Africa: Jimmy Carter spearheads final drive to eradicate Guinea worm disease

Former US president Jimmy Carter says US$ 100 million is needed to finally eradicate Guinea worm disease. The UK has pledged a third of this amount if other donors are prepared to cough up the rest.

Dr. Donald Hopkins, vice president for Health Programs at The Carter Center, shows South Sudanese children how to prevent Guinea worm disease when they visit their local water source. Photo: Carter Center/ L. Gubb

Since the Carter Centre took up the cause in 1986, the disease has been reduced by more than 99 per cent.  The majority of the remaining cases (98%) are from South Sudan, while Mali and Ethiopia have each reported less than 10 cases so far in 2011 and there was an isolated outbreak in Chad.

In 1995 Carter personally negotiated a six-month ceasefire between northern and southern Sudan, in a successful attempt to reach remote villages where Guinea worm disease was endemic.

Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis or dracontiasis) can be prevented through heath education, the provision of cloth filters for drinking water and larvicides. The Carter Center’s goal is to stop transmission of the disease worldwide before 2015 and ensure World Health Organisation (WHO) certification within three years. This would make it the second human disease, after small pox, ever to be eradicated in human history.

Related web sites:

• Carter Center – Guinea worm
• World Health Organization – Dracunculiasis
• Wikipedia – Dracunculiasis

Related news: Health policy: global assembly approves three WASH resolutions, E-Source, 14 Jul 2011

Source: Sarah Boseley, Guardian, 05 Oct 2011 ; DFID, 05 Oct 2011

Sudan: UN helps southern clean up disease-causing waste in the South

Some 16,000 volunteers will take to the streets of Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, next month in a United Nations programme to tackle health hazards caused by public dumping of waste in a rapidly growing metropolitan area that has endured repeated fatal outbreaks of cholera, water-borne diseases and malaria.

The project is part of a £20 million United Kingdom-funded project to improve the sustainable use of natural resources in Africa’s largest country, to be carried out by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) over the next three years. UK Minister of State for International Development Gareth Thomas was visiting Juba to launch the segment that aims to establish long-term waste management capacity in Southern Sudan.

The clean-up, which will be replicated in the nine states of southern Sudan, will be coupled with a sustained awareness-raising campaign to encourage the citizens of Juba to adopt an environmentally friendly attitude towards the disposal of waste in the city.

UNEP’s country-wide programme seeks to help the people of Sudan, a country ravaged by several current and recent conflicts, to achieve sustainable peace, recovery and development by improving the management of natural resources.

The recently established UNEP office in Juba will also provide technical support to the Government to manage its forests and other valuable natural resources in a sustainable manner, and work to build the capacity of Government ministries to tackle environmental issues.

After a peace agreement in 2005 ended two decades of war between the Government in Khartoum, in the north, and southern Sudanese rebels, UNEP conducted a post-conflict environmental assessment, making 85 recommendations and outlining a detailed US$ 120-million action plan over three to five years.

Source: UN News Centre, 16 Oct 2009

Mozambique: Worst cholera outbreak in a long time

With resources stretched thin, aid agencies struggling to contain a cholera outbreak across all but one of Mozambique’s 10 provinces hope the approaching end of the rainy season will bring some relief.

“This year is worse than previous years, even worse than years in which we had floods. There are more cases and the fatality rate is slightly higher,” secretary-general of the Mozambican Red Cross, Fernanda Teixeira, told IRIN. Over 12,000 cases and 157 deaths have been recorded since 1 January 2009.

The latest Southern Africa Regional Cholera Update, compiled by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said the highest number of cases had been recorded in the northeastern provinces of Nampula (3,033) and Cabo Delgado (2,427).

[...] The surge in new cases was attributed to recent heavy rainfall in a number of provinces, but the underlying factors of cholera in Mozambique have always been related to pervasive water and sanitation problems, and a chronic lack of access to health facilities.

“There are many causes, like poor sanitation in cities and in the countryside,” Texeira said. Less than 50 percent of Mozambique’s 21 million people have access to safe drinking water.

The ministry of health has been leading the response to the outbreak, with the help of partners like WHO, the Red Cross and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). According to the OCHA update, health and water and sanitation were key areas in the ongoing intervention.

“Social mobilization campaigns via radio, and distribution of information, education and communication materials were being intensified in order to reduce misconceptions and mobilize community around key cholera prevention messages,” the update noted.

The need for adequate information was recently evidenced in a tragic case of ignorance when two Mozambican Red Cross volunteers were killed by the local community, who were convinced that the volunteers were deliberately spreading cholera. The incident in early March resulted in the charity organization halting its health work in the province of Nampula.

[...] The OCHA update said a US$ 875,000 donation by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) had recently been released to help the humanitarian community in Mozambique cover the immediate needs of the response.

In the meantime, Teixiera said, “We are doing what we can with the resources we have … the rainy season will come to an end in April; usually the situation then becomes better.”

Source: IRIN, 35 Mar 2009

Malawi: rains expose poor sanitation

Malawi is [...] battling a cholera outbreak which has killed 19 people [in Lilongwe] since the onset of the rainy season, an unusually high death toll. Up to 485 cases of the epidemic have since been registered and treated. World Health Organisation records from the 2007/2008 rainy season indicate not even a single cholera case was registered in the country’s capital, Lilongwe, last year, although up to 20 deaths and 1,022 cases were documented in nine of Malawi’s 27 districts.

[...] The country’s health experts have attributed the [cholera] problem to lack of safe water combined with poor sanitation and poor hygiene. [...] “We encounter cholera outbreaks almost every rainy season when people who have little or no access to safe water resort to using untreated water from swamps,” [Malawi's principal secretary for health Chris] Kang’ombe told IPS.

[...] A task force comprising the Ministry of Health, United Nations Children’s Fund – (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO) and United Kingdom’s Department For International Development (DFID) is currently working to promote civic education on hygiene and chlorination of water sources in the country to control further cholera outbreaks.

Source: Pilirani Semu-Banda, IPS, 23 Jan 2009

DR Congo: UK gives UNICEF 37 million USD to boost the attainment of MDG on water and sanitation

UNICEF Representative to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Pierrette Vu Thi together with British Secretary for International Cooperation, Alexander Douglas signed a cooperation agreement for an estimated US$37 million dollars [in Kinshasa on 06 January 2009].The programme supports the national strategy of promoting improved access to water, sanitation and hygiene in rural and peri-urban communities throughout the country through the Healthy Village and Healthy School initiative. [...] The Ministy for Primary, Secondary and Professional Education and the Ministry of Public Health [...] are the primary implementing partners of WASH activities for UNICEF-DRC.

The US$ 37 million grant will be disbursed through UNICEF over a period of four years [and] ill benefit an estimated 9 million Congolese in 12,500 communities and over 750,000 primary school children.

Source: UNICEF / ReliefWeb, 06 Jan 2008

Sierra Leone: Villagers build latrines for better hygiene and child survival

Mahmud Konneh recently finished building a latrine in his village, Tilorma, in the Kenema District of eastern Sierra Leone. It is one of 30 new latrines that have been constructed by Tilorma villagers under the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach.

© UNICEF Sierra Leone/2008/Davies

[...] This sanitation initiative is being supported by UNICEF and the UK Department for International Development, in collaboration with the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health and Sanitation, and non-governmental partners.

Since the January 2008 introduction of CLTS in Sierra Leone, 103 villages have stopped practicing open defecation. As a result, the participating communities are cleaner, more hygienic and less likely to suffer from outbreaks of diarrhoea.

Source: Issa Davies, UNICEF, 28 Oct 2008

MCC and DFID Sign Agreement to Coordinate Poverty-Reduction Efforts in Africa

On Feb., 19, 2008, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) signed a first-of-its-kind Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two organizations which will increase coordination and make their poverty reduction efforts more effective in Africa and throughout the globe.

Focusing initially on Africa, the MOU identifies practical areas for cooperation in countries in which both the US and UK are active, including Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. Areas of cooperation that have been identified are data and statistics sharing, growth diagnostics, environmental protection, infrastructure projects, transparency in large-scale procurements, impact evaluation, and future staff exchanges.

In Mozambique, DFID and MCC will support the government to scale-up of rural and urban water and sanitation. In Tanzania, DFID and MCC will explore possibilities of joint work to support increased transparency in the construction sector through the COST initiative.

Read more: MCC, 19 Feb 2008