Epidemic

Guinea will launch an Ebola vaccination drive Tuesday after a flight delayed by a Saharan dust storm arrived carrying thousands of jabs, as the West African country fights to stamp out a resurgence of the deadly virus.

The National Action for Control of AIDS (NACA) has said that Nigeria and six other countries — Jamaica, Rwanda, Mozambique, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Botswana — are the nations in the world that have shown great resilience in withstanding the Covid-19 impact on HIV-AIDS epidemic.

Abia State Commissioner for Information, Chief Okiyi Kanu, has explained that the state’s emergence as the third most-preferred investment destination in Nigeria came as a result of the deliberate policies of the state government tailored towards economic recovery.

Nigerian authorities have put health workers on red alert following the resurgence of Ebola epidemic in Guinea.

A fourth Guinean Ebola patient died on Monday, the health agency said, as the government and aid groups began to roll out their response to the outbreak.

Barely 24 hours after Guinea declared Ebola outbreak in the country as an epidemic, Port Health Services of the Federal Ministry of Health in Nigeria has been directed to scale up screening at the port of entry.

The immunisation campaign against Ebola commenced on Monday in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the first case was reported a week ago, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) African branch said.

The new outbreak, in the town of Gouécké, has already killed three - two women and a man. They were among seven people who attended a nurse's funeral on February 1 and later came down with diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding. All seven cases have now been confirmed as Ebola virus.

Liberia has put health agencies on alert in the wake of an Ebola outbreak in neighbouring Guinea, President George Weah announced on Sunday.

The Lagos State Government has disclosed that the experience gained and lessons learnt, during the outbreak of Ebola and COVID-19 pandemic (first-wave) in the State, had prepared the present administration for the second wave of the disease, just as it also unveiled plans to deploy more technology to critical sectors to improve productivity and wellbeing of residents.

French President Emmanuel Macron has gambled by not imposing a third national lockdown to contain Covid-19 — against expectations and the advice of his most senior scientific advisers.

A task force on environmental sanitation in Oyo on Saturday arrested 40 persons in Ibadan for allegedly violating the environmental sanitation laws.

Poorer countries face a best-case scenario of a 6-8 month lag behind richer nations in getting access to COVID-19 vaccines to protect their populations against the pandemic disease, the philanthropist Bill Gates said on Wednesday.

New border controls went into force in France on Sunday as part of a massive effort to contain the spread of Covid-19 and avoid another nationwide lockdown.

The Director-General of the agency, Dr. Olufemi Oke-Osanyintolu who paid an unscheduled visit to the market over the weekend, discovered that the waste generated through the market abattoir cattle dings and sewage were being indiscriminately disposed into the waterways which could lead to serious environmental and health hazards.

Exactly one year after it thrust the word “lockdown” into the global conversation, Wuhan passed the anniversary on Saturday with a mix of pride at emerging from Covid-19’s grip and caution over a possible relapse.

The Ondo State government has begun the distribution of 10,000 doses of rat poison to destroy rats in Lassa fever prone communities, as the dreaded virus begins its upward trend in the state.

Foreigners caught not wearing face masks on the Indonesian resort island of Bali are being subject to an unusual punishment: push-ups.

The US says it has intelligence that researchers in a Wuhan lab became sick with COVID-19-like symptoms in autumn 2019 - before the first identified case of the outbreak.

The 82-year-old president of Guinea, Alpha Conde, has received his first dose of a vaccine against the coronavirus, part of a scheme mainly involving government members, a source close to his office said Saturday.

The four leading international health and humanitarian organizations on Tuesday announced the establishment of a global Ebola vaccine stockpile to facilitate quick response to the outbreak of the epidemic.

Pope Francis and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth on Saturday became the latest high-profile figures to join the global vaccination campaign against the coronavirus, as the UK reported it had surpassed more than 3 million cases since the pandemic began more than a year ago.