More than 170 people have died from yellow fever outbreaks in Nigeria this year, despite vaccines being available since 2004. A preference among some Nigerians for traditional, herbal medicine is part of the problem. But experts said apathy to vaccines in rural areas is the biggest challenge.Nigerian car washer Jonathan Sale caught yellow fever from mosquito bites while in secondary school, 23 years ago, before a vaccine was available to treat the viral disease.“When I had that sickness, my lips turned yellow, and my tongue, my eyeball became yellowish. And I was vomiting yellow, yellow, yellow,” Sale said. “I was thinking I was going to die, and God saved me. I went to the hospital and they gave me drips and some drugs.” Nigeria has had the yellow fever vaccine since 2004 and offers it free for children.But since 2017, outbreaks of yellow fever have left scores dead and many others suffering.Dr. Rilwanu Mohammed, the executive chairman of the Bauchi State Primary Health Care Development Agency, said many parents fail to get their children vaccinated.“We now did a small survey and found out that out of the people we sampled, half had not taken the vaccination,” Rilwanu Mohammed said. “The children sampled were under the age of five, and half had not taken the vaccination.”Traditional medicineWhile apathy among parents is the main challenge to vaccines, some Nigerians also opt for traditional medicine instead, like Ahmadu Mohammad, who claims he was cured from yellow fever by visiting the community traditional healer.Mohammad said that people use with herbal medicine and don’t often go to a hospital. He said the treatment is a syringe placed in fire, and once the needle turns red, the herbal doctor prays on the syringe before piercing it into the chest. He said that is the gift God has given the herbal doctor.Aisha Rufai is an immunologist in the city of Jos. He believes more Nigerians are willing to get the yellow fever vaccine, which lasts a lifetime.“There is great awareness now, almost everybody is aware of immunization now, so that of traditional, you’ll find out that it is a very minute number of people that go for traditional,” Rufai said. The Nigerian federal government plans to carry out a massive yellow fever immunization campaign across five high-risk yellow fever states starting mid-January.
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Day: December 22, 2020
Retail giant Walmart Inc. is facing a civil lawsuit from the Department of Justice alleging the company “unlawfully dispensed” controlled substances, including opioids “throughout the height of the prescription opioid crisis.” Walmart has pledged to fight the lawsuit. According to a news release, the DOJ alleges Walmart, which operates over 5,000 pharmacies nationwide, violated the Controlled Substances Act “hundreds of thousands” of times. The DOJ says Walmart “knowingly filled thousands of controlled substance prescriptions that were not issued for legitimate medical purposes or in the usual course of medical practice, and that it filled prescriptions outside the ordinary course of pharmacy practice.” The complaint further alleges that “as the operator of its distribution centers, which ceased distributing controlled substances in 2018, Walmart received hundreds of thousands of suspicious orders that it failed to report as required to by the DEA.” In combination, these failures “helped to fuel the prescription opioid crisis,” according to the DOJ. Penalties could be billions of dollarsIf found liable, Walmart could end up paying billions of dollars in civil penalties, with a maximum of $67,000 per unlawful prescription filled and $15,000 for each suspicious prescription it failed to report. “It has been a priority of this administration to hold accountable those responsible for the prescription opioid crisis. As one of the largest pharmacy chains and wholesale drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent the diversion of prescription opioids,” said Jeffrey Bossert Clark, acting assistant attorney general of the Civil Division, in a news release. “Instead, for years, it did the opposite — filling thousands of invalid prescriptions at its pharmacies and failing to report suspicious orders of opioids and other drugs placed by those pharmacies,” Clark said. “This unlawful conduct contributed to the epidemic of opioid abuse throughout the United States. Today’s filing represents an important step in the effort to hold Walmart accountable for such conduct.” In a statement, Walmart said the lawsuit “is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context” and that the DOJ is attempting “to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place.” According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, in 2018 an average of 128 people in the U.S. died daily from opioid overdose. The cost of the crisis was estimated to be $78.5 billion per year.
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Major climate and clean energy measures are tucked inside the package of $1.4 trillion in annual spending to fund the government and $900 billion to provide COVID-19 relief approved by Congress late Monday. It’s a rare bit of bipartisan agreement on an issue that has been mostly stalled in Congress while global temperatures rise and climate change-driven disasters pile up. Environmental groups said the initiative is a start, but much more needs to be done. FILE – A worker installs solar panels on a roof at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles, California, Aug. 8, 2019.The measure provides short-term tax breaks for solar and wind power and for technology to remove planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plant and industrial emissions, known as carbon capture and sequestration. It phases down the use of extremely powerful greenhouse gases known as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in cooling systems. Clean-energy research and development get a funding boost as well. In all there is roughly $35 billion of new funding for renewable technology and energy efficiency in the legislation, according to advocate groups. “Over the last few years, we found a great deal of cynicism that a bill like this could actually get done,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president of policy Marty Durbin said in a statement. “But passage of this bill will prove that there is common ground on which all sides of the debate can come together.” Durbin described the bill as “truly historic — setting up the biggest action Congress has ever taken to address climate change, and the first energy bill in 13 years.” Greenpeace USA Democracy Campaign Director Folabi Olagbaju called it “a step in the right direction but simply not good enough to meet the magnitude of the moment.” Bruce McDougal prepares to defend his home as the Bond Fire burns though the Silverado community in Orange County, California, Dec. 3, 2020.2020 is on track to be the warmest or second-warmest year on record. Scientists say dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions need to happen worldwide, and soon, to avoid catastrophic global warming. Congress has done little to address the problem since 2010, when a bill aiming to charge polluters for emissions failed in the Senate. The new spending bill extends an existing tax credit that benefits solar power by two years. It extends a tax credit for land-based wind power by one year and creates a new credit for offshore wind. A credit for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that is only deployed on commercial scale at a handful of facilities, gets a two-year extension. The hydrofluorcarbon chemical phase-down brings the United States in line with a United Nations treaty signed by 197 other countries. Business groups supported it, but the measure faced opposition from a few key Republicans concerned about stricter state and local measures creating a patchwork of regulations. The new measure bars them from regulating HFCs for five years. The wide-ranging spending bill includes a potluck of other measures environmentalists back, including programs to reduce diesel pollution, transition to electric school buses and weatherize low-income homes. It also reverses Trump administration cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and climate change programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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An organization run by women in Senegal, ElleSolaire, was supplying solar panels to light up country homes that are off the power grid. But with the outbreak of the coronavirus, and health care stretched, ElleSolaire has switched to providing the panels to underequipped, remote health clinics, where women are often forced to give birth in the dark. Senegalese women adorned in colorful wax fabric clothes laugh and dance around in the village of Tiamene Diogo. They are celebrating because the local clinic that provides prenatal care will soon have electric lights and fans. Head nurse Issaka Dia says with more than 2,500 people from six villages, there are about eight births each month, many of which he attends to at night using only the light from his mobile phone. He says he’s so happy. He feels like they can now work day and night, even in the heat. The remote region in western Senegal is off the electric grid, so the clinic will be powered by the sun. Since 2018, the woman-run ElleSolaire has been installing solar power in rural households. With the coronavirus pandemic stretching health care, the company began equipping remote clinics. Kelly Lavelle is the founder and executive director. “We’ve been just amazed at the reception,” said Lavelle. “The reception we’ve seen today is a point in case. It’s sad in a way that we’ve had to wait for COVID to hit for us to stop and think about the health clinics. But I’m really pleased that we’ve managed to pivot this into an opportunity.” The organization also provides new skills for women like Jeanne Thiaw, ElleSolaire’s women’s coordinator. She used to scrape by with child care and cleaning jobs. She says that although she could pay the rent before, she could not feed her family because she didn’t have the means. Since the onset of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, Thiaw and her co-workers have installed solar-powered lights, fans, and mobile phone chargers at 23 remote clinics. More than one million Senegalese lack access to power, according to USAID, and the World Health Organization says rates of maternal mortality are high. Oumar Samb is a project evaluator with Senegal’s Ministry of Women, Family and Child Protection. He says when women arrive to give birth in the night or in the day and all the machines are down, it’s obviously a danger for the woman in labor and for the newborn. Access to solar energy for these rural women can be lifesaving, he says. And that, say the women, is progress worth celebrating.
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South African scientists say new variant of COVID-19 virus is causing resurgence of cases
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U.S. officials are considering a requirement for all travelers from Britain to offer proof they have tested negative for COVID-19.News outlets say the White House coronavirus task force met Monday and discussed crafting a rule that passengers prove they have taken a negative test within 48 or 72 hours before leaving Britain.The proposed rule comes as more than 40 countries have suspended travelers from Britain in response to a dramatic rise of infections because of a new strain of COVID-19 sweeping across southern Britain.WHO Says No Evidence Coronavirus Variant is Deadlier, More Severe Social distancing remains best way to avoid catching virus, experts sayDiscovery of the new variant has overshadowed the introduction of the new COVID-19 vaccines developed separately by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Hospitals across the United States received nearly 6 million doses of the vaccine developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health, adding to the 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shipped last week for a vaccination effort that has started with front-line health care workers and nursing home residents.The European Union Monday authorized use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine across the 27-nation bloc after its regulatory agency, the European Medicines Agency said the inoculation meets quality and safety standards.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said deliveries of the vaccine are scheduled to start Saturday, with inoculations beginning across the EU Dec. 27-29.“This is a very good way to end this difficult year and to finally start turning the page on COVID-19,” she said of the disease caused by the coronavirus.EU Approves Pfizer-BioNTech COVID Vaccine US begins distributing second coronavirus vaccine across the countryThe Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Chinese vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech’s COVID-19 vaccine was shown to be effective in late-stage trials in Brazil, citing people involved in the vaccine’s development.The Journal said Brazil is the first country to complete late-stage trials of Sinovac’s vaccine, CoronaVac, which is also being tested in Indonesia and Turkey. It said Brazilian officials will announce the vaccine’s efficacy rate Wednesday. With the number of new COVID-19 vaccines increasing, the Vatican says it is “morally acceptable” for Roman Catholics to receive vaccines developed using tissue from aborted fetuses. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Church’s doctrinal oversight office, issued a statement Monday granting permission for Catholics to take such vaccines because it does not “constitute formal cooperation” with the means in which the tissue was obtained. The office also said it is not always possible to obtain vaccines that do not pose an ethical dilemma. The Vatican’s statement echoes one made last week by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to American Catholics, who said receiving the vaccines is justified “in view of the gravity of the current pandemic and the lack of availability of alternative vaccines.” The Roman Catholic Church has long opposed development of vaccines or other therapeutic treatments using stem cells obtained from abortions, which the Church considers a moral sin. The Vatican’s doctrinal office said that vaccination must be voluntary, and that those who refuse to be vaccinated “must do their utmost” to avoid becoming infected and spreading the disease. The office also said there is a “moral imperative” for the pharmaceutical industry, governments and international organizations to ensure that vaccines “are also accessible to the poorest countries”.
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