Cholera is spreading fast through camps housing people displaced by Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria’s Borno state, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Most deaths were recorded in Muna Garage camp on the outskirts of state capital Maiduguri, the epicenter of the extremist insurgency that has also destabilized neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

A UN report said more than 530 suspected cases of cholera had been registered by Tuesday – more than three times the number reported five days earlier.

Twenty-three people had died, it added, up from 11 reported on Aug. 31.

The outbreak began late last month, and aid workers had already warned that Nigeria’s rainy season could spread disease in already unsanitary displacement camps.

About 1.8 million people have abandoned their homes because of violence or food shortages during the conflict, UN agencies say.

As well as Muna Garage, the nearby camps of Custom House, Ruwan Zafi and Bolori II also had cholera cases, and there were reports of outbreaks in the areas of Moguno and Dikwa, northeast and east of Maiduguri, the UN note said.

In Dikwa, 80 km (50 miles) from Maiduguri, there were 103 suspected cholera cases, 17 of which had been confirmed with a rapid screening test at the local hospital, but no outbreak had been officially declared.

Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection spread by contaminated food and water. It can be easily treated with oral rehydration solution if caught early, but the disease can kill within hours if left untreated.

The latest figures suggested a 4.3 percent fatality rate – well above the 1 percent rate that the World Health Organization rates as an emergency. The short incubation period of two hours to five days means the disease can spread with explosive speed.

(Source: Reuters)

Crop-eating fall army worms have attacked nearly 37,000 hectares of maize in northern Cameroon, officials said on Wednesday, accentuating an already dire humanitarian crisis provoked by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram’s cross-border insurgency.

More than two dozen African nations have reported outbreaks of the invasive Central American variety of the pest, which is harder to detect and eradicate than its African counterpart.

They have now spread to all of Cameroon’s 10 administrative regions, though maize crops in the Extreme North region have only been heavily affected since July, Deputy Agriculture Minister Clementine Ananga Messina told Reuters.

“The army worm attack endangers the entire maize sector and is creating serious risks of food insecurity, because it’s the most commonly grown cereal in Cameroon,” she said. The Extreme North region bordering Chad and Nigeria has been hit hard by Boko Haram, whose campaign of violence and cross-border attacks has sent more than 93,000 Nigerians fleeing into Cameroon where some 235,000 people have also been displaced.

Across the Lake Chad region around 1.5 million people are confronting a food crisis, according to the United Nations. Cameroonian authorities have launched an action plan to fight against the infestation, but so far pesticides have failed to contain it.

“There are no effective means to fight armyworm currently existing in Cameroon,” said Agriculture Ministry expert Andre Marie Elombat Assoua. “The chemical products now being used by farmers are ineffective and too expensive.”
Around 12 million Cameroonians, more than half of the national population, regularly consume maize. It is also an important ingredient for the central African nation’s breweries and in the production of feed for livestock. Though the fall armyworm prefers maize, it also attacked sorghum and millet, two of Cameroon’s other staple crops, earlier this year.

Source: Reuters

The race to replace the Late William Aurelian Eteki Mboumoua as president of the Cameroon Red Cross has begun in earnest. Candidates contesting for the post have begun campaigns ahead of elections scheduled for the 12th August 2017 at the headquarters of the institution. The date, venue and candidates eligible to take part in the elections were made public by the Minister of Public Health and chair of the Ad hoc Electoral Committee for the election of the president of the Cameroon Red Cross, Andre Mama Fouda and the co-chair, El Hadj Modibo Halodou Ibrahima.

According to the press release, six candidates were retained for the race including Abdousalam Mahaman, Akame Mfoumou nee Mendomo Cecile Leonie, Marie Madeleine Fouda, Feutse Roger, Ousmanou Dawaye and Peh Peh Ebenezer. Of the six candidates only five will be running, Ousmanou Dawaye having passed away.

The kicker for election campaigns was given on Thursday, 17th August 2017 by Feutse Roger during a press Conference in Yaoundé where he launched his manifesto. The Ambassador of humanitarian activities and President of the Red Cross for Mfoundi who has served in the Cameroon Red Cross for ten years said he vision is to build a Red Cross of action and proximity which is able to generate its own income.

He hopes to promote the humanitarian heritage by promoting team work, training of rescuers and to redefine the management model in the institution. He will however be contesting alongside Marie Madeleine Fouda, Former Minister of Social Affairs and member of the outgoing executive. She holds dear the vision of the founder of the Red Cross which is to help the needy and increase the number of rescuers in schools and institutions. She also hopes to use her 25 years experience in the Red Cross to attract more partners and donors.

Retired police Superintendent Peh Peh Ebenezer holds that a soldier remains a soldier even for a humanitarian mission. The retired officer hopes to use his experience as a uniformed man to forge a dynamic, strong and independent Red Cross. Former Vice President of the Management board and member of the ongoing executive, Abdousalam Mahaman and Akame Mfoumou nee Mendomo Cecile Leonie member of the outgoing executive also have convincing reasons why they hope to lead the Cameroon Red Cross. At the end of the elective general assembly at the Red Cross Head quarters on Monday 21st August 2016, the new President of the body will be known after the ballots would have been counted.

Source: CRTV

YAOUNDE, Cameroon–Cameroon expects to more than triple its soybean harvest this year in an effort to cut imports of the crop, a top official in the Ministry of Economy said Wednesday.

“We expect to produce 35,000 metric tons of soybeans in 2017 from a new 200-hectare plantation,” Cameroon’s deputy minister of the economy, Yaouba Abdoulaye, told reporters.

Source: Fox business

A scandal involving eggs contaminated with insecticide spread to 15 EU countries, Switzerland and as far away as Hong Kong on Friday as the European Commission called for a special meeting on the growing crisis.

Brussels said the 15 affected EU countries were Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Britain, Austria, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Denmark, along with non-EU Switzerland. But in a sign the crisis is going global, Brussels also announced that Hong Kong had received some tainted eggs from the Netherlands, with the southern Chinese city becoming the first place in Asia known to be affected.

Hong Kong health minister Sophia Chan said Saturday authorities were “strengthening” inspections of eggs from Europe Ministers and food safety chiefs from around the European Union are set to meet on September 26 in a bid to get countries to stop “blaming and shaming” each other over the scare involving the chemical fipronil.

Millions of eggs have been pulled from supermarket shelves across Europe and dozens of poultry farms closed since the discovery of fipronil, which can harm human health, was made public on August 1. The issue has sparked a row between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, the three countries at the epicenter of the crisis, about how long they knew about the problem.

“Blaming and shaming will bring us nowhere and I want to stop this,” Vytenis Andriukaitis, the European Commissioner for health and food safety, told AFP as he announced the meeting. “We need to work together to draw the necessary lessons and move forward instead.”

European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said that “this is not, let’s be clear, a crisis meeting” and it is being held next month to get “distance to the events.” Fipronil is commonly used to get rid of fleas, lice and ticks from animals but is banned by the European Union from use in the food industry.

The EU insists there is no threat to human health, but the World Health Organization (WHO) says that when eaten in large quantities it can harm people’s kidneys, liver and thyroid glands. As well as dealing with the immediate food safety issue, the EU is also seeking to calm tempers over the egg row after a series of divisive crises in the bloc in recent years, from Brexit to migration.

Belgium earlier this week accused the Netherlands of knowing about the fipronil eggs since November 2016 and failing to notify other countries. On Thursday Dutch Health Minister Edith Schippers admitted the government had made “errors” but denied a cover-up.

“We were well aware of a report of the presence of fipronil in the pens of egg-laying hens in November 2016, but there was no indication at the time that fipronil itself was found in the eggs,” said Schippers. A Dutch whistleblower separately said he had told the authorities that Chickfriend, the Dutch company at the center of the scandal, was illegally using fipronil in the treatment of lice in chicken pens in The Netherlands.

“I am the anonymous whistleblower,” Nick Hermens told the NPO public broadcaster. A Belgian company, Poultry Vision, has said it provided Chickfriend with the chemical. Dutch and Belgian investigators carried out coordinated raids on several premises on Thursday, arresting two people at Chickfriend.

However, Belgium itself has been forced to admit that it knew about fipronil in eggs back in June but kept it secret for nearly two months because of a criminal investigation. Fresh discoveries of contaminated eggs have continued daily. Denmark said on Friday it had found two tons of fipronil-tainted scrambled eggs, bringing the total of contaminated eggs to 22 tons, mainly from Belgium. Poland said it had discovered about 40,000 eggs imported from Germany.

French Agriculture Minister Stephane Travert said that since April the country had sold nearly 250,000 contaminated eggs, imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, but the risk for consumers was “very low” given French eating habits. The food scare is one of the biggest to hit Europe since the 2013 horsemeat scandal when equine meat was falsely labelled and mis-sold.

Previous food scandals include contamination of chickens and eggs by dioxin in 1999, which began in Belgium, and mad-cow disease — cattle feed contaminated by the ground-up carcasses of animals infected with a deadly brain disorder — which ran from roughly 1986-1998 and started in Britain.

(Source: AFP)

Britain and France say some contaminated eggs may have reached their supermarket shelves as the European egg contamination scandal broadens. Britain’s Food Standards Agency said on Monday it was “urgently investigating the distribution of these eggs in the UK,” adding that “the number of eggs involved is very small and the risk to public health is very low.”

It did not give the number of imported contaminated eggs in the country, but said it represented 0.0001 percent of eggs annually entering Britain. The contaminated eggs came from chickens which were fed Fipronil to treat red lice, a parasite in chickens.

“We are working closely with the businesses that have received eggs from affected farms. Investigations to date indicate that any affected products are no longer on the shelves,” the agency said. Meanwhile, the French government said more than a dozen batches of Dutch eggs contaminated with Fipronil have been found at two food-processing factories in central-western France.

The French Agriculture Ministry said they were unable to immediately say whether any of the products had been shipped to customers. The European Commission said on Monday the eggs under suspicion of contamination had also been distributed to France and Britain via Germany.

“It’s now up to the Swedish, Swiss, French and to the UK to check because all these eggs are traceable and trackable,” Commission spokeswoman Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters.

Supermarkets in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium have pulled millions of eggs from the shelves since Belgium gave the European Commission the first notification on July 20, while retailers in Sweden and Switzerland have followed suit.

Meanwhile Dutch farming organization LTO said several million hens may need to be culled at 150 companies in the country, with 300,000 having already been killed. An LTO spokesman said they “had to be eliminated because of contamination.”

Source: Presstv

As the world’s AIDS experts meet at a conference this week in Paris, health workers in Cameroon still struggle to identify and treat HIV-positive mothers and babies. Myriam Anang lost her husband and three-month-old baby two years ago to HIV. Now, Anang works as a peer educator in a government-initiated program to help others become better informed.

She was among the speakers in northern Cameroon at a gathering addressing AIDS and HIV. Anang said that when she tries to persuade sick villagers to go with their babies for HIV screening, they argue that they are not ill, but bewitched by their relatives. She said she knows three men who died of HIV, yet their wives have refused to take their babies to the hospital, claiming the families are suffering from a spell.

Anang did not have prenatal care. She delivered her baby at a traditional birth attendant’s home. It was only afterward, when she became sick, that she went to a hospital and found out she had HIV. In 2016, the government found that seven out of 10 women in the northern part of the country were not visiting hospitals when they were pregnant. About a third of those who did go to a hospital never returned for postnatal visits, even if they had tested positive for HIV.

The job of the peer educators is to identify pregnant women in their villages and encourage them to get medical care, even reminding them of their hospital appointments. The government says that since the start of the program, seven out of 10 pregnant women identified by peer educators now visit a hospital.

The results of a mother’s HIV test take a day. However, newborns need a special screening, and the bloodwork can only be processed a thousand kilometers away in the capital Yaounde, says Georgette Wekang, head of HIV Control and People Living with AIDS in Cameroon’s Ministry of Health.

Wekang says it takes between six and seven months for the results to be brought back from Yaounde and that, at times, those results are delivered after the babies have died. In addition, she says, fear of stigma prevents some women from returning with their babies for follow-up appointments.

The U.N. Children’s Fund estimates that in northern Cameroon, 40 percent of HIV-positive children do not receive treatment. Health officials say it is important to begin treatment as soon as possible after diagnosis.
The government of Cameroon has begun trials with new testing machines to reduce the time parents must wait for a baby’s test results. While antiretroviral drugs are provided for free, patients are requested to pay for laboratory tests.

In northern Cameroon, parents are told they can take their children to the town of Garoua for treatment. However, Mireille Yaki, the medical officer in charge of the hospital, says the facility regularly runs short of the antiretroviral drugs, and many parents stop bringing their children for treatment.

Source: VOANews.com

The so-called Circle of Friends of Cameroon, CERAC has officially handed over a renovated Deido District Hospital to the Biya government. The ceremony was presided over by the General Coordinator of CERAC, Linda Yang, personal representative of the First Lady, Chantal Biya on Wednesday the 19th of July 2017.

The wife of the Prime Minister, Linda Yang stated that the Deido District Hospital was renovated and re-equipped to improve on health care services. The General Coordinator of CERAC added that Chantal Biya and the association are committed to reduce infant and maternal mortality to the barest minimum. It is an open secret that the ladies are using money looted from state owned companies and from the treasury.

According to Dr Pierre Mintom, Director of the Deido District Hospital, the assistance come at a time when the hospital faces many difficulties. The now refurbished health facility received 29,116 patients in 2016. It has only 12 specialized medical practitioners,16 generalists and 104 nurses .

The Regional Delegate, Fritz Ntone Ntone expressed gratitude to CERAC for the assistance which he considered was a new beginning for the hospital . The Minister of Justice, Laurent Esso, Secondary Education boss, Jean-Ernest Ngalle Bibehe and the Governor of the Littoral, Dieudonnè Ivaha Diboua added their voices to that of the population to express gratitude to CERAC.

Source: CRTV

After giving birth at the age of 13, whenever Amina Mba wanted to attend prayers in her local mosque, sheer terror would stop her from crossing the threshold. “I would go and hide behind the mosque in order to pray,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as she lay under a flowery cover in a ward of the Catholic Hospital Complex of Batouri in eastern Cameroon.

The reason, she explained, was that no one could tolerate the terrible smell and leakages of urine and faeces caused by obstetric fistula, an agonising childbirth injury which Amina, now aged 20, developed when she had her baby in her early teens.

A refugee from Central African Republic who fled marauding gangs and highway henchmen as a 10-year-old with her nomad parents, Amina was married off by her family aged just 13. “It was a forced marriage. They wanted me to marry quickly, though I didn’t want to,” she said quietly.

After her fistula developed, her husband told her to go and live with her aunt, as her parents were on the move. “He did not visit me even once,” she said. After a few months, her aunt also kicked Amina out of her home, leaving her to fend for herself in the refugee camp.

Obstetric fistula is a hole that develops between the birth canal and bladder or rectum, caused by prolonged, obstructed labour, leaving women leaking urine, faeces or both. Girls who fall pregnant at a young age are particularly susceptible, as their bodies may not be mature enough to cope with the physical strain of bearing a child.

The social consequences are often severe. Girls and women are unable to work, becoming isolated and abandoned by their husbands, relatives and children, publicly shamed and even driven from their homes. Instead of getting support and medical help – which is often too far away, too expensive or simply unavailable – many are dubbed witches and shunned.

Some commit suicide. Others do it slowly, starving themselves to death in a desperate bid to stop the leaking. In Cameroon, every year around 2,000 women develop fistula, an average rate of more than 5 new cases each day, said Jean Pierre Tsafack, a health expert with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

But a new programme launched this week in eastern Cameroon, funded by the UNFPA and Fondation Orange, the philanthropic arm of the telecoms firm Orange, is offering free surgery to heal fistula victims and help them rebuild their lives.

The programme in Batouri is the second such initiative in the country’s East Region, and aims to provide operations for 120 women over two years. In addition, more than 600 women have been successfully treated at the fistula repair centre in Ngaoundéré, the capital of Cameroon’s Adamawa region, set up in 2013 with UNFPA support.

“After the operation, the women are completely transformed,” said Joseph Réné Boum, head of the UNFPA office in Bertoua in east Cameroon. “They become beautiful, smiling – they start their lives again.” Yet the fistula surgery is only the first step to recovery. The UNFPA also runs reintegration programmes for survivors, said Angelique Dikoume, a gender specialist with the agency.

First a series of conversations is held with the woman’s family and heath workers who explain exactly what fistula is, how it happened – and how it may be prevented from reoccurring. “We can advise families on contraceptive methods, and we also explain to the husband that after the operation, the woman shouldn’t have sex for six months, in order to allow the healing to take place,” said Dikoume.

On Tuesday, policymakers, donors and advocates will gather in London for a family planning summit that will discuss ways to reach an international goal to provide 120 million more women and girls with access to modern contraception by 2020.

The second part of the Cameroon programme is economic support for women and girls to identify business opportunities and provide vocational training. “Re-integration is very difficult as it often means starting again from zero,” said community health worker Marie Sebo. “Many women start by doing some farming, to keep malnutrition at bay.”

Fifty-year-old widow Sophie Makoro suffered with fistula for a decade – which not only isolated her socially, but also cut off her only source of income selling vegetables at the market. “People refused to buy anything off me. They were scared of me because of the smell,” she said.

To make ends meet, she would sell her crops to neighbours. “That was the only way people would buy my goods,” she said. Now, after surgery, she plans to expand her farm. But she is also anxious about the challenges ahead as she gets older. “I don’t have anyone to support me – no husband, no children. I rely only on myself,” she said.

In September, the world’s largest civilian floating hospital, run by international faith-based group Mercy Ships, is due to arrive in the port city of Douala to carry out thousands of critical treatments, including 500 fistula operations.

But UNFPA Cameroon head Barbara Sow is also seeking longer-term solutions, such as establishing a foundation for the treatment of obstetric fistula nationwide. “It’s so easy to do – to change the life of a woman.”

After Amina was abandoned by her husband and her aunt, Aya, a woman in her 60s and a fellow refugee from Central African Republic, met the teenager wandering alone in a camp and took her in to live with her and her daughter.

“Why? Because I’m a mother,” she shrugged, holding Amina’s hand. Until now, Amina has been home-bound, cooking, while Aya’s daughter sells water in plastic bottles collected by her mother. “That’s how we get by,” Aya explained, clutching a bag of empty bottles she had just gathered at the hospital.

Now that she is recovering, Amina hopes to start her own business. “I want to sell clothes,” she said. Asked if she would go back to her husband, Amina laughed, shaking her finger. “No way,” she exclaimed. “Never! Never!” “I will make new friends and start again,” she said.

Source: DNA

The Cameroon Medical Doctors Trade Union (Symec) has again announced a general strike action in all public hospitals from June 12, 2017. Symec says the strike is part of the third phase of their action, despite the numerous stonewalls erected by the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo government.

Cameroon doctors have made public four major demands which include the establishment of basic health insurance with universal coverage; Wage increases for physicians in the public sector, suspension of non-salary physician assignments, and an increase in the retirement age of physicians between the ages of 55 and 65.

The Francophone Minister of Public Health, tried to break the actions of the doctors by assigning in the remote areas, the leaders of the union, whose calls to strike are very closely monitored by the vicious regime in Yaoundé.

By Sonne Peter

Cameroon Concord News