After testing hundreds of people for coronavirus, Cameroonian nurse, Judith Maya, plans a hero’s welcome for the first arrival of COVID-19 vaccines in the Central African nation.

“I have seen people die within days after I test them positive. I need protection and can’t wait to be vaccinated”, the 35-year-old told Xinhua in the capital Yaounde where the country’s first batch of COVID-19 vaccines are expected to arrive at the weekend.

The delivery of 200,000 doses of Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccines, donated by China, will arrive on Sunday, said Shalom Tchoukfe Ndoula, Permanent Secretary of Expanded Programme on Immunization.

“Upon reception of these vaccines, we will distribute to the regions and the districts. There will be at least one health centre in every district,” Ndoula said, stating that over 500 accredited vaccination centres have been created across the country.

First in line for inoculations will be healthcare workers and those with chronic health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19, according to Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health.

“The first objective is to protect the most exposed people,” Ndoula said.

Members of the general population will then follow.

Cameroon will provide COVID-19 vaccines for free under its national vaccination plan and vaccination will not be mandatory, according to officials.

Johnson Esunge, a virologist running a lab that has performed more than 10,000 virus tests, said the arrival of the vaccines will be “a breakthrough” in the fight against the pandemic in the country.

“Vaccines save lives. This will definitely change so many things,” Esunge said.

Misconceptions around the COVID-19 vaccines have discouraged some Cameroonians from taking the jab but not 59-year-old Josephine Ndabu who has seen the devastation wrought by the virus up close.

Last year, she lost four members of her family to the virus in less than two months.

“I hope to be vaccinated, and that’s it. I have done my own research and now know that the vaccines are safe and can actually help. I cannot be discouraged by fake news,” Ndabu said.

She plans to talk to those who may still be sceptical about the vaccine.

Like Ndabu, Antoinette Fatimatu who works at the Yaounde General Hospital, is hopeful that the COVID-19 vaccine would make a huge difference.

Fatimatu, 38, said she has tested more people than she can count. “The most difficult part of the job is telling people they are positive. They get scared,” she said.

The prospect of getting vaccinated excites her. “I want the vaccine like now now now,” she said enthusiastically.

Louis Ngwei, who deals in household utensils in the national capital, is excited about the inoculation.

Ngwei, whose business has suffered the adverse consequences of COVID-19, said he was upbeat about the positive impact of the vaccine on the economy.

“It pleases me that the vaccine will soon arrive. With that, I hope we can move forward and get through this sad phase and restart our lives,” the 55-year-old said.

The vaccination programme will be crucial for Cameroon’s efforts to revive its economy, which has suffered due to strict social distancing restrictions that hit consumer spending and saw job losses.

Cameroon reported its first coronavirus infection in March last year, an imported case from Europe.

Cameroon had registered 61,731 COVID-19 cases, including 56,926 recoveries and 919 deaths, tweeted Thursday by the country’s Minister of Public Health Malachie Manaouda.

Source: Xinhuanet

Scores of Cameroonians with kidney failure and their relatives have blocked traffic since Monday around a Yaoundé hospital to protest a shortage of dialysis treatment.  Cameroon authorities blame administrative procedures and coronavirus disruptions for slowing the import of dialysis machines and medicines.

Traffic was at a standstill in Yaounde’s Melen neighbourhood this week as hundreds of patients with kidney failure, and their relatives, protested a halt to treatment at the Yaoundé University Teaching Hospital.

Among the kidney patients who sat or lay on the road in front of the hospital is 54-year-old Emmanuel Pierre Essi.

He says their protest began on Monday after at least seven kidney patients died within three weeks due to lack of treatment.

Essi says he and many of his peers may die after missing at least six sessions of hemodialysis for the past two weeks.  He says the Yaoundé University Teaching Hospital has only five hemodialysis machines for over 160 patients.  Essi says old age and overuse have crumbled the machines and patients who need four hours of dialysis per session, now take seven hours to filter and purify their blood in the dialysis machine.  He says kidney patients also lack hemodialysis kits and dialysis fluid.

Cameroonian health officials are pleading with the patients to halt their protest while the government tries to fix the problems.

The government says that since the coronavirus pandemic began last year, it has been unable to import dialysis equipment and medicine from suppliers abroad due to travel restrictions and the economic slowdown.

The hospital’s deputy director, Felicien Ntone, says officials are trying to secure the equipment needed for dialysis treatment.

He says Cameroon and its suppliers in Europe and China are examining the best possible ways to speed the shipment of dialysis kits and dialysis machine spare parts to Cameroon.  Ntone says the government has agreed to urgently release funds for the purchase of hemodialysis kits.

Ntone says kidney patients who become critical will be transferred to other dialysis centers.

He says hospitals are negotiating with the government to allow the buying of medicines and equipment without passing through a long procurement process.

Meanwhile, on the third day of the demonstration, some of the protesters are refusing to back down.

Yaoundé University student Donald Yaje’s parent has kidney failure.  Yaje vows to keep protesting until the government provides the needed treatment.

“We cannot be indifferent while our relatives are dying,” he said.  “We want the government to look for a way of importing equipment instead of always complaining that the coronavirus has [imposed] restrictions to the shipment of goods from Europe.  They should not forget kidney patients while struggling to stop corona.”

Cameroonian health authorities say the country has about 2,500 patients with acute kidney infections, up from 400 in 2012.

There are about seven towns in Cameroon with dialysis centers, with five dialysis machines at each.

Yaoundé has two such centers — the largest with 20 dialysis machines.  But health authorities acknowledge they are often not working as a result of overuse and poor power supply.

Source: VOA

Richer countries are failing a “rudimentary” test of global solidarity by hoarding Covid vaccines, Amnesty International said Wednesday as it accused China and others of exploiting the pandemic to undermine human rights.

In its annual report, the campaigning rights organisation said the health crisis had exposed “broken” policies and that cooperation was the only way forward.

“The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the world’s inability to cooperate effectively and equitably,” said Agnes Callamard, who was appointed Amnesty’s secretary general last month.

“The richest countries have effected a near-monopoly of the world’s supply of vaccines, leaving countries with the fewest resources to face the worst health and human rights outcomes.”

Amnesty strongly criticised the decision by former US president Donald Trump to withdraw Washington from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the pandemic — a step now reversed by Trump’s successor Joe Biden.

Callamard called for an immediate acceleration of the global vaccine rollout, calling the innoculation campaign “a most fundamental, even rudimentary, test of the world’s capacity for cooperation”.

Widening inequality

Since the coronavirus emerged in China in late 2019, the pandemic has claimed more than 2.8 million lives globally and infected at least 130 million people.

Despite regular calls for global solidarity from international organisations, figures show widening inequality in access to vaccines.

According to an AFP count, more than half the 680 million-plus doses administered worldwide have been in high-income countries, such as the United States, Britain and Israel, while the poorest have received only 0.1 percent of the doses.

At the end of March, the WHO warned of an increasingly unbalanced distribution of vaccines.

Amnesty International has supported initiatives such as the WHO’s vaccine exchange platform C-TAP to share know-how, intellectual property and data.

The under-used initiative could be used to build production capacity and additional vaccine production sites, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to the WHO.

Amnesty dismissed as “paltry half-measures” decisions like those of the G20 group of nations to suspend debt repayments for 77 nations.

Chinese ‘irresponsibility’

Amnesty also hit out at the “gross irresponsibility” of China during the pandemic, accusing Beijing of censoring health workers and journalists who tried to sound the alarm at the start of the outbreak.

“Covid-19 intensified a crackdown on freedom of expression with a number of citizen journalists who reported on the outbreak going missing, and in some cases being imprisoned,” it said.

The rights group pointed to growing evidence of “grave human rights violations” more broadly in China, “including torture and enforced disappearances” of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the region of Xinjiang.

It said nations like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Hungary had used the pandemic to further silence criticism and cited violence by the security services in Brazil and Nigeria against protest movements in the past year.

“Some (leaders) have tried to normalise the overbearing emergency measures they’ve ushered in to combat Covid-19, whilst a particularly virulent strain of leader has gone a step further,” Callamard said.

“They have seen this as an opportunity to entrench their own power. Instead of supporting and protecting people, they have simply weaponised the pandemic to wreak havoc on people’s rights,” she added.

Amnesty said during the health emergency, groups like women and migrants had been further marginalised in parts of the world.

It said its report outlined how “existing inequalities as a result of decades of toxic leadership have left ethnic minorities, refugees, older persons and women disproportionately negatively affected”.

“We face a world in disarray. At this point in the pandemic, even the most deluded leaders would struggle to deny that our social, economic and political systems are broken,” Callamard said.

Source: AFP

With a total of 57,337 cases, the ruling CPDM crime syndicate in Yaoundé has now been informed that La Republique du Cameroun is the 13th most affected country in Africa.

The curve of Covid-19 infection is constantly increasing in the two Cameroons and the frequency is even more worrying but not for the 88 year-old President Biya.

In one week, French Cameroun recorded 4112 new positive cases. This brings the number of people infected with the virus in the two Cameroons to 57,337.

Cameroon Concord News understands that with these figures, the divided nation is gradually approaching the top of the table of the most affected countries on the African continent.

53 people infected with the disease died recently including two cabinet ministers. A total of 851 patients have now died from Covid-19 in French Cameroun and the figures in Southern Cameroons are still being kept like a nuclear secret.

427 patients were reportedly in intensive care in the cities of Douala and Yaoundé, including 122 on oxygen. The National Order of Physicians made an appeal to the Biya regime to take important measures to limit the spread of the virus.

The so-called Dion Ngute administration instead placed a ban on all festive events only in the Centre region hosting the political capital and the barons of the Biya regime.

Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute told a COVID-19 task force meeting to intensify sensitization campaigns as infections continue to increase. But it is still business as usual in all the major towns and cities in French Cameroun.

By Rita Akana in Yaounde

The UK medical regulator said Saturday that out of 30 people who suffered blood clots after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, seven have died.

“Out of the 30 reports up to and including 24 March, sadly 7 have died,” the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said in a statement sent to AFP.

Announcing the thirty blood clot cases on Friday, MHRA said “the benefits of the vaccines against Covid-19 continue to outweigh any risks”, urging the public to keep taking the vaccine.

Up to 24 March, 22 reports of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) and eight of other thrombosis events with low platelets were logged.

“The risk of having this specific type of blood clot is very small,” the agency noted.

“The number and nature of suspected adverse reactions reported so far are not unusual in comparison to other types of routinely used vaccines,” the MHRA online statement on April 2 said.

However there were no such reports for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The Netherlands on Friday became the latest in a line of European countries to halt vaccinations with the AstraZeneca jab for people under the age of 60 amid fears of links to rare blood clots.

The move came after five new cases in the Netherlands affecting women between 25 and 65 years of age, one of whom died.

Germany had taken a similar decision earlier this week.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which has also previously declared the AstraZeneca vaccine safe, as has the World Health Organization, is expected to announce updated advice on the issue on April 7.

The EMA said again on Wednesday it believes the vaccine is safe and that experts have found no specific risk factors such as age, gender or medical history.

Britain, where the vaccine was developed with Oxford University, has been one of the countries worst-hit by coronavirus with nearly 127,000 dead.

Source: FRANCE 24 with AFP

The Vice President of the Southern Cameroons Interim Government, Dabney Yerima has said that more than 400 health centers have been destroyed as a result of attacks by Cameroon government army soldiers waging a devastating military campaign against the English speaking people of Southern Cameroons.

Vice President Dabney Yerima told members of the Ambazonia Interim Government cabinet on Sunday that the French Cameroun regime headed by Mr. Paul Biya and the French Cameroun elite force known as the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) are responsible for the destruction of more than 400 Southern Cameroons health facilities in the rural areas.

The exiled Southern Cameroons leader added that more than three quarters of all health centers in Southern Cameroons-Ambazonia are now closed, while medicine is now a rare commodity.

Yerima also said that the deliberate silence maintain by the international community has turned the Southern Cameroons conflict into the largest humanitarian crisis in the Gulf of Guinea.

The high-ranking Southern Cameroons Interim Government official further highlighted that the plight of Ambazonian children remains grim with many in the rural areas dying of preventable causes.

Dabney Yerima went on to say that in the days ahead, the Interim Government will be implementing the Big Rubbergun project to push back the occupying French Cameroun army soldiers.

By  Asu Vera Eyere

The battle against HIV, which has taken a back seat during the Covid-19 pandemic, returned to the fore in France Friday during the 28th edition of Sidaction, an annual televised fundraising event happening through Sunday.

The virus that causes AIDS has claimed the lives of more than 32 million people worldwide since the 1980s. Scientists are continuing their research and creating new initiatives to develop a vaccine to overcome this scourge.

The health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic has slowed research, even though several trials have recently relaunched, Bruck-Landais, the director of the research and health division at Sidaction, said.

The subject of a vaccine strategy has mobilised research since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, Bruck-Landais said, mentioning “many failures, and vaccine projects or vaccination strategies that have since evolved thanks to our greater knowledge of the virus and the immune system”.

These developments now make it possible to test complete strategies capable of circumventing the problems of HIV, an unstable virus that mutates and from which many subtypes arise.

Several trials and ‘a rather innovative strategy’

So what is the state of research today? “There is a very advanced trial in phase 3 that we expect results from in 2022,” Bruck-Landais said. This trial is testing a “mosaic” strategy, making it possible to use different pieces of the HIV virus, which correspond to different subtypes, with the aim of being able to prevent most of the virus that is in circulation worldwide.

A trial for a preventative vaccine launched in France by the Vaccine Research Institute, a laboratory created by the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS) and the University of Paris-Est Créteil, is among other trials currently in phase 1.

This trial “is testing a rather innovative strategy to optimise dendritic cells: Central immune cells that orchestrate our immune response”, Bruck-Landais explained. The idea is to “target these cells so they can recognise HIV viruses and then present them with antigens in order to stimulate antibody production”.

The Vaccine Research Institute launched a call for volunteers in late February and planned three stages of recruitment. Its trial aims to “test the safety of the vaccine”, Bruck-Landais said, and its goal for now is to discover whether the vaccine produces an immune response and whether the planned doses induce side effects. The first volunteers will receive their injections in mid-April.

‘Interactions and lessons to be learned’

While the research is continuing, it has faced difficulties linked to the health crisis. “Trials have been interrupted or slowed down,” Bruck-Landais said, particularly because it became impossible to monitor thousands of participants due to “travel problems and health measures”. Expected results have thus been delayed.

However the research director noted a positive corollary to the health crisis: It encouraged HIV and Covid-19 researchers to collaborate. This collaboration in particular opened up new avenues of study on messenger RNA technology, which is used for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. “This technology has never been tested for HIV, but researchers have been studying it for several months to apply it to HIV,” said Bruck-Landais.

The two viruses are nonetheless very different, she said, noting that vaccine strategies tested for HIV have not been successful, whereas several Covid-19 vaccines have been found in record time.

“One is the coronavirus – Sars-CoV-2 – and the other is a retrovirus – HIV,” she explained. “HIV mutates enormously. In each viral cycle, every time it multiplies, it generates at least 20 mutations, and on top of that, there are at least four different subtypes circulating in the world.

“The vaccine strategy is less complicated when it comes to getting the immune system to recognise a single virus than thousands of variants and at least four subtypes.”

The state of HIV research has benefitted coronavirus research, she added. “Vaccine strategies that were tested for HIV and did not work are being used for Covid-19 vaccines, including the adenovirus vaccine (used by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson).

“There are interactions and lessons to be learned on both sides.”

In France, 173,000 people live with HIV, and an estimated 24,000 more are unknowingly infected. However, a drop in screenings for HIV during the Covid-19 pandemic – around 650,000 tests in 2020 according to Santé Publique France, the national health agency – has raised fears of an epidemic rebound by 2022.

Culled from France 24

All festive events in Cameroon’s Centre region that hosts the capital city Yaounde have been banned, the region’s governor Naseri Paul Bea said in a statement Thursday evening.

He said the decision was taken following an upsurge in COVID-19 infections and deaths in the region.

The decision came after Cameroon’s Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute told a COVID-19 task force meeting on Thursday to intensify sensitization campaigns as infections continue to increase in the Central African nation.

As of Friday, Cameroon had registered 47,669 COVID-19 cases, 38,820 recoveries and 721 deaths, according to data released by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Source: UrduPoint

Belgium is reintroducing strict lockdown measures in response to a worrying surge of new COVID-19 infections, with the government saying Wednesday that schools would close and residents would have limited access to non-essential businesses.

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said the virus variant first identified in Britain is taking a heavy toll on the health of the country’s people: confirmed cases increased 40% over the last week, and hospital admissions rose 28% following a long stable period.

“It’s difficult to take such a decision, and for many it will be a deception,” De Croo said after an emergency meeting with regional leaders. “But I’m convinced that we are going to break this third wave.”

Under the government’s new order, schools and universities will no longer welcome students for in-person classes starting Monday, although kindergartens will remain open. The government’s goal is to resume in-person teaching from April 19, after the Easter break.

“The largest number of infections is in the 10 to 19 age group,” De Croo said, noting that children and young adults who show no or few COVID-19 can infect parents and grandparents who become very sick and end up in the hospital.

A total of 22,763 people have died from coronavirus-related causes in Belgium, which was among the countries hit hardest when the pandemic emerged last year. About 1 million of Belgium’s 11.5 million residents have received a first vaccine dose, and De Croo said the vaccination program in nursing homes had already helped reduce COVID-19 deaths.

Health Minister Frank Vandenbroucke said a recent sharp increase of COVID-19 patients in Belgium’s intensive care units was worrying.

“We need to return to a simple rule: limit contacts,” he said. “With the perspective to reopen our society in the coming months, with the absolute priority to reopen schools after Easter.”

Under the new rules, which take effect on Wednesday night, non-essential shops can remain open but customers will need to book appointments to be allowed inside. Hairdressers and beauty parlors have to close again for four weeks, until April 25.

“It is anger and disgust! Both for non-essential businesses and for contact trades: Where are the numbers? It’s unacceptable,” Olivier Mauen, spokesman for the independent businesses union, told public service broadcaster RTBF.

Teleworking remains mandatory, and the maximum number of adults permitted to gather outdoors is being reduced from 10 to four. Belgium’s ban on non-essential travel outside the country will also remain in force over the Easter holidays.

(AP)