Health

Lagos, Nigeria | AFP | Two people in Lagos have died and a hundred medical workers have been placed under observation after a flare-up of Lassa fever, a cousin of the deadly Ebola virus, officials said Wednesday. Lagos University Teaching Hospital said the two died this week after being admitted for …

Barbara Kemigisa uses he own story to get youth to test and treat Kampala, Uganda | FLAVIA NASSAKA | Barbara Kemigisa was sexually molested when she was just six years old. At 17 years, she discovered she was HIV positive. She is now 31 years old and has two children; …

Khartoum, Sudan | AFP | Resting on a hospital bed after a session of chemotherapy, Sudanese banker Mohamed Hasan vividly recalls the day when doctors told him he had blood cancer. It is a shock in any country but in Sudan, where access to drugs and treatment is impaired by 20-year-old …

The Hague, Netherlands | AFP | Dutch authorities on Tuesday said they had started testing chicken meat stemming from poultry farms affected by a tainted egg scandal to determine whether it, too, was contaminated. Scientists are looking for the presence of fipronil, a substance potentially dangerous to humans, after supermarkets in …

  Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Uganda’s Ministry of Health has confirmed there is an active outbreak of Measles in Kampala and Wakiso Districts. All the five divisions of Kampala, as well as several suburbs in Wakiso District are affected. According to a statement released Tuesday, the Ministry of Health surveillance …

Brussels, Belgium | AFP | Britain and France said Monday that some insecticide-tainted eggs may have entered the country, as millions of chickens faced being culled in the Netherlands in a growing European contamination scandal. Belgium meanwhile vowed full transparency about why it kept the scandal secret despite originally learning in …

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia | AFP | Saudi Arabia has pledged $33.7 million to help the World Health Organization eradicate cholera in war-wracked Yemen, where the disease has killed nearly 2,000 people, the WHO said on Sunday. Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the organisation, confirmed that Saudi Arabia, which leads an …

Manila, Philippines | AFP | Some 2,000 mothers in the Philippines breastfed their babies in public on Saturday in a gathering aimed at cutting infant deaths and dispelling taboos over the practice. To the upbeat sounds of local pop songs, hundreds of mothers suckled their babies inside a cavernous Manila stadium, …

The Hague, Netherlands | AFP | Supermarkets in the Netherlands and Germany were Thursday removing millions of eggs from their shelves believed to have been contaminated by a toxic insecticide in a widening food scandal. Amid fears the Dutch poultry industry could be facing huge financial losses, German officials said late …

Successful trials held in South Africa, Uganda, Rwanda |JULIA BELLUZ| Developing a vaccine to stop HIV is thought to be among the most daunting challenges in medicine for one big reason: The virus is extraordinarily genetically diverse, even more so than the flu. So it’s difficult to think about how …