Cameroon, one of the countries in Africa worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, is set to receive “very shortly” more than one million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute said on Friday.

Pointing to “a deterioration in the epidemiological situation” in the country, Dion Ngute told state radio that “more than one million vaccine doses will be available very shortly”.

He did not specify which vaccines they were.

Dion Ngute called on the population to get inoculated, but said the vaccination programme would be on a voluntary basis.

“In the space of one week, more than 3,000 new cases have been recorded, bringing the total number of people who have tested positive to Covid-19 to 38,988,” he said.

Cameroon, with a population of 26 million, has registered 588 deaths from coronavirus so far.

Source: Urdupoint

President Joe Biden said Tuesday the United States would have sufficient vaccine supply by the end of May to inoculate the entire US adult population.

“We’re now on track to have enough vaccine supply for every adult in America by the end of May,” said Biden — who had previously forecast it would take until the end of July to amass that many doses.

“That’s progress. Important progress. But it is not enough to have the vaccine supply,” Biden said, stressing the work still ahead to administer the vaccines once acquired.

“We need vaccinators, people who put the shots in people’s arms, millions of Americans’ arms.”

“Great news, but stay vigilant,” Biden said. “It’s not over yet.”

Biden made the announcement during a short speech in which he confirmed a deal for pharma giant Merck to produce rival Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine to boost supply nationwide.

“This is the type of collaboration between companies we saw in World War II,” Biden said.

The US leader said that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine manufacturing facilities “will now begin to operate 24/7.”

The J&J vaccine is the third to receive US regulatory approval for emergency use.

Unlike the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the J&J vaccine requires just one dose, and is stored at fridge temperatures, offering logistical and practical advantages.

Johnson & Johnson has so far said it aims to deliver 100 million doses to the United States by June.

(AFP)

The death toll from Covid-19 in the US surpassed 500,000 on Monday with President Joe Biden set to memorialise the staggering number of lives lost despite a recent decline in coronavirus cases.

It has been nearly a year since the pandemic upended the country with dueling public health and economic crises.

“It’s nothing like we’ve ever been through in the last 102 years since the 1918 influenza pandemic … It really is a terrible situation that we’ve been through – and that we’re still going through,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House Covid-19 medical adviser and the nation’s top infectious disease official, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program on Sunday.

The White House said on Sunday it planned a memorial event in which Biden would deliver remarks.

A White House spokesman said the president along with first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff would hold a moment of silence on Monday and there would be a candle-lighting ceremony at sundown.

Biden last month observed America’s Covid-19 deaths on the eve of his inauguration with a sundown ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.

Biden will use “his own voice and platform to take a moment to remember the people whose lives have been lost, the families who are still suffering … at what is still a very difficult moment in this country”, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday.

Still at ‘very high’ level

More than 28 million Covid-19 cases have rocked the United States and 497,862 have died, even as daily average deaths and hospitalisations have fallen to the lowest levels since before the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. The virus took a full year off the average life expectancy in the United States, the biggest decline since World War Two.

While the decline “is really terrific … we are still at a level that’s very high,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “We want to get that baseline really, really, really low before we start thinking that we’re out of the woods.”

Fauci told CNN that Americans may still need masks in 2022 even as other measures to stop the virus’ spread become increasingly relaxed and more vaccines are administered, and they may also need a booster shot depending on how variants emerge.

Less than 15% of the US population has received at least one vaccine dose, with nearly 43 million getting at least one shot and nearly 18 million getting a second shot, US statistics show.

More localities are easing some restrictions, such as on indoor dining, and moving to reopen schools even as millions await their shots, sparking debate over the safety of teachers, students and others.

Financial pressures also continue to weigh even as economists express optimism for the year ahead. Congress is weighing Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, with the House of Representatives expected to vote on it this week and the Senate seeking to pass it before March 14.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

The coronavirus will probably continue to circulate long-term despite the roll-out of vaccines, the head of the EU’s ECDC health agency told AFP on Friday, urging Europe to keep its restrictions in place for now.

“It seems more likely that it would stay” than disappear, Andrea Ammon, the head of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said in an interview.

“It seems very well adapted to humans. So we should be prepared that it will remain with us,” she added.

“It wouldn’t be the first virus that is with us forever, so it’s not an unusual feature for a virus.”

While vaccines dramatically reduce the risk of contracting the illness caused by Covid-19, scientists have not yet established with certainty whether they also reduce transmission of the virus.

So when will we know if they do?

“It will still take a few months. You need a certain amount of vaccinated people that you follow. Special studies are now being set up,” Ammon said.

There is particular concern that the vaccines may not be as effective against some variants of the virus, especially the South African and Brazilian ones.

– Running the last kilometres –

Ammon pointed out that vaccines for the seasonal flu have to be adapted annually as the virus that causes it changes.

“It might turn out that (the coronavirus) goes the same way, or that at one point it remains stable and we can use one vaccine for a longer period,” she told AFP.

Ammon called on EU countries to maintain their restrictions despite a decline in cases across much of Europe.

“It’s still a mixed picture… We are really not out of the woods,” she said, noting that all EU members, with the exception of Finland, were still in “an epidemiological situation of serious concern”, according to the ECDC’s criteria.

“Everybody’s fed up with the measures, but when you’re running a long distance course… (you) have to run the last kilometres,” she stressed.

The number of daily cases across Europe is currently around 150,000, compared to around 250,000 a month ago, according to official data compiled by AFP.

Any relaxing of measures has to be done gradually, one measure at a time, “and only when you observe that it’s either stable or further decreasing then you go to the next one.”

The European Union’s vaccination campaign, which began in late December, has gotten off to a rocky start, hampered by a lack of vaccines and delivery delays.

According to official data on Friday, only three percent of people in the EU had received at least one vaccine dose, and 1.4 percent two doses, with a total of 20 million doses administered.

“Everybody’s aiming for that, all the efforts are in that direction,” Ammon said when asked if the goal seemed realistic.

Source: AFP

Cameroon is seeing a resurgence of leprosy, the bacterial infectious disease that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage.  Cameroon health authorities, on Sunday’s World Leprosy Day, said infections have jumped by about 50% since 2018.  Leprosy patients say,  just as in ancient times, they are shunned and neglected. 

Cameroon two decades ago announced that it had eliminated leprosy, but around 200 cases continued to be reported each year. 

In 2019, cases of the bacterial disease, which damages skin and nerves, increased to 270 and last year jumped to over 300.   

Ernest Nji Tabah, the permanent secretary of Cameroon’s National Committee for Leprosy, says a number of Cameroon’s health districts have been reporting outbreaks of the chronic but curable condition. 

“About 70 new cases have been reported in the southwest.  We have hot spots in regions like the North, the Adamawa, the Southwest, the Northwest,” he said. “People think that leprosy is a spell, it is divine punishment, it is caused by witchcraft, it is hereditary and so on.  Leprosy is none of these.” 

Tabah was attending an event organized by the aid group Circle of Friends Cameroon for Sunday’s World Leprosy Day. 

Aid groups handed out small gifts of food, soap, and toiletries to 30 leprosy patients at the Jamot’s Hospital in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé.  

Patrice Essolla, 51, says they never received such attention as most families abandoned relatives with leprosy. 

He says they need more assistance because they have been rendered helpless by leprosy.  Essolla says communities should stop thinking that leprosy patients are witches and wizards and instead give care, support and comfort the patients need to recover from it.  He says they are poor and need help — not the mental torture some families inflict on them. 

The Cameroon Baptist Convention’s Center for Hope helps care for leprosy patients in the northwestern town of Mbingo.   

The head of the center’s leprosy department Fomban Oliver says Cameroon was too quick to declare the disease eradicated.   

Speaking via a messaging application, he says Cameroon shouldn’t have closed some treatment centers and stopped education on the disease. 

“If it is possible for the government to reinstate the treatment centers, that will be wonderful.  If we do not do that, something alarming is going to happen,” he said. “In the field, there are no longer leprosy inspectors or supervisors or those controlling leprosy.  Even the new nurses and the new doctors that are up now, they know nothing about leprosy and if something is not done in the nearest future, the increase will be alarming.” 

The Health Ministry official in charge of leprosy in Yaoundé, Dian Ndjock, says they are encouraging all suspected cases to be taken to hospitals.  

She says the government will never neglect the suffering of leprosy patients.  

Ndjock says patients are treated and given food free of charge in four specialized centers and that people with the disease can be rushed to any of the 380 district hospitals in Cameroon.  She says civilians should stop stigma and social exclusion of leprosy patients. 

The U.N. reports every year over 200,000 new leprosy cases are detected globally with India, Brazil, and Indonesia accounting for more than three quarters of infections.   

The World Health Organization says in the Africa region case numbers have dropped by 42% since the year 2000 but about one million people have leprosy induced disabilities. 

Source: VOA

A team of experts from the World Health Organization left quarantine in Wuhan on Thursday to begin a heavily scrutinised probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, after Washington urged a “robust and clear” investigation.

The group started a two-week quarantine on arrival on January 14 in the central Chinese city where the first known cluster of virus cases emerged in late 2019.

Wearing masks, they peered at the ranks of waiting media from the window of a bus which whisked them from the quarantine to another hotel on Thursday — although it was not immediately clear when and where their investigation will start.

“So proud to graduate from our 14 days… no-one went stir crazy & we’ve been v productive,” tweeted team member Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a global NGO focused on infectious disease prevention.

The virus is believed to have come from bats and to have initially spread from a wet market in Wuhan where wild animals were sold as food.

The WHO insists the visit will be tightly tethered to the science of how the virus — which has killed more than two million people — jumped from animals to humans.

But in a sign of the political baggage attached to their mission, US President Joe Biden’s new administration weighed in before the experts had even finished quarantine.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, new White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it was “imperative we get to the bottom” of how the virus appeared and spread worldwide.

Psaki voiced concern over “misinformation” from “some sources in China” and urged a “robust and clear” probe.

Beijing snapped back on Thursday, warning the United States to “respect facts and science, respect the hard work” of the WHO experts.

They must be allowed to work “free from political interference”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters.

But in a mission dogged by delays and obfuscation from their Chinese hosts, it was not clear what the expert team will be allowed to see in Wuhan — or what useful evidence remains a year after the outbreak in a country which has vigorously controlled the narrative of how the pandemic began.

The early days of the outbreak remain among the most sensitive topics in China today, with the Communist leadership seeking to stamp out any discussion that shows its governance in a poor light.

Beijing has also sought to seed doubt into the origin story, floating the unsubstantiated theory that the virus emerged elsewhere.

Another theory, amplified by former US president Donald Trump, is that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan where researchers were studying coronaviruses.

Relatives of Wuhan’s coronavirus dead have called for a meeting with the team from the UN health agency, saying they have been facing new levels of official obstruction since the WHO team arrived.

According to official Chinese figures the virus killed nearly 3,900 in Wuhan, accounting for the vast majority of the 4,636 dead China has reported.

China is taking no risks in bringing a resurgence of the virus to heel, conducting anal swabs, localised lockdowns and cancelling flights as it makes travel before the Lunar New Year difficult.

(AFP)