committing crime against humanity in Sierra Leone.

Sadly, there is a breakdown of social value system in the society than ever before simply because the teenage parents don’t have the socialization skills to develop such a core family value. The county needs severe and real commitment to settle such a national crisis rather than putting more interest in celebrating an independence that is not meaningful.

Indeed, the celebration of independence is just because of age factor not because progress has been made in the country as compared to other countries that have had independence. Despite the challenges that come with governing a fragile state, all of these socio-economic and political problems persist because there is no “political will”. For Liberians to always be proud of their independence celebration there must be practical reality of national commitment which will require collective efforts that calls dedication, honesty, hard work, transparency and nationalism.

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Sports Men and Women Urged to Become Malaria Ambassadors

Accra, July 25, GNA – The Country Director of the John Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs (JHU/CCP) Voices, Mr Emmanuel Fiagbey, has called on sports men and women as well as their technical handlers to remain ambassadors in the fight against the malaria disease.

Mr Fiagbey charged them to continue to behave as role models in their communities by ensuring that families make maximum use of their treated mosquito nets and discourage the people from using any other medicine apart from ACTs in treating malaria when they fall sick of the disease.

The Country Director of JHU/CCP0 Voices for a Malaria-free Future Project under its flagship program, ‘United Against Malaria’, and in collaboration with the National Malaria Control Program and other partners said this at the presentation of special commemorative certificates and ‘T’ shirts to the National Sports Authority in Accra.

The over 600 ‘T’ shirts, which also carry messages on malaria prevention will be presented to all the 4,942 participants and their officials at the on-going National Unity Games made up of the teams of Football, Volleyball, Table tennis, Handball, Netball, Basketball, and the winners of the first, second and third positions in all the athletics events.

The Certificates which were signed by the Director of the National Sports Authority, Mr Worlanyo Agra carry the messages: “Be a member of the Winning Team- Sleep in treated mosquito nets every night; Take only ACTs any time you have malaria; Encourage pregnant women in your house to seek Antenatal care on time; and Keep Ghana Malaria-free for the next games.”

Mr Agra in receiving the items commended the growing partnership between the Malaria program and the National Sports Authority.

“We would remain active members of the ‘United Against Malaria’ partnership and continue to ensure that sporting activities at all levels, national, regional, district and at the community levels are used as grounds for educating our people on malaria prevention and correct treatment of the disease.

“Whether you are a sports man or woman or not, mosquitoes do not know the difference and the malaria parasite they carry can kill any one of us any time if we fail to sleep in our nets or take the correct medicines”, he emphasized.

GNA

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‘Dirty sock smell’ Lures Mosquitoes to a Sticky End

Researchers in Tanzania have chemically reproduced the stench of smelly feet in an innovative new approach to combat the spread of malaria in the country.

The scientific team at Tanzania’s Ifakara Health Institute has developed a potent serum — similar to that of human foot odor — to lure and kill mosquitoes, which can carry malaria and other diseases.

Four times more powerful in attracting mosquitoes than natural human odor, the synthetic smell is now being used in a pioneering research program aimed at killing mosquitoes outdoors using a “mosquito landing box.”

“The goal is to eliminate malaria,” said scientific researcher, Fredros Okumu, who is developing the technology. “We are going to do this by tackling the transmission of disease outside the house.”

Mosquitoes are lured inside the boxes by the synthetic odor, which is dispersed by a solar-powered fan. Once inside, the insects are either trapped or poisoned and left to die.

“We know mosquitoes don’t see people, they smell them.” Okumu said.

“Substances we omit when we sweat, such as lactic acid, act as a signal to mosquitoes … The aim here was to produce a mixture that would mimic a human being.”

The result, said Okumu, was a chemical blend that “smelt just like dirty socks.”

“If you came to our lab when the research was being done, you would have thought that someone had just come off a soccer field,” he admitted.

Okumu, who is currently completing a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in England, plans to develop the mosquito landing boxes over the next two years, thanks to a $775,000 joint grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the not-for profit organization Grand Challenges Canada.

“This is a great example of an African innovator, with an African innovation, tackling an African problem,” said Dr Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada.

“Malaria kills about 800,000 people a year, mostly children, in Africa. At the moment existing technologies, such as bed nets and sprays, tend to repel mosquitoes inside the home.

“This technology attracts mosquitoes outside the home to kill them, and could be complimentary to what is there now,” Singer continued.

Working closely with villagers in remote communities where malaria is endemic, Okumu is aiming to produce a practical and sustainable technology that will be easy to run and operate.

Okumu is keen to explore further cost-saving measures in order cement the mosquito boxes as part of everyday Tanzanian life. Ideas include using the boxes’ solar-panel technology to supply energy to people’s homes and substituting the costly chemical mosquito lure with actual foot odor collected from specially designed cotton pads placed in people’s socks.

“We hope at the end of the two years we will be able to tell the world this is a good strategy to use and start involving industry and more communities and villages,” said Okumu.

The prevalence of malaria in Tanzania has decreased in the last 10 years and Okumu has seen rates in his region dramatically decline from 40% in 1997 to around 7% today.

“We are sure that the reduced rates are due to the improved delivery of bed nets, drugs, insecticides and living standards,” said Okumu. “But malaria is not going to disappear using these existing methods.”

Okumu says he hopes to see his boxes used across the region before existing methods become less effective.

“Mosquitoes can modify their behavior quite rapidly to deal with the added deterrents of sprays and bed nets,” he said.

“For example, instead of going into houses to bite people, mosquitoes are now starting to wait to bite people outside,” he said.

For Okumu, this is a personal as well as a scientific venture. Born in western Kenya, malaria has been apart of Okumu’s life for as long as he can remember.

“All the places I have lived have been malaria zones. When I was growing up I had malaria at least twice every year,” he said.

He continued: “Malaria has claimed so many lives and diseases like this are one of the biggest blocks to our social and economic development.”

CNN