Category Archives: Africa

Shell to go ahead with seismic tests in whale breeding grounds after court win

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Judgment rules company can blast sound waves in search for oil along South Africa’s eastern coastline

Royal Dutch Shell will move ahead with seismic tests to explore for oil in vital whale breeding grounds along South Africa’s eastern coastline after a court dismissed an 11th-hour legal challenge by environmental groups.

The judgment, by a South African high court, allows Shell to begin firing within days extremely loud sound waves through the relatively untouched marine environment of the Wild Coast, which is home to whales, dolphins and seals.

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‘She didn’t deserve to die’: Kenya fights tuberculosis in Covid’s shadow

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For the first time in a decade deaths from TB are rising, with the curable disease killing 20,000 Kenyans last year. Now testing ‘ATMs’ and other innovations are helping to find ‘missing cases’

One day in May last year, Violet Chemesunte, a community health volunteer in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, got a call from a colleague worried about a woman she had visited who kept coughing.

She asked if Chemesunte could go round and convince the 37-year-old woman, a single mother to three young children, to seek medical help. She suspected tuberculosis (TB), and feared it might already be too late.

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How probable is it Omicron Covid variant will take hold in UK?

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Analysis: UK’s early vaccine deployment and use of different vaccines from South Africa mean it’s too soon to say

Omicron is causing consternation around the world, with the variant found to be behind an exponential rise in Covid cases in South Africa. Yet with just 42 cases confirmed in the UK so far, and most European countries seeing numbers in the double rather than triple figures, could this be a tentative sign the variant may fail to take hold outside southern Africa? The bottom line is, it is too soon to say.

One issue is that there are important differences that make it difficult to compare the situations in South Africa and beyond.

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The most unsafe passage to Europe has claimed 18,000 victims. Who speaks for them? | Lorenzo Tondo

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As Europe outsources its border policing to Libya, rescue operations by NGOs are hampered by criminal inquiries in Italy

In the early hours of 21 June, somewhere in the vast expanse of the central Mediterranean, a Médecins Sans Frontières team on board a rescue vessel received a distress call. The motor of a small boat carrying asylum seekers from Libya had broken down, and the vessel was taking in water.

These are the first dramatic scenes in Unsafe Passage – a Guardian Documentaries film by Ed Ou for the Outlaw Ocean Project, released today – but they are also the first moments in a race against time that repeats itself again and again in the stretch of sea separating Europe from Africa.

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Omicron seems to carry higher Covid reinfection risk, says South Africa

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Scientists warn of higher rate of repeat infections but say vaccines appear to protect against serious illness

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 appears to be reinfecting people at three times the rate of previous strains, experts in South Africa have said, as public health officials and scientists from around the world closely monitor developments in the country where it was first identified.

As the EU’s public health agency warned that Omicron could cause more than half of all new Covid infections in Europe within the next few months, evidence was emerging, however, that vaccines still appear to offer protection against serious illness.

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Covid live: Germany to impose ‘lockdown’ on unvaccinated and could make jabs obligatory from February

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Germany is seeking to break a surge in coronavirus infections; India detects two cases of new Omicron variant in Karnataka; Greece and Finland detect first Omicron cases

Some Covid numbers from Germany are now in.

The European nation reported another 73,209 new Covid cases for Wednesday and 388 deaths, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute.

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Omicron variant found around world as more nations tighten travel rules

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US among more than 50 nations bringing in stricter border controls as variant is identified in 24 countries

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 has been identified in new countries around the globe, including the US, west Africa, the Gulf and Asia, as American authorities indicated they would further tighten border controls over concerns that the new strain may be more transmissible.

Underscoring the fast spread of the variant, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa – where Omicron was first detected – said it had now been found in five out of nine provinces, and accounted for 74% of the virus genomes sequenced in November.

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Activists call for revolution in ‘dated and colonial’ aid funding

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Aspen Institute’s New Voices want donors to exercise humility and trust those receiving grants to know what their communities need

Aid donors are being urged to revolutionise the way money is spent to move away from colonial ideas and create meaningful change.

Ahead of a two-day conference this week, activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America have called on public and private global health donors – including governments, the United Nations, private philanthropists and international organisations – to prioritise funding for programmes driven by the needs of the community involved, rather than dictated by preconceived objectives.

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Even after 40 years the response to Aids in many countries is still held back by stigma | Hakima Himmich and Mike Podmore

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It is hard to protect yourself from HIV when having sterile syringes or condoms can lead to arrest: discrimination is restricting progress in eliminating HIV

Forty years after the first cases of Aids were discovered, goals for its global elimination have yet to be achieved. In 2020, nearly 700,000 people died of Aids-related illnesses and 1.5 million people were newly infected with HIV.

This is despite scientific and medical advances in the testing, treatment and care of people living with HIV.

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The rising cost of the climate crisis in flooded South Sudan – in pictures

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Families facing severe hunger are wading through crocodile-infested waters in search of water lilies to eat. Susan Martinez and photographer Peter Caton return with Action Against Hunger to find that the dire situation they reported on in March has only worsened

Desperate families in flood-ravaged villages in South Sudan are spending hours searching for water lilies to eat after another summer of intense rainfall worsened an already dire situation.

People have no food and no land to cultivate after three years of floods. Fields are submerged in last year’s flood water and higher ground is overcrowded with hungry people, in what is quickly becoming a humanitarian crisis.

Nyanyang Tong, 39, on her way to the Action Against Hunger centre with her one-year-old son, Mamuch Gatkuoth, in Paguir

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Botswana upholds ruling decriminalising same-sex relationships

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Court of appeal decision hailed as victory for LGBTQ+ community that could encourage other African countries to follow suit

Gay rights campaigners expressed joy at the Botswana court of appeal’s decision to uphold a ruling that decriminalised same-sex relationships, saying the country’s judiciary had set an example for other African countries.

The government had appealed a 2019 ruling that criminalising homosexuality was unconstitutional. The ruling had been hailed as a major victory for gay rights campaigners on the continent, following an unsuccessful attempt in Kenya to repeal colonial-era laws criminalising gay sex.

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Omicron variant: G7 to hold emergency Covid meeting as Japan closes its borders

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South African president and WHO’s Africa chief urge against travel bans, saying they ‘attack global solidarity’

G7 health ministers will hold an emergency meeting on Monday about the new Omicron Covid-19 variant spreading across the world and forcing border closures, as experts race to determine the level of threat posed by the new strain.

The meeting was called by G7 chair Britain, which is among a steadily growing number of countries that have detected cases of the heavily mutated new variant.

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Can the Gambia turn the tide to save its shrinking beaches?

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In a developing country reliant on its tourist industry, the rapidly eroding ‘smiling coast’ shows the urgent need for action on climate change

When Saikou Demba was a young man starting out in the hospitality business, he opened a little hotel on the Gambian coast called the Leybato and ran a beach bar on the wide expanse of golden sand. The hotel is still there, a relaxed spot where guests can lie in hammocks beneath swaying palm trees and stroll along shell-studded pathways. But the beach bar is not. At high tide, Demba reckons it would be about five or six metres into the sea.

“The first year the tide came in high but it was OK,” he says. “The second year, the tide came in high but it was OK. The third year, I came down one day and it [the bar] wasn’t there: half of it went into the sea.”

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Scientists sharing Omicron data were heroic. Let’s ensure they don’t regret it | Jeffrey Barrett

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The teams in Africa who detected the new Covid genome moved quickly. Their actions should not result in economic loss
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One of the positive experiences during two years of pandemic gloom has been the speed of scientific progress in understanding and treating Covid. Many effective vaccines were launched in less than a year and rapid large-scale trials found a cheap and effective drug, dexamethasone, that saved thousands of lives.

The global scientific community has also carried out “genomic surveillance” – sequencing the genome of the virus to track how it evolves and spreads at an unprecedented level: the public genome database has more than 5.5m genomes. The great value of that genomic surveillance, underpinned by a commitment to rapid and open sharing of the data by all countries in near-real time, has been seen in the last few days as we’ve learned of the Covid variant called Omicron.

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Boris Johnson tightens rules on travel and mask-wearing over Omicron concerns

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Travellers to UK must take PCR tests and masks to be made mandatory in shops and on public transport

Boris Johnson has announced fresh measures to curb the spread of coronavirus including mandatory masks in shops and PCR tests for travellers entering England after two cases of the Omicron variant were detected in the country.

Amid mounting global concern over Omicron, named a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization on Friday, the prime minister set out a series of steps the UK is taking to maximise its defence against Covid-19.

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Omicron’s full impact will be felt in countries where fewer are vaccinated

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Analysis: the new coronavirus variant seems highly transmissible, but the big question is whether it causes severe disease. Either way, poorer nations will be hit hardest

In early August Gideon Schreiber and a team of virologists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel began playing around with the spike protein of the Sars-CoV-2 virus – the protein that allows the virus to enter our cells – to see if they could predict future mutations that could yield dangerous new variants of Covid-19.

At the time, Schreiber noted with concern that there were a variety of ways in which the spike protein could evolve. If all of these mutations occurred at once, it could yield a variant that was both extremely transmissible and potentially capable of evading some of the body’s immune defences, blunting the efficacy of the vaccines.

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‘Taste this, it’s salty’: how rising seas are ruining the Gambia’s rice farmers

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The farmers, mostly women, once grew enough but must now buy imported rice as the climate crisis edges them into poverty

In the sweltering heat of the late-morning west African sun, Aminata Jamba slashes at golden rice stalks with a sickle. “The rice is lovely,” she says, music playing in the background as her son, Sampa, silently harvests the grain. But even if the quality is high, the quantity is not.

While once Jamba could have expected to harvest enough rice to last the whole year, this year she reckons it will last three to four months. After that, she will have to look elsewhere for a way to feed her family and make enough money to live.

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US to restrict travel from southern Africa over Omicron Covid variant fears

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Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said on Friday there was “no indication” the new “Omicron” coronavirus variant discovered in southern Africa had reached the US.

Nonetheless, the the Biden administration said it would restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries in southern Africa, starting on Monday.

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Omicron variant spreads to Europe as UK announces countermeasures

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Experts stress importance of delaying import of new Covid variant to UK to avoid Christmas mixing

As an alarming new Covid variant spread to Europe on Friday, scientists warned that it would inevitably reach Britain, while ministers faced calls to urgently speed up the vaccination programme.

Thousands of travellers were left stranded or with their plans in disarray after flight bans were introduced targeting countries across southern Africa, where the variant was discovered. Hotel quarantine and enhanced testing would be brought in across the UK, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, said.

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State-affiliated TV purports to show Ethiopian PM on the battlefront against Tigray rebels – video

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Footage purporting to show Abiy Ahmed on the battlefront of the country’s year-long war against Tigray forces has been broadcast, four days after he announced he would direct the army from there. Wearing military uniform, Abiy said: 'The enemy doesn't know our capabilities and our preparations … Instead of sitting in Addis, we made a change and decided to come to the front'

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