Some US states are defying the Trump administration’s plans to replace the ObamaCare insurance scheme in their bid to protect the Obama era health care policy and keep their insurance markets stable.

A number of states, including California and Maryland, are making efforts to impose limits on short-term insurance plans, even as the Trump administration intends to expand access to them throughout the country, US news outlets reported Saturday.

According to the reports, the states are taking the measure out of concerns that the availability of the newly-prescribed short-term plans will drive up premium costs for ObamaCare.

This is while northeastern states of Vermont and New Jersey have already passed state laws that require their residents to purchase health insurance. These individual mandate laws are aimed at replacing the now-repealed federal requirement.

Advocacy groups and state authorities backing such measures further underline that the states are seeking to protect advances made under ObamaCare from harassment by the Trump administration, which tried to repeal and replace the law and, failing that, initiated efforts to chip away at it.

High costs are reportedly the major incentive behind the efforts by the largely Democratic states.

The administration proposed rules back in February that would allow people to purchase short-term health insurance for up to 12 months, lifting restrictions from the Obama administration that limited the coverage to a maximum of three months.

The short-term plans don’t need to meet ObamaCare’s consumer protections, so they would potentially be much cheaper than a traditional plan. But people with pre-existing conditions can be charged more.

The cost of health insurance premiums on the ObamaCare exchanges is expected to climb in the coming weeks and months. Several states may face major double-digit hikes next year.

The high costs are blamed on measures the Trump administration has taken that could cut into ObamaCare’s enrollment.

“There’s been a series of actions taken by the current administration that have undermined enrollment,” said president and CEO of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, Chet Burrell, as he declared a potential 26-percent premium rise for next year in the state of Maryland.

Meanwhile, California also passed a bill that would completely ban the sale of short-term plans beginning in 2019, though it has yet to be signed into law.

Moreover, Hawaii lawmakers passed a bill that would essentially eliminate the state’s short-term health plan market by prohibiting their sale to anyone eligible for a plan on the ObamaCare exchange. That bill is also pending the governor’s signature.

Source: Presstv

Sitting on a stool outside her wood-plank house in Cameroon, indifferent to the light rain falling, Diane described how she killed her five-year-old “sorcerer” son.

They boy had suffered from episodes of severe pain his whole life, and was weak and thin, she said. As is the custom in the Central African country, she and his father consulted traditional healers known as marabouts about what to do.

“Madam, your child is a sorcerer,” they said. “He came into the world to torture you. He will die one day,” recalled Diane, who asked not to be identified by her real name. The marabouts told her it was useless to seek medical help.

So on a Thursday morning in February last year, at the rooster’s crow, she suffocated her son with an old pillow.

“I kept the pressure on like in movies and he died,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, with no sign of remorse.

“I killed my child because he was going to die anyway. Before, he was suffering greatly. Now he is at peace.”

What the boy really suffered from was sickle-cell disease, a genetic condition that causes abnormally shaped red blood cells and a variety of complications. It can be treated but not cured.

Diane had learned that she and her partner carried the disease trait during a hospital visit with their first child, who died. But she believed the marabouts over the doctors.

“They told us we couldn’t have more children because we would give them the disease. It was false. The marabouts showed us that sickle-cell children came into the world to torture us and spend all our money,” said the frail 32-year-old.

It took seven months for Diane to agree to tell her story, on the condition that her real name and location not be revealed.

Of the 19 people with sickle-cell disease the Thomson Reuters Foundation interviewed for this story, 16 said they were called “sorcerers” and “devils” as children, abandoned by their fathers and subjected to “demystification” rituals that could have killed them.

Eleven mothers said they believed their children were sorcerers.

“In Cameroon, sickle-cell disease is synonymous with discrimination, the disease of shame, something mystical,” said Fernand Tekoua, president of the national association of people with sickle-cell disease.

“It is ingrained in habits and in society. Even the family thinks you are worthless and just waiting for your day to die,” he said.

LIVING DEAD

Sickle-cell disease is most common in Africa, and affects up to two percent of the population in tropical countries such as Cameroon, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The main symptoms are pain attacks which can last up to a week, a susceptibility to infections, and anemia, which causes weakness and fatigue. Most children with the most severe form die before the age of five, according to WHO.

Like Diane, other parents interviewed described their children as having been constantly sick since birth.

“Sickle-cell crises are frequent and a week of hospitalization can cost over 200,000 CFA francs ($350). The majority of families don’t even have money to eat,” said Tekoua of the national association.

“The child with sickle-cell disease is thus seen as the one that ruins the family.”

Although there is no evidence that children with sickle-cell disease are regularly murdered in Cameroon, interviews with doctors, patients, and parents suggested that it is possible, and that others die of intentional neglect.

“He’s a monster, he deserves to die,” said one mother in the capital Yaounde of her nine-year-old son. When she found out he had sickle-cell disease two years ago, her partner abandoned her and she never took the boy to the hospital again.

“I wouldn’t shed a tear at the death of this child that separated me from my husband,” she said.

Several people with the disease said their parents would tell them: “Why did I bring you into the world? You shouldn’t be alive. Die and leave us in peace.”

They were referred to as “living dead”, “revenants”, “disciples of the devil” and “guardians of hell”, they said.

Hans Edgar, 24, who is living with the disease, said that his father walked out on the family after refusing to spend a penny on his “sorcerer son”.

His mother then took him to a marabout, who one day put him on a grate over burning coals to rid his body of the bad spirit.

“I was little and I jumped with all the force of desperation to save my skin,” he said. “He wanted to grill me like a chicken.”

PREVENTION

Cameroon’s health ministry estimates that sickle-cell disease is responsible for 16 percent of all deaths of children under five, said Etoundi Mballa, head of the division for diseases and epidemics.

“This is a lot. It’s a really worrying problem,” he said.

In 2014, the first treatment center devoted to the disease was opened in a hospital in Cameroon’s second city Douala. But unlike HIV, tuberculosis and malaria programs, it is not subsidized by the government.

Mballa said the health ministry’s plan for fighting the disease included awareness-raising, free vaccines for certain infections and free iron tablets and antibiotics.

The ministry also recommends that young adults get tested for the trait before marrying and having children, he said.

But people living with the disease said much more must be done to spread correct information and make treatment affordable.

In Douala, those who have survived into adolescence and adulthood meet twice a week to console one another, discuss the future, and share concerns and advice.

To end the disease, they think the government should make blood tests free and mandatory.

“If my parents had done this test, I would not be going around today with this disease that destroyed my life,” said Allan, a 17-year-old student.

“We must give all Cameroonians a chance to save the next generation of children.”

Source: Reuters

Twelve people have died of cholera in northeast Nigeria’s Adamawa state, the health commissioner said on Wednesday, in the latest outbreak of the disease in the region.

The outbreak has infected 142 people in Mubi district since Sunday, Ahmad Sajo told AFP.

“We have recorded 12 deaths from (a) cholera outbreak in Mubi north and Mubi south local government areas in the past four days,” he said.

“A total of 142 people were infected and medical teams have been dispatched to the affected communities to contain the rapid spread of the disease,” Sajo said.

He said the medical teams were yet to find out the cause of the outbreak.

Cholera is caused by a bacterium transmitted through contaminated food or drinking water. It causes acute diarrhoea, with children particularly at risk.

Water-borne diseases are a constant threat because of a lack of adequate sanitation as well as stagnant groundwater during the rainy season in Nigeria.

Last month 13 people were killed in a similar outbreak in nearby Yobe state, which the authorities blamed on contaminated water.

(Source: AFP)

Health workers in Democratic Republic of Congo will begin a vaccination campaign on Monday aimed at containing an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, a spokeswoman for the health ministry said on Sunday.

Jessica Ilunga said that 4,000 doses of vaccine were shipped on Saturday to the city of Mbandaka, which last week registered its first cases of the disease in an urban area since the outbreak was declared earlier this month.

The outbreak is Congo’s ninth since the disease made its first known appearance in the 1970s. The cases in Mbandaka, a port city on the Congo river, have raised concerns that the virus could spread downstream to the capital Kinshasa, which has a population of 10 million.

The World Health Organization is sending 7,540 doses of the vaccine developed by Merck to Congo. It is also in talks about a second vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson.

A government spokesman said late on Saturday that Congo’s partners had promised to make available a total of 300,000 doses of vaccine.

(Source: Reuters)

Congolese and UN officials were racing to prevent a runaway Ebola outbreak in Congo on Thursday, working out the logistics of keeping newly arrived vaccines well below freezing in a steamy region on the equator with unreliable power.

World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Christian Lindmeier said the UN body would convene an Emergency Committee meeting on Friday to consider the international risks.

This is the Democratic Republic of Congo’s ninth epidemic since the disease was identified in the 1970s, but also its most alarming because of the risk of transmission via regular river transport to the capital Kinshasa, a city of 10 million.

An experimental but highly effective vaccine is being deployed against the virus, with health workers being vaccinated first, but it needs to be kept 80 degrees Celsius below freezing in a humid region where daytime temperatures hover around 30.

“For now, the cold chain is guaranteed at -80 degrees until Kinshasa,” Health Minister Oly Ilunga told Reuters. “There is a fridge that will be prepared (on Thursday) … in Mbandaka and that will be at -80.”

“This vaccine is no longer experimental. The effectiveness has been proven and validated,” he added. “Now that we are facing the Ebola virus we must use all the resources we have.”

The WHO expert committee will decide whether to declare a “public health emergency of international concern”, which would trigger more international involvement, mobilizing research and resources, Lindmeier said.

Emergency Committees have been set up to advise on past outbreaks such as the 2016 Zika epidemic in Latin America and the huge West African Ebola outbreak that killed at least 11,300 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia from 2014 to 2016.

Mindful of criticism it received for being too slow during that epidemic, when it took months to convene an Emergency Committee, the WHO is moving fast on Congo’s latest outbreak.

The committee can advise WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on actions to be taken by Congo and other countries to try to halt the international spread of disease without unduly interfering with trade or transport.

The Kinshasa government reported the outbreak on May 8, one day after two samples tested positive, and within days the WHO was sending experts, preparing a helicopter “air bridge” to the site, and planning a vaccination campaign.

There have already been 44 suspected, probable or confirmed cases of Ebola, and 23 people have died. Potentially most worrying is a confirmed case in the city of Mbandaka, which has a population of about 1 million.

“The arrival of Ebola in an urban area is very concerning and WHO and partners are working together to rapidly scale up the search for all contacts of the confirmed case in the Mbandaka area,” said WHO Regional Director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti said in a statement.

Mbandaka is also connected via the Congo River to Kinshasa, a crowded city where millions live in unsanitary slums not connected to a sewer system.

Several public boats a day head from there downstream over the river to the capital. They are so overloaded with people that they sometimes topple over, toilets are filthy and water for washing absent.

The other Ebola cases were spread across sites in remote areas where the disease might not travel quickly.

Already the WHO has warned that there is a “moderate” regional risk because the disease could travel along the river to Central African Republic and Congo Republic. But it has said the global risk is low because of the remoteness of the area and the rapid response launched so far.

Even if the logistics of the ‘fridge bridge’ prove easy enough to overcome, “the vaccine is not a magic bullet,” Peter Salama, WHO’s medical emergency program head told Reuters this week, especially since health workers have been infected.

“Having healthcare workers infected is usually a ‘canary in the mine’ for potential amplification,” he said.

(Source: Reuters)

The foundation on which Lebialem is built has collapsed, and the possibility of rebuilding maybe smaller than a mere discussions.  A decision to shut-down Mary Health African of Hospital Fontem – Lebialem was reached yesterday.

The selfless people – the Focolare Movement, whose only mission is “Love and Unity” and who indisputably own the recognition, and from whom no one can take away that “Honor” for building the Lebialem from scratch to its current image, are leaving.

After a lengthy meeting lasting many hours of evaluating the current circumstances of a war on citizens; they searched through pages, and their-52-year history in the area; “life and death,’ then, a tearfully decision – leave.

One of their many challenges laminated at the meeting, many of the medications come in from outside the country, especially Europe, but now they are limited to, not merely the inability to bring in medication from Europe, but also dealing with ruthless uneducated warring soldiers, who do not understand the work of the gentle people.

In really war times, Hospitals – a place where the dying, the wounded and the sick come, are guarded and protected from any attack, but just over two weeks ago, an employee a member of their 80-persons strong-staff was seized,  tortured to death. The hospital called for a day of mourning from all other hospitals across Cameroon. No report here on the response; but the torture and killing of this employee, criss-cross the floor of discussion.

Today, the hospital lies flat, eight patients in total, in a 120 beds inpatient hospital, doctors and nurses take cover on a minute by minute base; and they are words of uncontrollable weeping, and wailing yesterday when this news of the Focolare’s departure broke.

Neither the War-President-in-Chief, nor anyone in that country knows what it takes to bring-in one of the members of the Focolare, or one of the doctors, or one of the nurses, from around the world to settle in that area.  And no one has the slightest ideas of the extensive medical service these people provide to the entire area, off course, this is why no one cares about whoever dies.

Source: LECDA Yahoo Group

Emergency teams of specialists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and United Nations agencies have been deployed to the African country to tackle the spread of a new wave of Ebola epidemic.

UN and Congolese authorities said Sunday that the deployment over the weekend came after reports suggested that more than 30 people had been infected by Ebola.

A total of 18 people have been killed since April 4 when first cases of Ebola were reported. Authorities officially confirmed last Tuesday there was an outbreak centered around the village of Ikoko Impenge, near the town of Bikoro in the northwestern province of Equateur.

Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga, along with officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), traveled to Equateur on Saturday after reports of the latest infection case emerged from the area a day earlier.

Kalenga said then government and UN agencies would do their best to root out the new epidemic as soon as possible.

“We have to pool our efforts quickly and align ourselves with the government response plan to fight this new epidemic effectively,” the minister said in a statement.

The Congolese government fears the Ebola virus, which killed more than 11,300 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia from 2014-216, could spread out of control.

The WHO is also acting more quickly in the DRC as it tries to avoid criticism that it faced over its slow response to the previous outbreak in West Africa.

“The WHO is strengthening its presence, positioning a dozen epidemiologists who will be divided on the axes of Mbandaka, Bikoro and Iboko to investigate alerts,” WHO’s Congo representative Allarangar Yokouide said Sunday.

Three separate locations covering 60 km (37 miles) or more in Equateur province have already been contaminated with Ebola as the provincial capital Mbandaka, with about 1 million inhabitants, is in immediate risk. Nine neighbors of Congo, especially Republic of Congo or Central African Republic, have been put on high alert as WHO fears a spread of the virus across the border.

The Ebola virus can be fatal as a result of damages it does on blood vessels which causes internal and external bleeding.

Source: Presstv

Nigeria has increased screening tests at airports and other points of entry as a precautionary measure following an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the immigration service said on Thursday.

At least 17 people have died in an area of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo, two years after the worst ever outbreak of the virus ended in West Africa after killing more than 11,300 people and infecting some 28,600, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Nigeria was hailed as having contained the virus in 2014, with 8 deaths, following fears that it could spread through the commercial capital of some 20 million inhabitants and across Africa’s most populous country of around 180 million people.

The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) said thermometers had been used to monitor some entrants into the country since the virus last hit the region. Screening had been stepped up since the latest outbreak in Congo.

“We are using all the facilities available to detect the virus. That means extra use of thermometers,” said NIS spokesman Sunday James, speaking via phone.

“We must take extra measures to make sure people are screened at all the entry points into the country,” he said.

Ebola spread to Nigeria in 2014 when Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American diplomat, flew into the country from Liberia and collapsed at the main international airport in Lagos.

Kenya screens travelers at airports, border posts

Authorities in Kenya have also beefed up efforts to screening travelers at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the border posts of Busia and Malaba.

Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki told journalists that thermal guns had been installed at these points to detect persons with elevated temperatures.

A National Health Emergencies Council has also been established to act expeditiously to prevent any importation of Ebola.

Culled from Africa News

Cases of hemorrhagic fever were reported in an area of Congo that is facing an Ebola epidemic as far back as December and the first deaths were ported in January, a spokesman for the World Health Organization said in capital Kinshasa on Thursday.

The health ministry said on Tuesday that at least 17 people had died in an area of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo where health officials have now confirmed an outbreak of Ebola, but did not give a time frame. Only two cases have been confirmed as Ebola, by a laboratory in Kinshasa.

A time span as long as five months since the first infection would be alarming, since it gives the virus a head start in infecting lots of people before action was taken to contain it.

This is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in the vast, forested central African nation since it was first identified near the eastern Ebola river in the 1970s. It comes less than a year after an outbreak killed eight people in Congo’s remote northeastern forests.

“According to our early information, the cases have been reported since December and the first deaths were reported in January, but the link between the deaths and the epidemic has not yet been established,” WHO Congo spokesman Eugene Kabambi told Reuters.

The health ministry said on Thursday it had dispatched a team of 12 experts to the area to try to trace new contacts of the disease, identify the epicenter and all affected villages and provide resources.

The epidemic so far appears to be centered around the village of Ikoko Impenge, near the town of Bikoro, where local health officials had reported 21 patients showing signs of hemorrhagic fever, of whom all but four of whom had died.

“This advance team brought the first batches of equipment, mostly containing rapid diagnostic tests for the Ebola virus and laser thermometers,” the health ministry statement said.

It added that they had already arrived in the regional capital Mbandaka, about 150 km away from the affected area.

Ebola is best known and most feared for the internal and external bleeding it can cause in its victims, owing to damage done to blood vessels. Victims often die of shock but symptoms can be vague, including fever, muscle pain, diarrhea and nausea.

The worst Ebola epidemic in history ended in West Africa just two years ago after killing more than 11,300 people and infecting 28,600 in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Congo’s long experience of the disease and its vast, remote geography mean outbreaks are often localized and relatively easy to isolate and snuff out.

But Ikoko Impenge and Bikoro lie not far from the banks of the Congo River, an essential waterway for transport and commerce, downstream of which lie both Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital of neighboring Congo Republic. Between them, the two cities have a population of more than 12 million.

(Source: Reuters)

Zimbabwe has fired all nurses who went on strike to demand higher salaries, in a hardline response by the country’s new leadership to growing labor arrest.

Several thousand nurses were sacked in a terse statement issued on Tuesday evening by Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, who accused the strikers of being “politically motivated.”

Patients were turned away from major hospitals after the nurses began their industrial action on Monday, shortly after doctors ended their own weeks-long strike earlier in the month.

“Government has decided in the interest of patients and of saving lives to discharge all the striking nurses with immediate effect,” Chiwenga said in a statement.

He said unemployed and retired nurses would be hired to replace those fired.

Chiwenga was the military general who led the ousting of Robert Mugabe in November when the army briefly took control and ushered Emmerson Mnangagwa into the presidency.

Chiwenga described the nurses’ strike as “deplorable and reprehensible” as the government had released $17 million (14 million euros) to boost their pay and allowances.

He said the funds would now be used to employ new nurses.

Zimbabwe’s nurses association said they “noted” Chiwenga’s statement but added that they remained on strike.

After Mugabe’s 37-year rule, Mnangagwa has vowed to revive the country’s moribund economy and attract foreign investment to fund better public services.

“Government has done everything to comply with the demands of the striking nurses,” Mnangagwa said, according to state-owned media. “This leaves us with no option but to dismiss them.”

More than 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s budget is spent on government wages.

Teachers at public schools have threatened to go on strike if their pay is not increased.

Zimbabwe is due to hold elections in July or August, the first since the shock fall of Mugabe, who ruled since independence from Britain in 1980.

Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former deputy, is a veteran loyalist in the ruling ZANU-PF party.

(Source: AFP)