Month: January 2015

Medical aid group MSF says pulls out of parts of Sudan

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A medical staff attends to a malnourished child at a MSF hospital in an IDP camp inside the U.N. base in MalakalMedecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has pulled out of some conflict-hit parts of Sudan due to a lack of cooperation from authorities, the medical charity said on Thursday, as the country suffers increasing violence. Sudan has faced a rebellion in Darfur since 2003 and a separate but linked insurgency in Blue Nile and South Kordofan since the secession of South Sudan in 2011. The group said that total denial of access to Blue Nile, forced closure of activities in East Darfur and administrative obstacles in South Darfur had made its work in those areas impossible, accusations that Sudan has denied.

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As Ebola ‘fear factor’ eases, African tourism edges back

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An orphaned baby elephant walks through mud as tourists take pictures at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Nursery within Nairobi National Park, near NairobiBy Edith Honan NAIROBI (Reuters) – From the jungle-clad slopes of the Great Lakes to the game parks of South Africa, tourism is beginning to recover as the Ebola outbreak in a corner of the continent ebbs and foreigners overcome their fear of the virus. The epidemic has been confined overwhelmingly to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, where at least 8,700 people have died. Inquiries at Safaribookings.com, a marketplace for more than 1,200 safari companies in east and southern Africa, were down 25 percent during the last four months of 2014, but bounced back in January, with a 20 percent rise compared to a year ago. A scaling back of the wall-to-wall media coverage of the handful of Ebola cases that occurred in Europe and the United States – where most tourists to Africa come from – has helped.

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Weekly Ebola cases below 100, WHO says endgame begins

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Health workers push a wheeled stretcher holding a newly admitted Ebola patient, 16-year-old Amadou, in to the Save the Children Kerry town Ebola treatment centre outside Freetown, Sierra LeoneBy Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) – The number of new confirmed Ebola cases totalled 99 in the week to Jan. 25, the lowest tally since June 2014, the World Health Organization said on Thursday, signalling the tide might have turned against the epidemic. "The response to the EVD (Ebola virus disease) epidemic has now moved to a second phase, as the focus shifts from slowing transmission to ending the epidemic," the WHO said. "To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, efforts have moved from rapidly building infrastructure to ensuring that capacity for case finding, case management, safe burials, and community engagement is used as effectively as possible." The outbreak has killed 8,810 people out of 22,092 known cases, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Cases and deaths have fallen rapidly in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the past few weeks, with just 20 deaths recorded in Liberia in the 21 days to Jan. 25.

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