Cameroon

New research by community activists from Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Nigeria finds that women’s health is still not a priority within programmes to prevent vertical transmission of HIV, despite all the recent declarations and summits on maternal health. The research report was launched at the African AIDS Conference (ICASA) in Addis Ababa. It calls for more comprehensive care for women and families as part of the drive to end vertical transmission of HIV.

Dakar - Significant progress has been made in sub-Saharan Africa toward the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank said in the third annual edition of its world MDGs follow-up report presented on Wednesday in Dakar.

Scientists in past centuries called the sickness by the Italian phrase mal aria -- or bad air -- for the supposedly disease-bearing zephyrs wafting from swamps.

Polio has spread to two more countries in West Africa, further jeopardizing the World Health Organization's goal of wiping out the disease by next year. The WHO has come t close to reaching its goal, having reduced the number of new polio cases to the lowest level since it began its program in 1988 to eliminate the disease. The WHO said there were 667 paralytic cases in 2003, about 1 percent of the number in 1988. But the spread of polio to Benin and Cameroon is a discouraging setback in its $4.6 billion effort to have po lio join smallpox as the only diseases to be eliminated from the human population. WHO officials are placing the blame squarely with Nigeria, which is Africa's most populous nation and the home of 300 of the new polio cases in 2003, nearly half the world total. The chief obstacle is opposition to polio immunization by some Islamic leaders in the state of Kano, in the northern part of the country. These opponents contend that the vaccine contains hormones that sterilize girls, Dr. Heymann said. The W.H.O. strongly disputes the contention. Ridding the world of its last cases of a disease is one of the most formidable challenges in public health. As long as one polio case exists anywhere, an infected traveler can export the disease to start outbreaks elsewhere in the world. Nigeria and Niger were the only two West African countries that had never wiped out polio in their own population. Nigeria has exported polio to at least six West African countries in recent months, Dr. Heymann said. His team is awaiting molecular tests to determine whether the viruses isolated from the Benin and Cameroon cases came from Nigeria or one of the seven neighboring countries that have reported cases- Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Niger and Togo. The number of paralytic polio cases is a small fraction of the number of people infected with the polio virus and capable of transmitting it to other people who may become crippled. Outside of West Africa, the five countries affected by polio and the number of cases are: India (214); Pakistan (96); Afghanistan (8); Egypt (1); Lebanon (1). To prevent any further spread of the disease, the W.H.O. is taking two major steps. One is to conduct what it calls mop-up campaigns to immunize all susceptible children in an area where a new case has occurred. Cameroon and Benin are now conducting such campaigns in an effort to prevent the imported cases from spreading further. But the immunization campaigns are costly and put an added burden oncountries that had previously eradicated polio because they take money from other important health programs, Dr. Heymann said. In a second move, the W.H.O. has invited the health ministers from affected countries to discuss polio eradication in Geneva. Nigeria's national health minister has made a commitment to attend the meeting, as has a representative of the state of Kano, where the opposition to polio vaccination programs is centered, Dr. Heymann said. Dr. Heymann said he expected the ministers to sign a public commitment that their countries would do all they could to stop transmission of polio by the end of 2004. In Kano, Muslim and political officials contend that tests performed there found that polio vaccine contains a dangerous level of the fertility hormone, estrogen, and that this would cause girls who receive the vaccine to become sterile, according to Agence France-Presse. But the W.H.O. says the vaccine contains only the Sabin polio virus that protects against the disease. The Nigerian government appointed a panel of experts that sent the polio vaccine to two laboratories in the WH.O network for testing. These laboratories found no elements of family planning or any hormones or any infectious agents other than the Sabin polio virus, Dr. Heymann said. So it has become a real issue between the central government and the state government, and an issue that is very difficult to deal with. The Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, has announced that the polio vaccine is safe, Dr. Heymann said. Earlier setbacks forced the WHO to revise to 2005 its original goal of eradicating polio by 2000. Dr. Jong Wook Lee, the WHO.'s director general, has pledged to meet that goal with the aid of Unicef, Rotary International, the United States and other partners. The WHO says it does not now intend to change the date again and that it fears that many donors and polio-free countries where imported cases are occurring will abandon the goal of eradication. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/africa/11POLI.html 11 January 2004.)

Washington -- For the first time since the breakout of AIDS, infection rates are showing widespread signs of stagnating or declining in some of the hardest-hit urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new US analysis. US and United Nations officials have found a decline or leveling off of HIV rates in cities in 11 countries, greatly expanding earlier reports that the deadly virus was in retreat in Uganda and among young people in Zambia. But analysts say that the rates are still disturbingly high in those areas and that they are unsure whether to attribute the relative stability or decrease in the number of HIV cases to improved prevention efforts, changes in sexual behavior, or more ominously, an upswing in the numbers of people dying. A US Agency for International Development study of data from the US Census Bureau, which was obtained by the Globe, found that urban areas in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda have had steady declines in HIV prevalence. It showed that the virus was leveling off in cities in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Republic of Congo, and Senegal. But the study also showed several urban areas in which HIV continues a long-term trend of increasing. Those cities are in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, Mozambique, and Cameroon. The new report comes seven months after the National Intelligence Council, a think tank inside the CIA, projected that the number of HIV and AIDS cases could jump to more than 100 million worldwide by the year 2010, compared with more than 40 million now. Piot and others acknowledge that they do not know exactly what is causing the drop or leveling off of HIV infection rates in the urban areas. Paul S. Zeitz, director of the Global AIDS Alliance, an advocacy group, called the figures potentially ''exciting,'' especially in areas of high prevalence, such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. ''Does this mean, though, that death rates are accelerating?'' he said. ''We don't know. It could mean that so many people are dying that people are starting to change their behavior.''(Source:John Donnelly, Boston Globe 5/11/2003)

Central and Eastern African countries, whose education systems are already threatened by HIV/AIDS, need to take concrete steps to minimise the impact of the pandemic, a regional forum in Yaounde, Cameroon, has concluded. The sub-regional forum on UNESCO's 'Education For All' (EFA) programme, held on 22-25 April, highlighted the alarming death rate among teachers who the 100 participants said, constitute high-risk groups in several countries. The high mortality rate among educators, the forum noted, could be an obstacle to achieving the objectives of EFA. World Bank documents presented showed that 14,460 teachers in Tanzania could die of AIDS by 2010, and up to 27,000 by 2020. In Kenya, the death toll among teachers rose from 450 in 1995 to 1,400 in 1999. Cote d'Ivoire and Malawi lose at least one teacher per day while in South Africa, as many as 133,000 could die by the end of this decade. The forum noted that 10 percent of teachers and 20 percent of students could be infected with HIV in the next five years. Describing the situation as catastrophic, UNESCO's AIDS focal point, Foussenou Sissoko, called for vigorous actions such as peer education and medical. He told PlusNews these measures should target teachers and students. He also called on countries to establish mechanisms to track the progression of HIV by, among other things, pushing for voluntary testing. Participants said HIV/AIDS education needed to be introduced in schools, despite the existing taboos and cultural obstacles. Education experts and other officials themselves had to stop believing that parents would be shocked to know that HIV/AIDS and safe sexual behaviour were being taught at schools, they said. They called for greater use of the media to spread the word. Participating countries pledged to continue existing anti-AIDS initiatives and to increase collaborative efforts, nationally and internationally, to combat HIV/AIDS among teachers. African ministers of education are scheduled to meet in December in Mauritius to discuss further steps that need to be taken. (Source: This Item is Delivered to the English Service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. http://www.irinnews.org )

The SA Medical Research Council and a number of foreign research organisations have been awarded about R270m to develop an effective vaginal microbicide for the prevention of HIV transmission to women. Council Spokesman Vincent Moaga said yesterday the money was awarded by the UK's department for international development and the five-year research programme would be co-ordinated by the Medical Research Council in the UK. Other participants include the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of the Witwatersrand, and a group of research collaborators in the UK, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon and Zambia. Moaga said that since HIV/AIDS had been recognised as a disease in the 1980s it had become the leading cause of death in Africa and the fourth most common in the world. More than 36-million people had HIV, 15000 people were infected daily, and 8000 people died of AIDS every day. The first two microbicides to be assessed for their safety are Dextrin sulphate and PRO 2000. Dextrin sulphate has already been tested in the UK, Belgium and Uganda and PRO 2000 in the UK, USA and SA. PRO 2000 gel has received approval for clinical trials in the UK, US and SA. Dextrin sulphate has received approval by the Medicines Control Agency in the UK. (Source: SAPA, 16 January 2002)