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