Africa Matters

African scientists are working to pool data that decodes diseases – a giant step

Infectious disease outbreaks in African countries are, unfortunately, all too common. Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Uganda; Marburg virus in Guinea or Equatorial Guinea; cholera in Malawi; malaria and tuberculosis are among them. These diseases do not respect human-made or porous borders. So it’s essential that scientists in Africa are able to generate and share…

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Tanzania moves from Covid-19 denier to a response model in Africa

Summary The World Health Organisation has declared the country the best performer in the Covid-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership among 34 African nations whose vaccination rates were below 10 percent by January 2022 Dar es Salaam. Until early 2021, Tanzania was a Covid-19 denier, but two years later, the World Health Organisation (WHO) now ranks the country as the best…

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Ghana first to approve Oxford’s malaria vaccine

London, Apr. 13 (BNA): A keenly-watched malaria vaccine from Oxford University has secured its first approval, in Ghana, as the African country ramps up efforts to combat the mosquito-borne disease that kills a child every minute. The effort is one of several focused on addressing the disease that kills over 600,000 each year, most of them children in Africa….

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Babycare: Why experts recommend breast over bottle

When babies do not feed directly from their mothers’ breasts during the first six months after birth, it puts them at higher risk of contracting a number of fatal diseases most significantly, diarrhoea, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). By Rodgers Otiso Diarrhoea, according to the WHO, is the leading cause of death among infants in developing countries…

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$2.54 Billion Needed to Tackle Unprecedented Health Needs in 2023 – WHO

Two-and-a-half billion dollars: that’s how much funding the UN World Health Organization (WHO) will need across its operations this year, it said on Monday, to help a record number of people facing disease and starvation. In its appeal, the WHO said that a staggering 339 million people now need humanitarian assistance globally. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the UN agency’s Director-General,…

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Tanzania is first African country to reach an important milestone in the regulation of medicines

Brazzaville   Tanzania is the first confirmed country in Africa to achieve a well-functioning, regulatory system for medical products according to the World Health Organization (WHO).   This means that the Tanzania Food and Drug authority (TFDA) has made considerable improvements in recent years in ensuring medicines in the healthcare system are of good quality, safe and produce the…

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