Ebola is worryingly popping up in new places while response to the outbreak remains insufficient [Al Jazeera]
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| The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has now killed more than 5,000 people, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said, marking another grisly toll in the epidemic. This is the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded, with more than 14,000 people sickened, the vast majority in the West African countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. There are some signs that the rate of new infections may be slowing overall in Guinea and Liberia, but there are still areas of those countries where transmission remains high, and they are surging in Sierra Leone, the health agency said on Wednesday. While the response to Ebola is ramping up, it is still insufficient: In Sierra Leone, for instance, less than 40 percent of cases are in isolation, according to WHO estimates. Worryingly, the virus has continued to pop up in new places, both within the most affected countries and outside their borders. The most recent example is a new Ebola cluster that Malian authorities reported on Wednesday - an alarming setback as the country tries to limit the epidemic ravaging other West African nations. Mali death A nurse working at a clinic in the Malian capital Bamako died on Tuesday, and tests later showed she had Ebola, Communications Minister Mahamadou Camara said. Two other people are also believed to have died of Ebola, though no tests were ever done on them to confirm the disease: an imam, whom the nurse treated at the Bamako clinic, and a friend who came to visit the man there. The announcement of the new cases came just a day after Malian health authorities said there had been no other reported cases - let alone deaths - since a two-year-old girl who had travelled to Mali from Guinea succumbed to the virus in late October. At least 75 people are under quarantine following the new cases in Bamako, including patients and staff from the hospital, said Ousmane Doumbia, secretary-general for the Malian health ministry. Several of the patients under quarantine are troops serving in the country's UN peacekeeping force who were being treated for wounds at the clinic, the force said in a statement. Health officials are also searching the city of about 2 million for those who helped prepare the body of the imam for burial before it was known that the corpse might be highly contagious. Source: Aljazera |
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Ebola death toll crosses 5,000 mark
Monday, November 10, 2014
Nightmare' for Ethiopian pastoralists as foreign investors buy up land
Ethiopia’s policy of leasing millions of hectares of land to foreign investors is encouraging human rights violations, ruining livelihoods and disturbing a delicate political balance between ethnic groups, a thinktank report has found.
The US-based Oakland Institute says that while the east African country is now lauded as an economic success story, the report, Engineering Ethnic Conflict, “highlights the unreported nightmare experienced by Ethiopia’s traditionally pastoralist communities”.
A controversial “villagisation” programme has seen tens of thousands of people forcibly moved to purpose-built communes that have inadequate food and lack health and education facilities, according to human rights watchdogs, to make way for commercial agriculture. Ethiopia is one of the biggest recipients of UK development aid, receiving around £300m a year.
The Oakland Institute’s research, conducted in 2012 and 2013, focused on 34,000 Suri pastoralists who have lived in south-west Ethiopia for up to three centuries. Suri livelihoods consist of herding cattle, goats and sheep, shifting cultivation, and hunting and gathering.
But the recent introduction of large-scale plantations “has not only made important grazing lands unavailable to the Suri and devastated their livelihoods, but disturbed political order between the Suri and other local ethnic groups, escalating violent conflicts”, the report says.
The investigation was prompted by 2012 reports of violence at Koka, a foreign-owned 30,000 hectare (74,000 acres) plantation established two years earlier to produce palm oil, although it has since expanded to grow moringa trees and maize, with plans for rubber trees.
According to a Kenyan NGO, Friends of Lake Turkana, the government cleared grass and trees to allow Malaysian investors to establish the plantation. Water was diverted from the Koka river to these plantations, leaving the Suri without water for their cattle.
In response, the Suri took up arms and battled government forces, Friends of Lake Turkana said. Government forces killed 54 unarmed Suri in a marketplace in retaliation. There have been more killings and arrests since.
Based on interviews with victims’ families, officials and other witnesses, the Oakland Institute found that the plantation exacerbated tensions between the Suri and another ethnic group, the Dizi, seen as collaborating with the government. The first episode of violence in February 2012, in which three Dizi police officers were killed, occurred over police marking land for expansions of the plantation.
The institute accuses the Ethiopian government of manipulating these tensions, for example, by favouring the Dizi in employment. “According to field research, the increase in violent clashes between the Suri and Dizi can be linked to the intrusion of the Koka plantation and displacement of Suri from lands vital for cattle raising, one of their most important livelihood resources.”
A generation after the famine that was screened around the world, Ethiopia claims it is on track to meet most of the millennium development goals and become a middle-income country by 2025. But the report contends that the government puts foreign and political interests above the rights and needs of local populations, especially historically marginalised and neglected ethnic groups.
It also argues that the World Bank’s support of three phases of Ethiopia’s pastoral community development project implicates western funds in the coerced settlement of pastoral communities and the conditional – and coercive – distribution of food aid.
“The dramatic reconfiguration of land for foreign investment in the Koka plantation, as well as its alleged failure, illustrates the haphazard manner in which the government of Ethiopia implements its development strategy,” it says.
“While there have been reports of Suri returning to the plantation lands to take corn and sweet potatoes, the palm tree-lined land is no longer suitable for grazing. Although, presumably, investors are unhappy with the failure of their cheaply-leased land, the local impact has been the increase of local ethnic conflicts and the drastic altering of local livelihoods.
“As such, the Koka plantation is representative of the Ethiopian strategy of pursuing foreign investor-led development at the expense of local inhabitants.”
Felix Horne, Ethiopia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said: “Unfortunately, the Suri and other marginalised groups have no ability to voice their concerns over these developments on their land.
“There is little in the way of an independent media in Ethiopia that is permitted to cover this story, civil society that could advocate on these issues have been decimated by repressive laws, any criticism of government is met with harassment and detention. So what options are left for the Suri?”
Source: The Gaurdian
Friday, October 31, 2014
Qualifications scandal divides South Africa
Ellen Tshabalala is alleged to have lied about her university qualifications
It might seem like a rather trivial scandal - something easily overlooked at a time when South Africa is mourning the violent death of its national football team captain and the credit rating agencies are circling overhead, poised to issue more warnings about the country's struggling economy.
But the mystery surrounding Ellen Tshabalala's academic qualifications demands attention.
It is an issue that seems to have divided South Africa.
To some it is a story that reveals nothing more than the enduring legacy of apartheid. To others it is a very modern outrage that exposes the shamelessness now infesting South Africa's democratic institutions.
Ms Tshabalala is the chairperson of South Africa's national broadcaster, the SABC, and for months she has been declining - with varying degrees of indignation and legal casuistry - to answer MPs who want to know if,as they allege, she lied about the impressive university qualifications she claims to have earned.
Ms Tshabalala is in good company.
The SABC's chief executive, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, has also been accused of lying about his qualifications on his official CV.
Political connections
And then there is the case of Pallo Jordan, a prominent ANC stalwart and public intellectual, who recently admitted that he had never earned the doctorate that always seemed to attach itself so confidently to his name. And there are others...
So what? Plenty of South Africans point back to the racist apartheid system and the demands of the liberation struggle, which denied generations of black people a decent education and access to the necessary opportunities and qualifications to thrive.
Some believe President Zuma is unfairly protecting Ms Tshabalala and Mr Motsoeneng
If some of them are now forced to tweak their CVs in order to meet some abstract job requirements, then surely the system itself is at fault.
"We need a change of attitude, to get rid of this rather inappropriate elitism... and to distinguish between a lack of qualifications and a lack of ability," says Stephen Friedman, a prominent political analyst whose own doctorate is "just a piece of paper that people take much too seriously here".
In the case of Pallo Jordan, the consensus seems to be that he made a foolish, sustained, but ultimately pardonable error of judgment.
But the situation at South Africa's national broadcaster has provoked far less sympathy, amid allegations that President Jacob Zuma is protecting his allies at the expense of due process.
'No sense of shame'
"They lied about it. If you're politically connected you can get away with it," fumed another political commentator, Justice Malala.
"You have these two who are seen as defenders of President Zuma at the SABC, which makes them virtually untouchable."
The high-handed manner in which Ms Tshabalala has rebuffed parliament's enquiries about her qualifications has led many South Africans to believe she must have political "cover" at the highest levels.
"For me what the Zuma administration has allowed is for people to lose their sense of shame - that this is the right thing to do," said Mr Malala
"The lines between right and wrong are becoming blurred. They can just tough it out," he added, citing the chairperson of the national carrier SAA, as another alleged beneficiary of presidential protection.
And before long, what starts with seemingly minor disputes about qualifications soon expands into a broader theory about Jacob Zuma's own legal battles, the controversial manner in which corruption charges against him were dropped before he became president, the exorbitant taxpayer-funded refurbishments to his private Nkandla home, and the growing belief that some of South Africa's most important institutions - not the least the prosecutor's office - are being stretched and bent out of shape in order to protect Mr Zuma.
Source: bbc.com/news
Is the Ebola epidemic ending in Africa?
Q: Is the Ebola epidemic ending in Africa?
A: No one knows exactly what is going on in West Africa. Several medical groups, like Doctors Without Borders, are reporting that they suddenly have far more beds than patients. In some cases, there are empty beds at centers where, just a few weeks ago, people were dying on the streets outside because there was no room.
The trend is especially noted in Liberia, the hardest-hit country. Laboratories are getting fewer samples to test. Ambulance crews are picking up fewer bodies. The World Health Organization confirmed that new cases were dropping.
But health authorities are warning that it is too early to celebrate.
It is important to remember that this happened once before, on a smaller scale. In March, after alarming reports from Guinea that a rural outbreak had reached the capital, the W.H.O. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent experts in to help. The epidemic spread to Sierra Leone, and then to Liberia. But cases grew only slowly, and by May, most of the experts were withdrawn. At the time, there was more worry about MERS in Saudi Arabia.
In early August, the chief scientist for Britain’s foreign aid agency said the “end of the epidemic was in sight.” He was wrong. About 800 people were known to be dead then. Cases had actually begun to explode in July, and now about 5,000 are dead.
There are some theories as to why the numbers seem to be going down. The leading one is that more West Africans now believe that Ebola exists, are afraid of it, and are touching each other less.
In that way, it is like lung cancer, only on a speeded-up time scale. It took 30 years for Americans to fully accept that smoking caused lung cancer. Once they believed, fewer started smoking. Deaths from lung cancer are now much lower than they used to be because many Americans in their 50’s and 60’s didn’t start as teenagers, or quit. But you wouldn’t say that the lung cancer epidemic is over.
Because poor West Africans often have many people sleeping in one room, Ebola spreads in households. Because the incubation period is up to 21 days, it often kills the family slowly, one by one. But for each other family that keeps the virus from entering its household, that can mean five or six fewer deaths.
Other theories are that tens of thousands of home-care kits have been handed out. They contain gloves, bleach, a bucket, plastic bags and a bleach sprayer. Using them around the sick, and especially during burials, may have helped.
Alternatively, hospitals may be empty because more people are dying at home. In Liberia, it has been reported that families are refusing to bring in their relatives because, if they die, they will be cremated.
Another report is that taxi and minibus drivers are refusing to take passengers who are bleeding or vomiting to hospitals. That forces them to die at home – which is cruel, but could slow the spread of disease to other passengers.
It is also important to remember that epidemics typically come in waves. The reasons for some are obvious, like the weather: flu cases rise in winter, polio cases rise in summer. Pox diseases like smallpox, measles and chickenpox used to surge every few years after a new set of young children was born. For other diseases, the reasons are not clear. Ebola may simply be having a moment between waves.
Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com/
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