4, July 2019
Liberia’s Health sector lacks almost everything!! Weah won’t talk 0
A young woman lies in intensive care at Liberia’s Phebe Hospital.
Her mother comes running in with the drugs she needs, but the doctor shakes his head. It is too late.
“When patients come, we are obliged to send (family members) out to get drugs. Sometimes by the time they get back (the) patients are dead,” laments Dr Jefferson Sibley, the hospital’s medical director.
“People are dying in front of our eyes, and we cannot do anything.”
Battered by years of civil war and then in 2014-16 by the worst Ebola epidemic in history, Liberia’s health sector is on its knees.
The crumbling infrastructure lacks almost everything — medicine, beds, equipment, ambulances, even a reliable electricity supply.
Phebe, in central Bong county, is the second largest hospital in Liberia, with 200 beds and seven doctors on its staff.
Despite chronic shortages, it still manages to treat at least 2,500 patients every month.
“We are supposed to get supplies from the ministry of health and the National Drug Services (NDS) but we haven’t received supplies for almost a year,” Sibley told AFP.
“We can’t do anything about it.”
Malaria was the cause of death of the woman in the intensive care unit.
She was 25.
– ‘Only the mercy of God’ –
According to the World Health Organization, total health expenditure per person per year is about $100 (87 euros) in Liberia, among the lowest in the world.
There is fewer than one regional or district hospital per 100,000 people in the country of about 4.7 million.
In 2010, accordiong to the latest available data, there were eight hospital beds per 10,000 people.
In Jenepeleta, a village 30 kilometres (19 miles) from the hospital in Phebe, Regina Kollie, 45, is trying to lower the fever of the youngest of her five children, a four-year-old girl.
Like many in the region, Regina sought help in traditional medicine and gathered leaves with which to wash her daughter, following the advice of a healer.
The treatment is not working and the child’s fever has raged for days. But going to the hospital is not an option.
“I don’t have the money to take my daughter to Phebe. The ambulance used to help us in these cases, but we don’t see it any more,” Regina says, weeping.
“The two ambulances we had are broken down,” Sibley confirmed, noting the vehicles had been “instrumental when it comes to saving lives”.
The ambulances “used to go for pregnant women, children and other people who are seriously ill in the villages… and bring them to us,” he said.
But now if there is an emergency case, “only the mercy of God can help.”
– Surgery by storm lantern –
“We have so many problems, but the key problem is that no funding is coming to the hospital,” said Sibley.
“We find ourselves indebted to vendors. People we take fuel from, people we take drugs from, all of them refuse to supply us because we owe them lots of money. The hospital owes $300,000 (265,000 euros) to vendors.”
The hospital’s electricity is frequently cut off, plunging it into darkness at night and forcing the lone surgeon to carry out operations by the light of storm lanterns.
A shortage of medicines is also crippling Liberia’s largest national health facility, the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia, says its medical director Jerry Brown.
“There are some drugs you can’t find in local pharmacies and government regulations prohibit us from procuring drugs currently from pharmaceutical companies outside the country,” the chief doctor told AFP.
“Our next source of drugs is the National Drug Services,” but it provides only enough to treat the most vulnerable, including children.
The hospital was negotiating with the ministries of health and finance for authorisation to buy directly from manufacturers, Brown said.
Health Minister Wilhelmina Jallah said the problem stemmed from the previous government, under which hospitals ran up big debts by obtaining drugs and fuel on credit.
“We have inherited all these debts, and the vendors no longer want to give us credits,” she said. “We have to pay some of these debts so that we can open the credit lines.”
In a sign of progress, eight container-loads of drugs had arrived, and these will help to ease shortages, she said.
AFP
5, July 2019
The Swiss luxury getaway of president Biya has become a hotbed of conflict 0
Cameroon’s longtime president Paul Biya’s latest “private visit” to his usual retreat at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva has sparked more than its usual mix of political controversy and quiet embarrassment.
Over the last decade, Biya, 86, who has been in power since 1982, has made the top floor suites of the five-star luxury hotel into his home away from home spending months at a time even as his country has slowly descended into conflict from Boko Haram Islamic terrorists in the north of the country and an Anglophone-led insurgency in north- and southwest of the country. The knowledge of his presence there has long infuriated various sections of Cameroonians at home, particularly in the opposition, but also in the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe who have been protesting in larger and larger numbers with each Biya visit.
This past weekend Swiss police fired tear gas and water cannons at Cameroonian protesters who clashed with security at the hotel where dozens of Biya’s personal security agents and federal police have stayed on guard in- and outside.
Violent scenes outside Geneva hotel of Cameroon president
And even while Geneva has long been seen as a personal break for Biya, it has now become the venue for possible peace talks between the Anglophone and Francophone sides and mediated by Switzerland. And the arrival last week of Biya and his wife, Chantal, is now seen as problematic.
“Not helpful” is how one source close to the diplomatic process described the arrival of Biya just days before a second meeting between factions from the predominantly Anglophone regions was to take place in Saint Luc—some 200 kilometers to the east of Geneva. The International Crisis Group reports that some 1,850 people have been killed and more than half a million left homeless, as an armed separatist movement evolved in response to political and social tensions.
Switzerland’s foreign affairs ministry, together with the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, are leading the mediation process aimed at putting an end to the deadly conflict which evolved after peaceful protests by English-speaking professionals to structural discrimination in October 2016. Groups in the two western regions of the country want the creation of an independent state called Ambazonia. President Biya has branded separatists as terrorists. Ebenezer Alwanga, chairman of the African People’s Liberation Movement, one of the main participants at the peace talks said that Biya’s repeated visits to Geneva “complicate” the peace talks, given he spends so much of his time here “rather than running the state he claims to be president of”.
Nfor Hanson Nchanji, a Geneva-based Cameroonian journalist emphasized that parties to the discussion need to communicate with their communities back home for talks to succeed.“The presence of Paul Biya in Switzerland has caused some Ambazonians to reconsider whether Switzerland may be the perfect mediator. But should they refuse the Swiss mediation…they will have nowhere to go.”
The Swiss mediated talks have been supported by United States, the European Union and the United Nations.
Meanwhile some Francophone opponents to Biya’s government, regretted that Maurice Kanto, a rival to Biya in the October 2018 presidential election, who won 14% of votes according to the Constitutional Council, was not included in the talks. The opposition accused the government of having rigged results. Doris Toyou, a Cameroonian lawyer living in Washington, who supports groups behind Saturday’s protest in Geneva, said Switzerland could not be trusted in talks.
It’s been reported Biya had spent at least 1,645 days abroad on private trips since 1982, with Geneva being his top destination. It estimated it costs Intercontinental Hotel around £40,000 ($50,000) a night for the president and his entourage. “How could Switzerland be trust-worthy in mediating the talks after the way the police treated protesters?” said Toyou.
Meanwhile, Jean Philippe Brandt of Geneva’s police explained that as protesters did not respect the agreed terms for protesting, and left an authorized area accorded for the demonstration, “The use of any accessory or armament was related possibly to the aggression by the protesters and to disobey instructions given by the police.”
The confrontation came just days after a Swiss journalist, Adrien Krause, who was covering Biya’s stay from in front of the Geneva hotel, was attacked. “It is very probable that they were security guards” associated to Biya.
Since then six members of Biya’s security team have been convicted of assault on the journalist.
Culled from Quartz Africa