Many African countries have been widely praised for their effective response to curbing the spread of the deadly coronavirus. Countries in the continent had from the onset of the pandemic implemented social distancing measures to control the spread of the virus and had from around August been reporting a decline in daily cases and deaths.
There have been growing concerns the very low-temperature requirements for the promising Covid-19 vaccine candidates developed by Pfizer and Moderna will lead to storage and logistics challenges that may hinder access to these vaccines in most parts of Africa and other developing regions, even in rural parts of developed countries.
In prehistoric times around 88 million years ago, Madagascar, the island country in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, split off from the Indian subcontinent. Now, a new study shows the island is breaking up again, this time into smaller islands.
Over the last decade there has been growing concern that so much of the way health systems are structured across Africa is set up to handle communicable diseases like malaria. But as the sub Saharan Africa region in particular has seen a growing middle class it has also seen a rise in noncommunicable diseases including heart disease, blood pressure, renal failure, and especially diabetes, which has been growing at an alarming rate.
This week there was much excitement around the world when Pfizer announced that an interim analysis showed its vaccine candidate is 90% effective in protecting people from Covid-19.
The two and a half week-long #EndSARS protests in Nigeria against police brutality has garnered attention and raised awareness far beyond the country’s borders thanks to a savvy, well-planned out campaign boosted by Nigerian and global celebrities. But none of this would have been possible without the sheer reach and immediacy of major social media platforms.
The race for a Covid-19 vaccine has so far been a show of vaccine nationalism as countries are securing prospective vaccines for their populations and prioritizing access for their domestic markets.
While countries across the world are battling with the coronavirus pandemic, some African countries, are also battling the outbreaks of deadlier hemorrhagic fever viruses: Lassa virus and Ebola virus.
The East African Rift system made up the western and eastern continental rifts, and stretches from the Afar region of Ethiopia down to Mozambique. It is an active continental rift that began millions of years ago, splitting at 7mm annually. The regular eruption of volcanoes along the rift and new insights into the break up of continents adds to the belief that the continent may be splitting to form a new ocean.
During the period of the transatlantic slave trade, more than 12.5 million enslaved persons were shipped from Africa to the Americas with about 3.5 million of them from Nigeria.
Researchers have been warning for months that production constraints and hoarding could limit Covid-19 vaccine supplies. For most of Africa, this may mean not having access to the vaccines for up to a year after approval.
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Africa has seen lower numbers of cases and death compared with other continents, on a “per million” basis.
Amazon has expanded its presence in Johannesburg and Cape Town by adding 3,000 new virtual customer service jobs to bring its total permanent workforce in South Africa to 7,000 people.
Last month, the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) published a consumer spending report which is meant to be published every three to five years. But the previous one was published 10 years ago.
Correction: An earlier version of this story had specific figures for early R&D plans but those figures were not specific to R&D and have been removed.
Scientists in Kenya have discovered a novel method with significant potential to completely stop mosquitos from transmitting the parasites which cause malaria in humans.
A day before Microsoft’s Azure Africa cloud services went live in 2019 with services offered from data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa, Huawei Cloud Data Centers started operations in Cape Town making it the first active cloud provider in the whole of Africa. Last month, roughly a year later, Amazon Web Service (AWS) rolled out its first Africa data centers also in Cape Town.
Pools of genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from all over the world are currently being scrutinized by scientists for insight into the Covid-19 disease. If a vaccine is eventually discovered—based on the sequences pooled so far—Africa may end up with the ‘Rotaviruses Vaccine Problem’.
Since scientists learned the coronavirus (Covid-19) might have origins with bats and potentially spread to humans through pangolins in a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, Chinese authorities have closed down or put under quarantine about 20,000 wildlife farms to curb wildlife trade. Vietnam is considering a similar ban.
This Thursday (Mar. 19) during the White House press briefing on coronavirus Covid-19 in the United States, US president Donald Trump surprised some observers in the medical sciences world when he revealed the US Food and Drugs Administration had approved the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of the coronavirus in patients.
The detection of Covid-19 coronavirus in Nigeria raised early concerns about the country’s capacity to handle a major epidemic but so far local public health officials have been commended for handling the outbreak with aplomb.
Firestone Liberia, the world’s largest rubber plantation owned by global tire giant Bridgestone, is alleged to have allowed the continuing release of waste into a river in Liberia, 15 years after it was first alleged of the same pollution problem.
Before now news stories about pangolins, endangered ant-eating scaly mammals found in West and Central Africa and Asia, have focused on how China’s insatiable thirst for their meat and scales has led to a rapid decline in its global population.
The successful development of a drug for the treatment of a sickle cell anaemia using a traditional herbal remedy by Nigerian scientists was widely regarded as a very significant breakthrough in medicine in 1998. Before Niprisan there was only one approved sickle cell drug (Hydroxyurea) but it was bogged down with multiple concerns about its toxic and carcinogenic side effects on patients.
