Category: Medical

The Phase 2 trials of Turkey’s virus-like particle (VLP) coronavirus vaccine candidate have been successfully completed, the country’s industry and technology minister announced on Friday.

Mustafa Varank, who was a volunteer in the trials, said the tests were completed with no side effects, according to a statement by the ministry.

He said the jab is among only five VLP vaccine candidates in the world that have reached the stage of clinical trials.

It was included in the World Health Organization’s list of COVID-19 vaccine candidates on March 30, he added.

The Phase 1 trials of the vaccine, developed by Turkish scientists Professor Mayda Gursel and Professor Ihsan Gursel, started in March with 30 volunteers, while Phase 2 involved 349 volunteers, the minister said.

Varank said more volunteers are needed for the Phase 3 trials.

“We aim to reach the required number of volunteers for the Phase 3 studies, which will start in September, and to obtain emergency use authorization,” he said.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s vaccination drive has been making strong progress, with Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announcing on Friday that more than 70% of all people aged 18 and above have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Two mountaineers of Ukrainian origin were rescued and taken to a hospital in Rize province of Turkey’s northern Black Sea region.

Maryna Shavkutina (35) and Mykola Shynkevych (45), along with six others, were hiking around the glacier area of Kackar Mountains, but later fell off a cliff and were injured.

Due to the challenging landscape and thick fog, helicopters were not able to rescue the injured mountaineers, and land units were dispatched to the scene by Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, National Medical Rescue Team, and gendarmerie forces.

The mountaineers were carried to the ambulance by portable stretchers, and then brought to a hospital.

Source: Anadolu Agency

The World Health Organization is urging African countries to ramp up preparations for COVID-19 vaccination rollouts in anticipation of the imminent arrival of millions of vaccine doses on the continent. WHO reports more than 6.2 million people have been infected with COVID-19 and more than 159,000 have died.

New cases of COVID-19 in Africa have fallen slightly following eight weeks of a fast-moving surge. The decline is attributed to a sharp drop in cases in South Africa. However, the World Health Organization reports the situation could change quickly as violent protests and mass gatherings in the country could trigger another rise in cases.

WHO regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti says Africa’s third wave is not over. She notes 21 countries, three more than last week, are experiencing a resurgence. She says the highly contagious delta variant has now been detected in 26 countries and 13 of them need more oxygen due to a surge in cases.

She says Africa continues to lag in COVID-19 vaccines, with just 20 million Africans or 1.5 percent of the continent’s population fully vaccinated. But she says Africa’s supply crunch is starting to ease.

She says the first delivery of doses donated by the United States through the COVAX Facility is arriving in Africa this week and altogether nearly 60 million doses from other sources are expected in the coming weeks.

“African countries must go all out and speed up their vaccine rollouts by five to six times if they are to get all these doses into arms and fully vaccinate the most vulnerable 10 percent of their people by the end of September,” Moeti said. “Around 3.5 to four million doses are administered each week on the continent, but this needs to rise to 21 million doses each week at the very least to meet this goal.”

Moeti says more than half a billion doses are expected through COVAX alone this year. This massive influx, she says, means countries must up their game.

“We need to address the issue of vaccine hesitancy,” Moeti said. “So, this communication—targeting people, targeting the messages that we are tracking and the misinformation or the fears and misconceptions is absolutely vital now because the time to mobilize people to be ready to be vaccinated is not when the vaccines are landing. It is now in this narrow period of a window that we have to do all of this.”

Regional director Moeti says countries must scale up their operations. She says countries need sufficient vaccine sites, storage facilities, adequate transport, plans for distribution and, of course, health care workers to carry out this life-saving activity.

Source: Voice of America

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Monday extended condolences over the loss of lives in a road accident in Pakistan.

“Learned with deep sorrow that many Pakistani brothers and sisters passed away in a bus accident in Punjab (northeastern province of Pakistan),” Cavusoglu wrote on Twitter.?

“I wish Allah’s mercy to those who lost their lives, a speedy recovery to the injured and condolences to the brotherly people of Pakistan,” he said.?

Early Monday, a bus collided with a container truck, killing at least 27 people and injuring 40, according to Pakistani officials.

Source: Anadolu Agency

Cameroonian officials say anglophone rebels are taking a new tack in their fight to break away from the country’s French-speaking-majority. Officials say the separatists have started disguising themselves as military troops to infiltrate villages and launch attacks.

In a video widely circulated on social media platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp, a group of 10 men armed with AK-94 assault rifles claim they are separatist fighters. The men, in civilian clothing, appear to brandish Cameroonian military uniforms, guns, ammunition and bulletproof vests they say they seized from Cameroon military. The men display a man’s head claiming it is that of a government soldier they killed and beheaded.

Cameroon’s military says the head displayed by the fighters as a trophy is that of one of its troops deployed to Babadjou, a French-speaking commercial town on the border with the English-speaking North-West region.

Awah Fonka, governor of Cameroon’s West region, where Babadjou is located, said more than 20 English-speaking separatists from Pinyin, a town in the North-West region, infiltrated the French-speaking West region Wednesday. He said the fighters attacked government troops and looted Babadjou shops.

Fonka said two government troops were killed by fighters disguised in Cameroonian military uniforms to fool the government troops.

Fonka visited Babadjou on Wednesday. He encouraged civilians who fled into the bush to return home.

Fonka said more government troops have been deployed to Babadjou and neighboring villages to find fighters hiding in the bush or among civilians.

The Cameroonian military warned both separatists and civilians against wearing military uniforms in a statement.

Separatists claim on social media they are in possession of several hundred Cameroonian military uniforms removed from the bodies of government troops they have killed. The fighters said some of the uniforms were seized from military camps they have attacked in the English-speaking western regions.

The military acknowledges that the fighters seized uniforms and military weapons from government troops but says the number of weapons and uniforms seized is low.

Peter Ngumulah, a 38-year-old college teacher, has been living in Babadjou for two years and says he fled fighting between government troops and separatists in the town of Bambili in the North-West region. Ngumulah says the government should increase the number of its troops in Babadjou.

“For heaven’s sake, how can just two soldiers be at the border [post between the West and North-West regions], knowing the sophisticated weapons the separatist fighters now possess?” he said. “Everything is going out of hand, and I pray the international community will step in and force both parties to sit at a roundtable for an unconditional dialogue.”

Fonka said five troops were at the military control post at Babadjou when the fighters attacked. Three troops escaped, with one suffering injuries from the shooting. The military said he is responding to treatment in a hospital.

This is not the first time English-speaking separatists have infiltrated the French-speaking region. The fighters attacked the French-speaking village of Galim three times this year and killed at least seven government troops. The military said the rebels stole weapons and deployed additional forces to kill or arrest the fighters.

Cameroon’s separatists have been fighting since 2017 to create an independent English-speaking state in the majority French-speaking country’s western regions.

The conflict has cost more than 3,000 lives and forced 550,000 people to flee to French-speaking regions of Cameroon or into neighboring Nigeria, according to the United Nations.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization has expressed concern about Uganda’s approval of a locally made herbal treatment for COVID-19 amid a third wave of cases.

The WHO has not approved the substance for COVID-19 treatment, but Ugandan pharmacists say they have little choice because drugs authorized for emergency use in developed countries are not available.

Uganda’s drug authority said Tuesday that it had approved the herbal medicine, Covidex.

Dr. David Nahamya, executive director of Uganda’s drug authority, said the approval followed a two-week scientific evaluation of the medicine’s safety and efficacy.

“Covidex has been notified to be sold in licensed drug outlets for supportive treatment in management of viral infections but not as a cure of COVID-19,” Nahamya said.

The WHO consulted researchers from nine African countries, including Uganda, in March about the use of traditional medicine to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Dr. Solome Okware of the WHO’s Uganda office said Covidex wasn’t among the traditional medicines that were evaluated.

“WHO has not received any information about this product,” Okware said.

Bases for approval

Nahamya reassured Ugandans that the manufacturer, Jena Herbals Uganda, had increased production and that the herb would be available for all who needed it, under medical supervision.

He added that the approval was based on initial assessments, published literature and safety studies conducted by the innovator.

“The product has been formulated from herbal plants that have been traditionally used to alleviate symptoms of several diseases,” Nahamya said. “To further the efficacy of the drug for other uses, NDA [Uganda’s National Drug Authority] has advised the manufacturer to conduct random controlled clinical trials, which are the highest level of evidence to ascertain any claims of treatment.”

Okware said that in collaboration with the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the WHO developed master and generic protocols to provide guidance to members for developing clinical trials to assess claims of effective treatment for COVID-19.

“Many plants and substances are being proposed without the minimum requirements and evidence of quality, safety and efficacy,” Okware said. “The use of products to treat COVID-19 which have not yet been robustly investigated can be harmful if the due process is not followed.”

‘Local solutions’

Dr. Samuel Opio, secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society of Uganda, said that while there were concerns about misuse of Covidex by the public, its approval was a positive step.

“Whatever is currently being approved [for] emergency use in the U.S. are not available in Uganda,” Opio said. “So the issue of lack of a treatment, the issue of inaccessibility to even what is approved for emergency use, means that we need to also look for local solutions to the global challenges, and herbal treatment is one area.”

Uganda recently received 175,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine but is inoculating only frontline workers. With just 856,025 people vaccinated in the country, many members of the public have resorted to using Covidex to treat COVID-19 symptoms.

Source: Voice of America

The World Bank announced a partnership with the African Union Tuesday to finance the acquisition and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine for 400 million people in Africa.

In a remote news conference via Zoom, World Bank Managing Operations Director Axel van Trotsenburg said the World Bank is providing $12 billion to not only acquire but deploy 400 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — a single dose shot — in support of the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) initiative.

The announcement comes a day after African finance ministers and the World Bank Group met to fast-track vaccine acquisition on the continent and avoid a third wave of COVID-19.

Van Trotsenburg said the bank is making the financing available in an effort to address the imbalance in vaccine access between the world’s wealthy and not-so-wealthy nations.

He said, “Less than one percent of the African population has been vaccinated. Africa has been marginalized in this global effort to get a vaccine. We have to correct this unfairness; and given that this is a global pandemic, we need global solutions and global solidarity.”

The project will be a big step toward helping the African Union meet its goal to vaccinate 60% of the continent’s population by 2022.

Van Trotsenburg said the regional effort complements the work of the World Health Organization-managed COVAX vaccine cooperative and comes at a time of rising COVID-19 cases in the region.

The World Bank has already approved operations to support vaccine roll outs in 36 countries. By the end of June, the World Bank expects to be supporting vaccination efforts in 50 countries, two thirds of which are in Africa.

Source: Voice of America