Nurses in Cameroon are marking this year’s World Hospice and Palliative Care Day (October 9) with visits to terminally ill patients in the country’s restive North-West and South-West regions. The regions’ ongoing separatist conflict has left hundreds of patients unable to receive regular in-home hospice care. Cameroon’s nurses are calling for that to change.

Mundih Noelar Njohjam a doctor treating patients with terminal diseases at Cameroon Baptist Conventions Health Services in Bamenda, capital of the English-speaking North-West region, says the separatist crisis is depriving many patients of palliative care.

“The high level of insecurity caused by the ongoing crisis has negatively affected access to palliative care for many patients, especially those living with cancers. Patients with terminal diseases are unable to get to health facilities where they can receive adequate palliative care. Consequently, they have to settle for suboptimal palliative care,” Njohjam said.

The Cameroon Association of Terminally Ill Patients reports that more than 900 patients are denied access to palliative care in the English-speaking western regions.

The association says hundreds of patients in need of help to relieve them of pain and suffering are dying in towns and villages. They say several hundred caregivers have fled hospitals in Cameroon’s troubled English-speaking regions since the separatist crisis escalated in 2017.

Hundreds of patients who have the means relocate to safer French-speaking towns to receive medical care for their terminal illnesses. The patients say they prefer to relocate to Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, and Douala, a coastal city where many of their family members have rushed to for safety.

Among others, the nurses visited the Yaounde residence of Christophe Esselebo, a 67-year-old retired teacher who has been living with HIV and liver disease for three years. He says he faces a great deal of stigma from family members and friends.

He says to prevent developing a mental health crisis, he avoids feelings of emotional attachments with family members who have abandoned him because of his condition. He says he avoids mental trauma during his remaining days by being positive about life and making friends on social media with people who think positively.

Esselebo says he regularly follows up treatment recommended by his doctor.

The visit to homes of people living with terminal diseases this year was organized by the Cameroon Association of Terminally Ill Patients and Santo Domingo Cameroon, a center that cares for people with terminal diseases.

Fulbert Kenfack Jiofack, coordinator of Santo Domingo Cameroon, says poverty pushes 70% of sick Cameroonians to seek assistance from African traditional healers. He says because of either illiteracy or lack of financial means, families abandon their members diagnosed with terminal diseases at home until they die.

Jiofack said fighters in the English-speaking western regions and government troops should avoid inflicting more pain on patients who are already suffering from diseases that cannot be cured. He said medical staff members should be allowed to give health care to people in need.

The nurses ask civilians to stop prejudging the terminally ill in Cameroon.

Cameron’s health ministry says the greatest prejudice is shown toward those suffering from infectious terminal diseases such as HIV.

The health ministry says stigma is driven by the thought that those receiving palliative care will die soon and that terminal illnesses are divine punishment for wrongdoing. Some families prohibit palliative caregivers from visiting their sick patients at home, the government reports.

Nurses said the role of palliative caregivers is to ease patients’ physical pain with medicines and provide psychological, emotional and spiritual counseling to people who have life-threatening and terminal illnesses.

Source: VOA

Dr. John Nkengasong, a U.S. citizen born in Cameroon, would be the first person of African descent to hold the position to coordinate the U.S. response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic worldwide. But the US Senate must approve his eventual nomination.

Dr. John Nkengasong also served as the director for the African Union’s Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Coronavirus, which for almost two years has been a virus of the cities and big towns, has begun spreading to smaller towns and is very likely to reach villages that, know nothing about the virus and how it can be prevented.

The virus, which is suspected of having killed many people in Cameroon’s major cities, has now found a new place in Mamfe where some ten people have been diagnosed with COVID-19-related health complications, with two actually dying.

For the past eighteen months, the people of Mamfe have been going about their business as if they are beyond the virus’ reach, but this indifference has simply varnished following the announcement of the virus’ presence in a town  where people love shaking hands and do live a social life that many consider as dangerous.

The country’s military is highly suspected of bringing this virus to the shores of Mamfe as most of the soldiers posted to Mamfe are from Yaoundé and Douala where the virus has been decimating the  population segment that  is either too vulnerable due to age or co-morbidities.

The Cameroon Concord News Group’s correspondent in Mamfe has been talking to many people on the streets of Mamfe and most of them are really scared, with the majority assuming that the military is to blame for the importation of this virus into a town that has been COVID-19-free.

“We have not been wearing mask here and I doubt if many people will be adopting a new lifestyle which includes wearing masks and avoiding people. If this virus really decides to take up residence here, then we have a huge crisis on our hands,” the desperate Mamfe resident said.

He added that “with the socio-political chaos playing out here in most of Manyu Division, we do not know where we can go to stay out of this virus’ path. Many people are scared. Who will help us? Neither Amba fighters nor the government can help us in this regard. The government is ill-equipped to deal with this ugly situation and Amba fighters cannot use their guns to kill this insidious virus. We just have to continue praying, but I know that prayers alone will not roll back the virus from our Division,” the Mamfe resident said.

Meanwhile, many residents of the city informed the Cameroon Concord News Group’s correspondent in Mamfe that Doctors Without Borders have been in Mamfe for close to one gear where they set up an isolation center which closed sometime in August and once the health organization shut down this facility and left because there were no COVID-19 cases, the virus showed up, coming in through the back door.

However, residents of the town have confirmed that Doctors Without Borders are back and their presence in the town is reassuring.

By Julius Agbor Bate in Mamfe

Africa wants to buy Covid-19 vaccines, rather than keep waiting for donor-funded doses to arrive, the African Union said Tuesday, imploring producers to give the continent a fair shot at market access.

The AU also urged manufacturing nations to lift export bans so the continent can begin to address for itself the glaring inequity in access to coronavirus jabs, as wealthy nations hog available doses.

“Vaccine sharing is good. But we shouldn’t have to be relying on vaccine sharing,” Strive Masiyiwa, the AU’s Covid-19 special envoy, told a press conference at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

“We want to buy from those same manufacturers.”

The major Covid-19 vaccine producers have a moral responsibility to ensure equitable access to end the pandemic, he said, but “those manufacturers know very well that they never gave us proper access”.

Just nine vaccine doses have been administered per 100 people in Africa, according to an AFP calculation.

That figure stands at 118 doses per 100 people in the United States and Canada; 104 in Europe; 85 in Asia; 84 in Latin America and the Caribbean; 69 in Oceania and 54 in the Middle East.

African nations “have been left behind by the rest of the world”, said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The UN health agency chief spelled out the danger of leaving Africa so poorly covered by vaccines.

“This doesn’t only hurt the people of Africa, it hurts all of us,” he said.

“The longer vaccine inequity persists, the more the virus will keep circulating and changing, the longer the social and economic disruption will continue, and the higher the chances that more variants will emerge that render vaccines less effective.”

– ‘Miracle’ –

John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told the press conference that just under 3.5 percent of the eligible African population has been fully vaccinated.

The WHO wants 40 percent fully immunised in every country by the end of the year and 70 percent of the world’s population by mid-2022.

It has called for countries to hold off administering extra booster shots until the end of December to allow more people to get a first dose instead.

The AU has set up the African COVID-19 Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, or AVAT, to purchase jabs for member states in a scheme to run alongside the donor-funded global Covax facility.

Masiyiwa said Africa was also setting up its own manufacturing capabilities and called for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights on the vaccines, as a common good.

He said: “It was a great miracle to have these vaccines. Now let this miracle be available to all mankind.”

Source: AFP

More than 200,000 people have died from Covid-19 in Africa since the start of the pandemic, according to an AFP tally compiled from official records as of 1700 GMT.

A total of 200,254 fatalities have been registered in Africa, home to more than 1.3 billion people, since the virus emerged in China in December 2019.

After several deadly months, including some 27,000 deaths in July and 26,000 in August, the pandemic appears to be easing on the continent, with current daily figures of 617 compared to up to 990 in late July, a record for the region.

The figures are based on tolls communicated daily day by health authorities in each country or by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) and include the countries of North Africa.

The WHO has said that if excess deaths directly or indirectly linked to Covid are taken into account, the real toll could be double or triple.

The total number of infections is also likely to be an under-estimate, given insufficient testing capacity in Africa.

“It’s probably a lot higher than that,” said researcher Glenda Davidson of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology. “Testing resources are very low on the continent.”

Death registration processes were often delayed and inaccurate, she added.

The current fall in the continent’s tally is a result of sharp drops in the hardest-hit countries.

South Africa has recorded 83,899 deaths so far. But last week’s daily average of 7,400 new cases and 234 deaths is significantly lower than in late July, when the daily average was up to 20,000 new cases and 420 deaths.

– Vaccination key –

The decrease has been even more striking in Tunisia, which has recorded a daily average of 1,680 cases and 64 deaths: 41 and 39 percent down on the previous week.

The figures are well below those of July, which were described by the government as “catastrophic”, with up to 7,900 cases and 207 deaths daily.

Tunisia’s summer was also marked by a sharp acceleration in its vaccination drive, with nearly 37 percent of the population having received at least one dose, compared to just 11 percent on July 1.

Africa has seen the lowest vaccination rate to date of all the continents, with only eight jabs administered per 100 inhabitants administered, according to an AFP count, compared with 102 in Europe and 116 in the United States and Canada.

According to the WHO, around three percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population are fully vaccinated. By comparison, 52 percent of people are fully vaccinated in the United States of America and 57 percent in the European Union.

“The inequity is deeply disturbing. Just two percent of the over five billion doses given globally have been administered in Africa,” WHO Africa chief Dr Matshidiso Moeti said last week.

However, inoculation in South Africa has been picking up after a rocky start.

“The vaccine has been our weapon,” said South African public health practitioner Shakira Choonara.

“It is contributing to certain changes in trends we are beginning to see.”

Source: AFP