Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and Briton Michael Houghton won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, the Nobel Committee announced Monday.

The three were honoured for their “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world,” the jury said.

“The discovery of Hepatitis C virus revealed the cause of the remaining cases of chronic hepatitis and made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives”, it added.

Thanks to their discovery, highly sensitive blood tests for the virus are now available and these have “essentially eliminated post-transfusion hepatitis in many parts of the world, greatly improving global health”, the Nobel Committee said.

Their discovery also allowed the rapid development of antiviral drugs directed at Hepatitis C.

“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating Hepatitis C virus from the world population,” the jury said.

“Prior to their work, the discovery of the Hepatitis A and B viruses had been critical steps forward,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a statement.

The award for work on a virus comes as the world battles the new coronavirus pandemic.

The trio will share the Nobel Prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million or €950,000).

Celebrations overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic

While the Nobel awards will go ahead as planned this year, celebrations have been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Nobel Foundation has cancelled the traditional banquet, which forms the centre-piece of the celebrations in December, replaced with a televised ceremony showing the laureates receiving their awards in their home countries.

They would normally receive their prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel who created the prizes in his last will and testament.

This year’s winners will be invited to celebrate alongside the 2021 laureates, assuming the pandemic has eased by then.

Last year, the honour went to US researchers William Kaelin and Gregg Semenza and Britain’s Peter Ratcliffe on for discoveries on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.

The winners of this year’s physics prize will be revealed on Tuesday, followed by the chemistry Prize on Wednesday. The literature prize will be announced on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize will wrap up the Nobel Prize season on Monday, October 12.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP & Reuters)

Coronavirus tests that deliver results in 15-30 minutes are to be rolled out across the United States and in scores of poorer countries, as health authorities worldwide try to get a handle on a disease that has now killed more than a million people.

US President Donald Trump announced 150 million tests would be distributed in America, while the World Health Organization said 120 million more would be available for the developing world at $5 each as long as funding was secured.

The testing push comes as the virus shows no sign of receding, with infection numbers climbing rapidly in Europe again and governments there clamping down on movement in an attempt to curb the surge.

Paris, London and Madrid have all been forced to introduce controls to slow infections, and on Monday Dutch authorities became the latest to tighten curbs, while the Czech Republic and Slovakia said they were preparing to declare a state of emergency.

The WHO said its $600 million scheme to roll out the quick diagnosis kits across 133 countries in the next six months would enable low- and middle-income nations to close the gap in testing with the rich world.

The kits are far faster, cheaper and easier to administer than regular standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) swab tests but are less sensitive and more likely to return false negatives.

“This will enable the expansion of testing, particularly in hard-to-reach areas that do not have lab facilities or enough trained health workers to carry out PCR tests,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.

Experts have for months been calling for widespread adoption of this low-cost technology so that people can test themselves several times a week.

Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina said the testing drive “is terrific and is a great start”.

But the amount being distributed by the US government was “simply not sufficient” and production should be multiplied ten- or twentyfold, he added.

– ‘Whatever is necessary’ –

The tests are part of a limited toolkit available to governments as they seek ways to get the wheels turning on economies that have been crippled in recent months by lockdowns and other restrictions on people’s lives.

A million Madrid residents are under partial lockdown, with the city and the surrounding region at the centre of Spain’s second wave.

The national government on Monday warned the local authorities of drastic measures if the region failed to move decisively to slow the uncontrolled spread.

“There is no doubt that (the central government) is prepared to do whatever is necessary,” Justice Minister Juan Carlos Campo told Spain’s RNE public radio.

– ‘Made peace with it’ –

Worldwide the virus has now infected more than 33 million people and killed over a million, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources.

On Monday the number of cases in India surpassed six million, with the country on course to overtake the United States in the coming weeks as the nation with the most infections.

Locals in Delhi said while they remained cautious, their fears had lessened since the pandemic began earlier this year.

Himanshu Kainthola, 61, who recovered from the virus last month, said his family’s worries had “reduced substantially”.

“We take the necessary precautions and invest in increasing our immunity rather than being anxious or scared of it,” he said. “We have made peace with it.”

Source: AFP

The global death toll from the new coronavirus, which emerged less than a year ago in China and has swept across the world, passed one million on Sunday.

The pandemic has ravaged the global economy, inflamed geopolitical tensions and upended lives, from Indian slums and Brazil’s jungles to America’s biggest city New York.

World sports, live entertainment and international travel ground to a halt as fans, audiences and tourists were forced to stay at home, kept inside by strict measures imposed to curb the virus spread.

Drastic controls that put half of humanity — more than four billion people — under some form of lockdown by April at first slowed its pace, but since restrictions were eased cases have soared again.

On Sunday 2230 GMT the disease had claimed 1,000,009 victims from 33,018,877 recorded infections, according to an AFP tally using official sources.

The United States has the highest death toll with more than 200,000 fatalities followed by Brazil, India, Mexico and Britain.

For Italian truck driver Carlo Chiodi those grim figures include both his parents, who he says he lost within days of each other.

“What I have a hard time accepting is that I saw my father walking out of the house, getting into the ambulance, and all I could say to him was ‘goodbye’,” said Chiodi, 50.

“I regret not saying ‘I love you’ and I regret not hugging him. That still hurts me,” he told AFP.

With scientists still racing to find a working vaccine, governments are again forced into an uneasy balancing act: Virus controls slow the spread of the disease, but they hurt already reeling economies and businesses.

The IMF earlier this year warned that the economic upheaval could cause a “crisis like no other” as the world’s GDP collapsed.

Europe, hit hard by the first wave, is now facing another surge in cases, with Paris, London and Madrid all forced to introduce controls to slow cases threatening to overload hospitals.

Masks and social distancing in shops, cafes and public transport are now part of everyday life in many cities.

Mid-September saw a record rise in cases in most regions and the World Health Organization has warned virus deaths could even double to two million without more global collective action.

“One million is a terrible number and we need to reflect on that before we start considering a second million,” the WHO’s emergencies director Michael Ryan told reporters on Friday.

“Are we prepared collectively to do what it takes to avoid that number?

Waking up to Covid-19

The SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the illness known as Covid-19 made its first known appearance in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak.

How it got there is still unclear but scientists think it originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.

Wuhan was shut down in January as other countries looked on in disbelief at China’s draconian controls, even as they went about their business as usual.

By March 11, the virus had emerged in over 100 countries and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, expressing concern about the “alarming levels of inaction.”

Patrick Vogt, a family doctor in Mulhouse, a city that became the outbreak’s epicentre in France in March, said he realised coronavirus was everywhere when doctors started falling ill, some dying.

“We saw people in our surgery who had really big breathing problems, young and not-so-young who were exhausted,” he said. “We didn’t have any therapeutic solutions.”

Frustrations, protests

Nor did the virus spare the rich or famous this year.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spent a week in hospital. Madonna tested positive after a tour of France as did Tom Hanks and his wife who recovered and returned home to Los Angeles after quarantine in Australia.

The Tokyo Olympics, Rio’s famed Carnival and the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca are among the major events postponed or disrupted by the pandemic. Premier League football has restarted but with empty stadiums. The French Open tennis tournament is limiting its audiences to 1,000 a day.

Israel has gone into full lockdown again and Moscow’s vulnerable have been ordered to stay home.

As the restrictions tighten, protests and anger are rising as businesses worry about their survival and individuals grow frustrated about their jobs and families in the face of another round of lockdown measures.

Anti-lockdown protesters and police clashed in central London on Saturday as officers dispersed the thousands at a demonstration.

“This is the last straw — We were starting to get back on our feet,” said Patrick Labourrasse, a restaurant owner in Aix-en-Provence, a French city near Marseille which is again being forced to close down bars and restaurants.

Along with the turmoil, though, lies some hope.

The IMF says the economic outlook appears brighter now than it had been in June, even if it remains “very challenging”.

Crucially, nine vaccine candidates are in last-stage clinical trials, with hopes some will be rolled out next year though questions remain about how and when they will be distributed around the world.

(AFP)

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Cameroon has said on September 23 that nine cholera cases have been confirmed and one death recorded in Buea, the chief town of the Southwest region of Cameroon since the declaration of the cholera outbreak last week, according to a news report by Cameroon Online.org.

Officials have expressed concerns that the epidemic could spread even more rapidly in the town that is hosting several internally displaced persons escaping from an armed separatist conflict principally in the rural areas of the region.

“The cholera outbreak declared in Buea is very concerning due to limited access to clean water, a health system weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that Buea town is hosting thousands of displaced people due to insecurity in the region,” OCHA said in a statement.

“Humanitarian actors are supporting the Regional Delegation of Public Health to develop a robust and rapid response, including the establishment of a Cholera Treatment Centre at Buea Regional hospital,” the statement added.

On Friday, health authorities in the region called on the residents to “be on the guard” and adopt hygiene and sanitation practices.

Cholera spreads through contaminated food and drinking water, causing diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting.

Source: Xinhuanet

The World Health Organization expects Europe to see a rise in the daily number of Covid-19 deaths in October and November, the head of the body’s European branch told AFP on Monday.

“It’s going to get tougher. In October, November, we are going to see more mortality,” WHO Europe director Hans Kluge said, as the continent currently experiences a surge of cases though the number of deaths has remained relatively stable.

The resurgence is however expected to lead to an increase in daily deaths, the WHO said.

“It’s a moment where countries don’t want to hear this bad news, and I understand,” Kluge told AFP in an interview, stressing that he wanted to send the “positive message” that the pandemic “is going to finish, at one moment or another.”

The WHO Europe’s 55 member states are holding an online meeting on Monday and Tuesday to discuss their response to the new coronavirus and agree on their overall five-year strategy.

However Kluge, based in Copenhagen, raised a warning finger to those who believe that the development of a vaccine will bring an end to the pandemic.

“I hear the whole time: ‘the vaccine is going to be the end of the pandemic’. Of course not!,” the Belgian said.

“We don’t even know if the vaccine is going to help all population groups. We are getting some signs now that it will help for one group and not for the other,” he said.

“And then if we have to order different vaccines, what a logistical nightmare!”

“The end of the pandemic is the moment that we as a community are going to learn how to live with this pandemic. And it depends on us and that’s a very positive message,” he said.

The number of cases in Europe has risen sharply in recent weeks, especially in Spain and France. On Friday alone, more than 51,000 new cases were reported in the 55 countries of the WHO Europe, which is more than the highest peak in April, according to the organisation.

Meanwhile, the number of daily deaths has remained at around the same level since early June, with around 400-500 deaths per day linked to Covid-19, WHO data showed.

Source: AFP

Cameroon says it urgently needs more than 2,000 pints of blood to save the lives of about 300 people, including hemodialysis patients, in the central African state’s troubled English-speaking town of Bamenda.

Health workers say the fear of COVID-19, coupled with increasing attacks by separatist fighters, has scared away most blood donors. People wounded in the separatist crisis and dialysis patients are being rushed to hospitals in French-speaking towns.

Ngum Sirri, 55, was being rushed to the General Hospital in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, in the hospital’s ambulance. The hemodialysis patient was brought in from the English-speaking town of Bamenda by her family members. She says she is in search of blood to save her life.

“When you give blood you save lives, so we are pleading with the population to help us donate blood in the general hospital. There are vulnerable people in the hospital who need blood, like those with dialysis, those with sickle cells. We have blood shortage in the hospital,” she said.

Sirri is one of the 30 patients from the English-speaking northwestern town of Bamenda who have received emergency assistance at the General Hospital within the past six days.  

 Fidelis Ako, head of the blood transfusion unit of the Regional Hospital in Bamenda, confirmed that patients are leaving for French-speaking towns. He said blood banks are becoming empty in English-speaking towns. He said the separatist conflict led many blood donors to escape to safer localities and blood scarcity has now become acute with COVID-19 scare.

    “The socio-political crisis (separatist conflict) has scared many of our donors away and then now the COVID-19. Since the hospital is a [COVID-19] treatment center, many people think that when you come here you will have coronavirus, and so we could not have persons coming to the hospital to donate blood and as well we could not organize mobile voluntary blood donation campaigns. People should not be afraid of coming to the hospital to make their blood donations because coronavirus is not injectable,” he said.

Ako says the blood bank of the Bameda hospital has not been able to help 40 patients in need within seven days.

“Last week we received over 70 requests for blood units, but we have been able to transfuse just 31 units of blood. Before the crisis we were transfusing over 4,000 units of blood per year, but as of now, we have not been able to transfuse up to 2,000 units so it shows that we are going to lose more patients because we don’t have blood units at the blood bank,” Ako said.

Cameroon said several patients have died as a result of the blood shortage and that its hospitals are finding it difficult to treat civilians wounded in the separatist conflict. Many of the injured are moved to hospitals in French-speaking towns like Bafoussam, Douala and Yaoundé.

 Ako said health authorities last week announced incentives to encourage blood donation. Civilians who donate blood will have a 50% reduction in their medical bills when they become sick.

 Non-governmental organizations have been encouraging people to donate blood. Feka Parchibel of the NGO Hope for Vulnerables and Orphans says many children they help also need blood.

“Our people are in dire need of blood. I am calling on all blood donors in the North West and the South West regions to help by rushing to the hospitals to donate blood to save lives. All we need is to practice all the preventive measures,” Parchibel said.

 Cameroon has reported more than 20,000 COVID-19 cases, with 415 deaths since March 5, when the first coronavirus case was reported in the central African state, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Source: VOA  

Headaches, confusion and delirium experienced by some Covid-19 patients could be the result of the coronavirus directly invading the brain, according to a study published Wednesday.

The research is still preliminary — but offers several new lines of evidence to support what was previously a largely untested theory.

According to the paper, which was led by Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, the virus is able to replicate inside the brain, and its presence starves nearby brain cells of oxygen, though the prevalence of this is not yet clear.

S Andrew Josephson, chair of the neurology department at the University of California, San Francisco, praised the techniques used in the study and said “understanding whether or not there is direct viral involvement of the brain is extraordinarily important.”

But he added that he would remain cautious until the paper underwent peer review.

It wouldn’t be completely shocking if SARS-CoV-2 is capable of breaching the blood-brain-barrier, a structure which surrounds the brain’s blood vessels and tries to block foreign substances.

Zika virus, for instance, also does this — leading to significant damage to the brains of fetuses.

But doctors had believed until now that the neurological impacts seen in about half of all patients could instead be the result of an abnormal immune response known as a cytokine storm that causes inflammation of the brain — rather than the virus invading directly.

– Prevalence unknown –

Iwasaki and colleagues decided to approach the question in three ways: by infecting lab-grown mini-brains known as brain organoids, by infecting mice, and by examining the brain tissues of Covid-19 patients who had died.

In the brain organoids, the team found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to infect neurons and then hijack the neuron cell’s machinery to make copies of itself.

Infected cells in turn promoted the death of surrounding cells by choking their oxygen supply.

One of the main arguments against the theory of direct brain invasion had been that the brain lacks high levels of a protein called ACE2 that the coronavirus latches on to, and which is found in abundance in other organs like the lungs.

But the team found that the organoids had enough ACE2 to facilitate the virus’ entry, and the proteins were also present in the brain tissue of deceased patients.

They also performed a spinal tap on a hospitalized Covid-19 patient suffering from delirium and found the individual had neutralizing antibodies against the virus in their spinal fluid — further evidence in favor of their theory.

The team then looked at two groups of mice — one set that was genetically altered so it had ACE2 receptors in only its lungs, and the other in only its brain.

Those infected in their lungs showed some signs of lung injury, while those infected in the brain lost weight rapidly and quickly died, indicating potentially heightened lethality when the virus enters this organ.

Finally, they examined the brains of three patients who died from severe Covid-19 related complications, finding evidence of the virus in all to varying degrees.

Intriguingly, the infected regions did not show signs of having been infiltrated by immune cells, such as T-cells, which rush to the site of other viruses like Zika or herpes to kill the infected cells.

This could hint that the overloaded immune response known as cytokine storm which is responsible for much of the damage seen in the lungs of Covid-19 patients might not be the main cause of neurological symptoms.

It has been hypothesized that the nose could provide the pathway to the brain, but the authors wrote this needed to be validated through more study.

They added that more autopsies will be required to learn just how prevalent brain infection might be.

Source: AFP

U.S. cases of the novel coronavirus surpassed 6 million on Sunday as many states in the Midwest reported increasing infections, according to a Reuters tally.

Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota have recently reported record one-day increases in new cases while Montana and Idaho are seeing record numbers of currently hospitalised Covid-19 patients.

Nationally, metrics on new cases, deaths, hospitalisations and the positivity rates of tests are all declining, but there are emerging hotspots in the Midwest.

Many of the new cases in Iowa are in the counties that are home to the University of Iowa and Iowa State University, which are holding some in-person classes. Colleges and universities around the country have seen outbreaks after students returned to campus, forcing some to switch to online-only learning.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Sunday said his state was sending a “SWAT team” to a State University of New York (SUNY) campus in Oneonta in upstate New York to contain a Covid-19 outbreak. Fall classes, which started last week at the college, were suspended for two weeks after more than 100 people tested positive for the virus, about 3% of the total student and faculty population, SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras said.

“We have had reports of several large parties of our students at Oneonta last week, and unfortunately because of those larger gatherings, there were several students who were symptomatic of Covid,” Malatras said.

Across the Midwest, infections have also risen after an annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota drew more than 365,000 people from across the country from Aug. 7 to 16. The South Dakota health department said 88 cases have been traced to the rally.

More than eight months into the pandemic, the United States continues to struggle with testing. The number of people tested has fallen in recent weeks.

Many health officials and at least 33 states have rejected the new Covid-19 testing guidance issued by the Trump administration last week that said those exposed to the virus and without symptoms may not need testing.

Public health officials believe the United States needs to test more frequently to find asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers to slow the spread of the disease.

While the United States has the most recorded infections in the world, it ranks tenth based on cases per capita, with Brazil, Peru and Chile having higher rates of infection, according to a Reuters tally.

The United States also has the most deaths in the world at nearly 183,000 and ranks 11th for deaths per capita, exceeded by Sweden, Brazil, Italy, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Peru.

(REUTERS)

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday declared that Africa was now free of the virus that causes polio, a landmark in a decades-long campaign to eradicate the notorious disease around the world.

“Today is a historic day for Africa,” said Prof. Rose Gana Fomban Leke, whose commission certified that no cases had occurred on the continent for the past four years, the threshold for eradication of poliovirus.

Poliovirus now joins smallpox in the list of viruses that have been wiped out in Africa, the WHO said.

Since 1996, eradication efforts “have prevented up to 1.8 million children from crippling life-long paralysis and saved approximately 180,000 lives,” the agency said.

Poliomyelitis — the medical term for polio — is an acutely infectious and contagious virus which attacks the spinal cord and causes irreversible paralysis in children.

It was endemic around the world until a vaccine was found in the 1950s, though this remained out of reach for many poorer countries in Asia and Africa.

In 1988, when the WHO, UNICEF and Rotary launched the worldwide campaign to eradicate the disease, there were 350,000 cases globally. In 1996, there were more than 70,000 cases in Africa alone.

Thanks to a global effort and financial backing — some $19 billion over 30 years — only Afghanistan and Pakistan have recorded cases this year: 87 in total.

Poliovirus is typically spread in the feces of an infected person and is picked up through contaminated water or food.

Vaccinating people to prevent them from becoming infected thus breaks the cycle of transmission and eventually eradicates the virus in the wild.

The last case of polio in Africa was detected in 2016 in Nigeria, where vaccination efforts had been hampered by the Boko Haram terrorist group.

More than 20 workers involved in the campaign lost their lives.

“This is a momentous milestone for Africa. Now future generations of African children can live free of wild polio,” said Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa.

“This historic achievement was only possible thanks to the leadership and commitment of governments, communities, global polio eradication partners and philanthropists,” Moeti said.

“I pay special tribute to the frontline health workers and vaccinators, some of whom lost their lives, for this noble cause.”

(Source: AFP)

Britain on Thursday said it will reimpose quarantine for travellers from France and the Netherlands, prompting Paris to quickly announce a “reciprocal measure”.

The UK government declared the change, which will likely spark a mass exodus among the estimated half a million British holidaymakers currently in France, after a rise in coronavirus cases there.

“Data shows we need to remove France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos & Aruba from our list of coronavirus Travel Corridors to keep infection rates DOWN,” transport minister Grant Shapps wrote on Twitter.

“If you arrive in the UK after 0400 Saturday from these destinations, you will need to self-isolate for 14 days.”

French junior minister for European affairs Clement Beaune said that it was “a British decision we regret and which will lead to a reciprocal measure”.

France “hoped for a return to normal as soon as possible,” Beaune said on Twitter.

On Thursday France recorded 2,669 new coronavirus infections, its highest daily number since May.

Britain had initially imposed a blanket quarantine on all visitors arriving in the country, but later carved out “travel corridors”, which exempted travellers arriving from certain countries from having to self-isolate.

But it reintroduced the quarantine for travellers arriving from Spain in late July, catching airlines by surprise — as well as thousands of Britons leaving for their holidays.

Britain reimposed quarantine for travellers from Andorra, Belgium and the Bahamas last week.

With more than 41,000 deaths caused by the Covid-19 disease, Britain is the worst-hit country in Europe and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised over his handling of the crisis.

His government also announced on Thursday that casinos and bowling alleys will be allowed to reopen in England after being shut during the lockdown, but that those not wearing masks face harsher fines.

Complacency warning

Skating rinks will also be allowed to reopen, and pilot schemes of larger crowds at sporting events will be introduced following a two-week delay to the initial plans caused by a spike in cases.

“A number of remaining aspects of England’s culture, sport, leisure and business sectors will be permitted to reopen from this weekend,” said the statement from Johnson’s Downing Street office.

“Two weeks ago the Office for National Statistics had expressed concerns about a slight increase in the number of people in England testing positive. The situation now appears to have levelled off,” it added.

Indoor theatres, music and performance venues will be able to reopen with socially distanced audiences.

The piloting of crowd-attended sporting events will commence with the final of the World Snooker Championship at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre on August 15 and 16.

“We are able to announce some further changes which will allow more people to return to work and the public to get back to more of the things they have missed,” Johnson said.

“However, as I have always said, we will not hesitate to put on the brakes if required,” he warned.

Despite the easing of lockdown measures, the government also announced that the fine for those who “repeatedly flout face covering rules” will be doubled to a maximum of £3,200 ($4,200).

New fines will also be introduced for “people hosting raves or other unlawful gatherings of more than 30 people”.

“Most people in this country are following the rules and doing their bit to control the virus, but we must remain focused and we cannot be complacent,” Johnson said.

The loosening of lockdown rules will not apply to local hotspots that have seen more stringent measures applied to prevent community spread.

Although the Office for National Statistics said the “situation had levelled off”, more than 1,000 people a day are still testing positive for the virus.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)