Cameroonian health workers and people with HIV marched for World AIDS Day on December 1, calling for access to treatment for patients in conflict areas.

About half a million Cameroonians have HIV, and at least 1,000 live in troubled western regions and the border with Nigeria. The protesters urged Cameroon’s military, separatists, and militants to allow all HIV patients access to needed treatment.

Marie Chantal Awoulbe, who belongs to the Cameroon Network of Adolescents and Positive Youths, which encourages those with AIDS to get regular treatment, took part in the protest and World AIDS Day activities at Chantal Biya International Research Centre in Yaounde. The center carries out research on AIDS, and supports programs to treat and support vulnerable people with HIV.

Awoulbe said her network is asking both armed groups and government troops to stop deaths among people with AIDS where there are armed conflicts by allowing the patients access to regular treatment.

Cameroon’s public health ministry says similar protests and activities to encourage free screening took place in 70 hospitals, with at least 30 hospital workers and people with AIDS taking part at each of the hospitals.

The Cameroon government accuses separatists in the country’s west of attacking hospitals and abducting health care workers. Activists also accuse government troops of attacking and arresting hospital staff suspected of treating civilians the military believes are either fighters or sympathize with separatists.

In April, medical aid group Doctors Without Borders suspended work in Cameroon’s troubled Southwest region to protest the rearrest of four of its staff members. Authorities accused the staffers of cooperating with regional separatists, but the organization denied it.

Medical staff members say intimidation and abduction of health workers, and ceaseless battles between government troops and separatist fighters make it impossible for medical supplies to reach the troubled English-speaking regions.

Twenty-eight-year-old Betrand Lemfon said he and several dozen people with AIDS moved from Jakiri, an English-speaking northwestern town, to Bafoussam, a French-speaking commercial city. He said he and others with the disease were afraid of dying in Jakiri because they did not have access to regular treatment.

“There are a lot of persons out there who are in need of medications, so if we could have the opportunity and chance for medications to always reach every interior part of the North-West region, South-West region who are hit by the crisis, it will help the adolescents, young persons and children living with HIV to take their ARVs [antiretroviral medicines] and stay healthy,” he said.

Lemfon spoke via the messaging app WhatsApp from Bafoussam.

Cameroon’s military says it will protect all health workers and civilians in the troubled regions.

The government says the number of people with the disease in Cameroon has decreased from about 970,000 in 2010 to 500,000 in 2021.

Health officials say the decline is due to increasing awareness of the disease and its consequences. The government says sexual behavior is changing, with the number of people using condoms or abstaining from sex increasing.

Honorine Tatah, a government official in charge of AIDS control in Cameroon, said unlike in 2020 when there was resistance due to lack of awareness, many more civilians now accept systematic screening for HIV.

“During antenatal care, a woman is screened for a number of diseases including hepatitis B, HIV and if you are tested positive, you are eligible for treatment and that treatment will reduce the chances of a child getting infected with HIV. The treatment is free of charge,” Tatah said.

World AIDS Day was the first international day for global health, starting in 1988. It allows people all over the world to join in the battle against HIV, to support those with HIV, and to remember those who have died from an AIDS-related illness.

Source: VOA

After a tiring day, Guy Bertrand pulls his taxi into a side street in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, whips out a plastic sachet of whisky and knocks it back in one go. “I like a good strong kick,” he says, sitting behind the wheel.

It’s often the most deprived Cameroonians who consume such strong but cheap alcoholic shots, known locally as “sachet whisky” or just sachets.

They are of dubious origin and can be dangerously toxic.

“After a hard day at work, to get drunk quickly we take a shortcut and drink sachets,” admits the 26-year-old taxi driver.

Back in September 2014, a government decree banned the sale of sachet booze and gave producers two years to sell off stocks.

Eight years later, in Yaounde and the economic capital Douala, brightly coloured packs of sachets of Bullet, Fighter, Shoot and Shooter seem to be everywhere.

They hang from sunshades outside small shops and street-sellers stack them up alongside powdered milk and sweets for children.

The government has granted moratorium after moratorium since 2014 suspending the decree.

But the sachets will have to be taken off sale by the end of the year, according to an official at the industry ministry, who asked not to be named.

– ‘Seven beers a sachet’ –

For Bertrand it’s a simple calculation. The local beer is about five percent strength, the King Arthur sachet brand is 43 percent proof.

“It’s the same as seven beers and six times cheaper,” he says.

With under two months to go before the deadline for the ban to be finally imposed, sachet sales are booming in the cities and the countryside, particularly among the youth and those with little spending power.

At kilometre 19 or PK19, in Douala’s northern suburbs, young workers and motorbike taxi drivers, some very young, are downing a white-ish liquid called “matango” — a homemade palm wine mixed with sachets.

The sun beats down around the palm trees.

“It sort of wakes us up,” one of the drinkers says, as the sun beats down around the palm trees.

They drinkers say they recognise the risk, but insist the alcohol helps them get through the day.

Alphonse Ayissi Abena and a colleague, both dressed in fluorescent orange jackets, are at the city centre’s Mboppi market, holding up placards warning “Sachet whisky kills”.

“Since we can’t halt the supply, we are trying to promote awareness,” says Ayissi Abena, who runs the Cameroon Consumers Foundation (FOCACO).

But 23-year-old motorbike taxi driver Ebenezer Massing is having none of it.

“It’s dangerous but it gives you strength. Everyone is going to die, I drink it, I’m going to die.

“I don’t drink it, I’m going to die… so I prefer to drink it and die.”

There’s certainly no problem with supplies or choice, at least for now. Gin, rum, vodka … well supposedly.

A sachet costs 100-150 CFA francs or 15-23 US cents.

Under the shade of a shed in Yaounde’s working class district of Ekoumdoum, 20 or so people, young and not so young, gather daily to chat at what they call their “parliament”.

Yet sachets abound and most people are drinking. “When we go to sleep, everybody is drunk,” laughs Cedric. Nearby, two drunks start fighting, leaving one injured.

– ‘Toxic’ –

Such brews are “very toxic for the body”, warns gastroenterologist Djomo Kopa at Douala general hospital.

“We don’t know the quantity of alcohol in each sachet, nor its strength nor exact make-up because it’s usually adulterated whisky,” she says.

“The legal ban from 2014, which has seen endless moratoriums, outlaws plastic sachets of alcohol,” notes Ayissi Abena.

The plastic and alcohol mix can be toxic, he says, but berates above all the legal vacuum created by the succession of moratoriums that has allowed producers to evade all safety checks.

“They don’t have any compliance certificates and use a lot of methanol,” he adds.

Methanol is deliberately added as a cheaper substitute for ethanol in adulterated alcoholic drinks around the world, particularly poor areas, and has been repeatedly condemned by the World Health Organization.

“The attitude of the government which granted these periods of moratorium is sickening,” says the FOCACO president, condemning a “blank cheque to these producers to continue poisoning Cameroonians”.

Source: Africa News

Cameroon Minister of Public Health, Manaouda Malachie on Thursday said Cholera has spread to eight of Cameroon’s 10 regions including the Center region, killing 272 people since October 2021.

Manaouda told a press briefing in the capital city of Yaounde that as of Oct. 20, 12,952 people were known to have been infected.

Efforts were underway to stop the disease from spreading but people needed to observe basic hygienic rules and go for treatment immediately if they noticed symptoms, the minister stressed.

On Wednesday, health officials in Southwest where the highest number of deaths and cases had been recorded, began vaccinating children in schools against cholera as part of nationwide measures to curb the disease.

Officials blamed poor sanitation and hygiene conditions for the spread of the epidemic.

Cholera is a highly virulent disease characterised in its most severe form by a sudden onset of acute watery diarrhoea that can lead to death by severe dehydration.

Source: Xinhuanet

Cameroon will start the fifth phase of nationwide COVID-19 vaccination next month, according to the country’s Minister of Public Health Manaouda Malachie.

The campaign will run from Nov. 18 to 27 and will target people aged 18 and above, vaccinated people eligible for the booster dose, and pregnant and breastfeeding women, Manaouda said in a statement Friday night.

As part of the vaccine response against COVID-19, Cameroon has already covered 12 percent of its population aged 18 and above with more than 1.8 million vaccinated to date, the minister said.

“These encouraging results are not enough to protect the country from a new resurgence. Despite the period of calm observed for a few months, there are still serious cases of COVID-19,” Manaouda said and added that the goal of the national vaccination campaign is to “achieve collective immunity.”

Cameroon has been fighting COVID-19 since March 2020. It has logged 123,785 confirmed COVID-19 cases and has lost over 1,900 people to the coronavirus, according to Africa CDC.

Source: Xinhuanet

Authorities in Cameroon’s Far North region on Tuesday declared an outbreak of cholera after recording at least 10 deaths arising from the disease.

A total of 113 suspected cases of cholera had been recorded as of Monday, the official media outlet CRTV reported, quoting the region’s Governor Midjiyawa Bakari as saying. Bakari made the disclosure during a crisis meeting held Tuesday in Maroua, the region’s capital.

Three health districts of the region, including Mokolo where the country’s largest refugee camp is located, have been affected by the epidemic, according to health officials.

Source:  Xinhua News Agency

A monkeypox outbreak has been confirmed in the town of Mbonge, health authorities in Cameroon say, but armed separatists are preventing workers from investigating suspected cases.

Cameroon government officials say health workers have been deployed to the districts of Kumba and Mbonge to communicate to hundreds of civilians with suspected monkeypox infections to immediately isolate and avoid contact with other people and animals, including pets.

Kumba and Mbonge are districts located in Cameroon’s English-speaking southwest region near the border with Nigeria.

Emmanuel Lenya Nefenda, the highest ranking Cameroon public health official in Kumba, said civilians are being educated after a suspected monkeypox infection was confirmed in Kumba. He said the case was reported after the confirmation by Cameroon public health officials of a monkeypox outbreak in Bole Bakundu, a village in Mbonge.

In order to prevent the spread of the highly contagious monkeypox, Nefenda said people should avoid contact with wild animals, avoid eating wild animals, and wear clean clothes, as opposed to “bush clothes” that may have had contact with rats or other animals.

Nefenda spoke from Kumba via the messaging app WhatsApp.

The government says one case of monkeypox was confirmed in Kumba, and the patient is receiving treatment in a hospital isolation ward. Several dozen specimens have been collected from suspected patients and sent to specialized laboratories in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, for laboratory examinations.

Health officials are warning civilians to take suspected patients to hospitals, and not to herbalists or African traditional healers in villages. But villagers say ongoing battles between separatists and government troops make it impossible for suspected patients to be transported to hospitals, which are far from towns.

Separatists on social media platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp, say any health worker sent by Cameroon’s central government in Yaounde should obtain an authorization from fighters.

But the government says only Cameroon state officials can assure the safety of health workers assisting people suspected of monkeypox infections.

Eko Eko Filbert, the highest government official in charge of public health in Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest region where Kumba and Mbonge are located, said armed groups should allow medical staff members to render humanitarian services.

Monkeypox is contagious, he said, but can be contained with the help of health workers.

Eko said no health official deployed to assist civilians suspected of monkeypox infection has been attacked, but that frightened health workers are scared of going out to search for patients and suspected patients.

The government says it will protect both its citizens and health workers.

The U.N. says Cameroon is a monkeypox endemic country but displacement away from established surveillance systems due to armed conflicts increase the risk of undetected transmission.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said 21 countries in the past week reported an increase in monkeypox cases, mostly in the Americas, which accounted for almost 90% of all cases reported last week.

The WHO says cases in the global monkeypox outbreak have topped 70,000 and warned that a decline in new cases does not mean people should drop their guard, as the slowdown in new cases worldwide could be the most dangerous time in the outbreak.

The U.N. says the disease causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions.

Source: VOA

Officials in Cameroon say the number of mental health patients in the country has more than doubled in the past year, as the country deals with a separatist crisis in its western regions and Boko Haram clashes in the north.

Fonbe Hedwick is the director of the Vine Mental Health Center, in Bameda, capital of Cameroon’s volatile Northwest region.

He says his center was chosen for World Mental Health Day activities in Bamenda because the number of psychiatric patients at the center increased from less than 20 in 2021 to over 100 in October 2022.

“We are receiving those who have gone through traumas, and they are sad, many who complain of sleeplessness, some who cannot be able to control themselves, they are so restless, so agitated. Some with severe anger issues. They present emotional and behavioral tendencies which are uncontrollable,” said Fonbe.

Fonbe said many families lack the resources to care for psychiatric patients at home and either abandon the patients at the center or put them on the streets.

Rebecca Nkwate is the highest government official in charge of mental patients in the Northwest region. She says the number of psychiatric patients seeking help in the region has increased from less than 2,500 to over 6,000 within the past year.

“Some of them come here already abused, so we listen to their story to increase their morale and in the course of looking for solutions, it may require that we go for home visits,” said Nkwate. “We help them at the level of the police and we work with those that go to the hospital when it comes to trauma management. We make sure that they enjoy the same human rights like other people.”

Overall, Cameroon says the number of mental patients in the central African state has more than doubled from about 10,000 to 23,000 in the past 12 months.

The government says with the separatist crisis in western regions and Boko Haram terrorism on the northern border decreasing, humanitarian workers are better able to find and assist patients abandoned in villages where fighting was intensive.

Laure Mengueme is the director of mental health at Cameroon’s Ministry of Health. She says many people lost family members in the conflicts or experienced acts of abuse, violence and trauma, triggering mental health crises.

She urges civilians to seek medical help instead of taking psychiatric patients to traditional healers or pastors who claim they have miracle solutions to mental health problems.

She says a majority of the mental patients government workers are assisting to recover their health are nervous, aggressive, irritated and violent. She simply says doctors and therapists should exercise more patience with psychiatric patients when the patients become violent. She says the country counts very much on doctors and therapists to reduce the growing number of mental patients.

The World Health Organization reports that growing social and economic inequalities, protracted conflicts, violence and public health emergencies continue to take a toll on mental health, in Cameroon and worldwide.

The U.N. says a staggering 84 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced in 2021 leading to an increase in the number of people in need of mental health care.

The 2022 World Mental Health Day theme is “Make mental health and well-being for all a global priority.”

Source: VOA