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CAIRO, Egypt (AFP) — Egypt said Wednesday it plans to manufacture one billion doses a year of China’s Sinovac vaccine, claiming it would become the Middle East and Africa’s “biggest vaccine producer”. Under the deal with the Chinese pharmaceutical company, a factory in Cairo will produce more than 200 million doses per year to cover “national needs”, Health Minister Hala Zayed told a press conference. A second factory will produce three million doses per day, […]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AFP) — There is “no evidence” that a Guinean woman who tested positive for Ebola after arriving in neighbouring Ivory Coast had the disease, the WHO said on Tuesday citing a new analysis from a lab in France. Her diagnosis in mid-August was thought to be the first confirmed case of Ebola in the west African country since 1994. The diagnoses sparked a huge contact-tracing operation by the World Health Organization and […]
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AFP) — Scientists in South Africa are monitoring a new coronavirus variant with an unusually high mutation rate, and whose frequency has gradually increased in recent months, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases said Monday. The variant, known as C.1.2., was flagged last week by the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation and Sequencing Platform in a preprint study that has yet to be peer reviewed. While the majority of South Africa’s coronavirus cases […]
KINSHASA, DR Congo (AFP) — Former DR Congo health minister Eteni Longondo was detained on Friday over the alleged misappropriation of funds allocated to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, official sources said. Longondo “was placed under a provisional arrest warrant this evening” following lengthy questioning, a government source said. The former health minister, who was in office until April, was taken to the Makala prison in the capital Kinshasa, according to a prison official […]
SPRINGS, South Africa (AFP) — A rundown South African railway station has been converted into an unlikely vaccination site where a shiny white train brings jabs to remote areas and boost sluggish uptake. One by one, people waiting in plastic chairs spaced out across a platform in the town of Springs, 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Johannesburg, were called to board a vaccine center on rails — the “Transvaco”. “We want to try and […]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AFP) — A young Guinean woman who tested positive for the Ebola virus in Ivory Coast after arriving there two weeks ago has recovered from the disease, the Ivorian health ministry said Tuesday. “We performed on the patient two biological tests which were negative in an interval of 48 hours. She is therefore declared cured,” Serge Eholie, ministry spokesman and head of the country’s infectious diseases department told AFP. “We are lifting […]
DAKAR, Senegal (AFP) — Guinean health officials are monitoring 172 contact cases of a man who died of Marburg virus, Health Minister Remy Lamah said Thursday. West Africa’s first recorded case of the virus — which belongs to the same filovirus family as Ebola but is somewhat less deadly — was confirmed on August 9. The virus, which is carried by bats and has a historic fatality rate of up to 88 percent, was found […]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AFP) — Ivory Coast has detected its first cases since 2015 of the H5N1 bird flu in poultry farms, the government said Thursday. “Since July 20, high death rates among poultry were spotted in traditional and modern poultry firms in Mondoukou” east of the country’s economic hub Abidjan, Livestock and Fisheries Minister Sidi Tiemoko Toure said in a statement. He added that “laboratory analysis confirmed the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian flu virus”. […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — The UN health agency said Tuesday that a second suspected case of infection by the deadly Ebola virus had been detected in Ivory Coast. World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said that as of Monday, there had been one confirmed and one suspected case, with nine contacts identified so far. No deaths have been reported. He said the WHO was “very concerned” about the ability of the virus to spread […]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AFP) — Ivory Coast began a roll-out of vaccinations against Ebola on Monday, after the country recorded its first known case of the disease since 1994, the health ministry said. “Health workers, close relatives and contacts of the victim” were the first to be vaccinated, getting jabs from 5,000 doses sent from Guinea, spokesman Germain Mahan Sehi said. Ivorian health workers had previously said that vaccinations of “targeted groups” had already begun […]
Ivory Coast has recorded a first case of Ebola, the health minister announced late Saturday, the first occurence of the deadly disease in nearly three decades. Officials at the Institut Pasteur had confirmed the case after testing samples taken from an 18-year-old Guinean woman, Health Minister Pierre N’Gou Demba said on RTI state television. She had left the city of Labe in Guinea by road, arriving in Ivory Coast on Wednesday, he added. “This is […]
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Saturday, the United States Geological Survey said, prompting a tsunami alert and damaging buildings in the west of the disaster-plagued Caribbean nation. The epicenter of the quake, which shook homes and sent people scrambling for protection, was about 100 miles (160 kilometers) by road from the center of the densely populated capital Port-au-Prince. “Lots of homes are destroyed, people are dead and some are at the hospital,” Christella […]
