WHO: Ebola spread outpaces control effort

Voice of America News: The head of the World Health Organization has told the presidents of West African nations stricken by Ebola that the outbreak is moving faster than efforts to control it. Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's director general, says if the outbreak continues to worsen, the consequences could be "catastrophic" in terms of lost lives and socio-economic disruption.

Chan is in Conakry, where she met Friday with the presidents of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast. WHO and the West African leaders are finalizing a $100 million plan to fight the spread of Ebola, which has claimed nearly 730 lives.  Chan said more than 60 health workers are among the victims, and that some international relief workers have been infected.

The WHO chief said her hope is the plan emerging from the Conakry meeting will mark "a turning point" in the international response to the outbreak. Several hundred medical personnel are about to be deployed to West Africa, Chan said, and an emergency committee will meet on Wednesday to assess the international implications of the outbreak.

Referring to the scale of the ongoing Ebola outbreak as unprecedented, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told VOA the outbreak is probably worse than the figures indicate. “There could well be cases in the community that we have missed because this has been one of the biggest challenges in terms of also tracing contacts," Hartl said. "People run away.  They do not want to be treated in the health centers.  They are afraid or they do not believe that the health centers can do them any good, so they try to be treated by their families and they get sick and die there.”

Hartl says key elements of the emergency plan are to stop transmission of the Ebola virus and to prevent the spread of the disease to neighboring at-risk countries by strengthening and scaling up all control and response measures....

An electronmicrograph of the Ebola virus, image by Cynthia Goldsmith at the CDC, public domain

West Africa's ebola outbreak prompts changes in Ivory Coast cuisine

Adama Bakayoko in Yahoo News via AFP: West Africa's first outbreak of Ebola fever is bad news for gourmets in Ivory Coast, but brings respite from the hunter to species sought out for tasty meat but feared to carry the disease. Late in March, Health Minister Raymonde Goudou Coffie called for her compatriots to stop eating porcupines and agoutis, which look like large river-rats, "until we can be sure there are no risks".

Bushmeat is known to be a vector of Ebola, the alarming haemorrhagic fever that has claimed at least 122 lives in Guinea, according to a UN World Health Organisation toll on April 17. Liberia, meanwhile, reports 13 deaths.

Hunters and restaurant owners in the central Ivorian town of Bouake are upset that clients have begun to steer clear of the strong taste of the agouti, a beast with a long snout and brown fur that can reach half a metre (1.6 feet) in length.

Last week, the minister's recommendation was still going unheeded or ignored by some traders and hunters in Bouake's main bushmeat market. One hunter openly carried a dead rodent. Emile, a customer in his 40s who seemed slightly tipsy, asked for "Ebola meat", meaning braised agouti. "Ebola can't survive alcohol or hot water," claimed the scarred Rigobeli, who had just eaten a large meal.

But such scenes are swiftly becoming a thing of the past. An official ban on bushmeat -- including antelopes, chimpanzees and porcupines as well as agoutis -- has been enforced and a week later, the Bouake market was empty....

I found an ew!-making picture of bushmeat, and I backed down. Just a stewpot, shot by Kriják Krisztina. The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.  

Chronic malnutrition harms Côte d’Ivoire’s north

IRIN: Forty percent of Ivoirian children in the northern region are chronically malnourished, the country’s highest rate, which has not fallen for the past six years. The effects of a drawn-out conflict, desertion by aid groups and inadequate medical staff have contributed to the situation. Food scarcity here is often due to harsh weather and high food costs.

The average rate of chronic malnutrition nationally is not much lower though, at 30 percent. Côte d’Ivoire’s northern region is mostly arid and on the fringes of the Sahel. Malnutrition levels here compare to Niger’s 40 percent and are slightly higher than Burkina Faso’s 34 percent.

The 2002-2009 political turmoil that split Côte d’Ivoire into rebel-held north and government-controlled south devastated public services in the in the north. Under rebel rule, private firms also fled, while the economy tumbled and insecurity rose. The region was, however, spared much of the violence sparked by the 2010 election dispute.

“The crisis significantly weakened the already precarious food security levels in this part of the country. Population displacements disrupted agricultural activities from 2002 to 2005,” said Bernard Kouamé, a nutrition expert based in the commercial capital Abidjan.

“Health infrastructure was degraded. The absence of health personnel for months on end and the fracturing of the health system greatly affected access to health services. The country has not totally recovered from these problems,” he said....

West Africa hopes new hydropower dams will cut poverty, climate risk

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: West African states in the Niger River Basin are seeking to tackle climate risks and reduce poverty by constructing three hydropower dams in the next five years. In late November, the Council of Ministers of the Niger Basin Authority (NBA), meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, endorsed an environmental and climate action plan for sustainable management of the scenic basin and its rich natural resources, which have come under threat from climate change.

The projects include a 102 megawatt (MW) hydropower dam at Fomi in Guinea, a 25 MW hydropower plant in Toussa, Mali, and the 565 MW Kandadji dam in Niger. These aim to boost hydro-electricity and irrigation, reduce desertification and flooding, and improve economic activities across the region.

“The West African region is facing urgent problems of food security, rural poverty and climate change that demand answers in the form of investment and infrastructure. We need to give a push to these three multi-purpose hydropower dam projects as a sustainable solution that involves the region’s largest river,” NBA executive secretary Collins Ihekire said in a statement at the Yaounde gathering.

The NBA is the coordinating body for the 4,200 km-long (2,600-mile) Niger River, bringing together the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

The NBA also agreed to rehabilitate three hydropower plants at Kainji, Jebda and Lagdo, as well as multiple run-of-river hydropower stations, optimise water storage, set up irrigation schemes for an additional 1 million hectares (2.5 million hectares) of land, and increase hydropower production to 1,000 gigawatt hours per day.

“Integrating future climate change adaptation and mitigation into our development action plan will enable...sustainable management of our water resources, to better the livelihood of the over 106 million population in the area,” said Emmanuel Nganou Djoumesi, Cameroon’s minister of the economy, planning and regional development, at the closing of the Yaounde meeting....

The Niger River from space

Data for development: revolution kicks off in Côte d’Ivoire

Mico Tatalovic in SciDev.net: We live in exciting times. Hoards of data collected routinely by big telecom companies — but which are currently sitting idle — are about to hit the research community and be used for as yet un-thought of applications. The UN high-level panel recently called for a ‘data revolution’ to underpin the planning and evaluation of the post-2015 development goals.

A taste of what might be in store was presented at the European Development Days meeting in Brussels, Belgium, this week (26 November). Mobile communications company Orange has huge amounts of data on traffic between its mobile masts, and in 2012 it decided to release some of that data from Côte d’Ivoire to researchers worldwide in a challenge to make use of that data. It anticipated 40 or 50 project applications and got 260 instead, though few came from African countries or Côte d’Ivoire itself.

The results, first released in May this year, were astounding. What had been — and largely remains — locked-up data, was analysed and presented by scientists to reveal a host of information with development applications.

Examples include better understanding of disease epidemics and their control, better traffic and parcel delivery planning, and insights into social divisions.

...And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Orange is now in talks with universities and ministries in Côte d’Ivoire about following up with a closer analysis of some of that data. It is also planning to repeat the experiment in another African country though it won’t reveal which one yet. And there is so much other data it has stored away, from, say, the age of mobile-phone users to information on solar radiation intensity at its solar-powered masts across the country....

A disguised cell phone tower in Capetown, shot by Dillon Marsh, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Indonesia's fisheries most 'vulnerable to collapse'

Clara Rondonuwu in SciDev.net: Indonesia and Liberia's coral reef fisheries are most vulnerable to collapse, says a study that has ranked the vulnerability of coastal nations based on indicators for their coral reef management, fisheries and food security.

The study, published in this month's Environmental Science and Policy, looked at 27 countries that depend significantly on coral reef fisheries for food and ranked them according to their exposure and sensitivity to the effects of climate change and man-made disturbances, as well on their capacity to adapt to changes.

Coral reefs are globally valued for their high biodiversity. For millions of people, they are a productive source of food. An average Indonesian gets almost 60 per cent of its animal protein from fish, while in Pacific island countries this figure is between 50 to 90 per cent. However, coral reef fisheries are expected to decline with climate change and other human caused disturbances.

In the new study, a higher sensitivity indicates that a country is highly dependent on coral reef fisheries for human protein sources, and is already close to or below the minimum protein consumption level, while capacity to adapt is the potential to respond to changes in the contribution of reef fisheries to the food system.

They found that Indonesia is the most vulnerable because of the combined effects of man-made disturbance and very high sensitivity. Liberia, the second most vulnerable, has very high sensitivity to coral reef fisheries decline and the lowest level of adaptive capacity. Kenya, Ivory Coast and the Philippines complete the top five most vulnerable....

Hundreds of fisherman boats on the beach at Pangandaran, Indonesia, shot by Danumurthi Mahendra, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Rural dwellers must adapt to climate change

Théodore Kouadio in AlertNet, apparently from the Ivory Coast:  The calls came at a workshop held at the Regional Unit of Higher Education of Korhogo, in the north of the country earlier this year (18 May), at which researchers presented recent work on the impacts of climate change in the region.

"Data from 1970–2000 show that rainfall during the period decreased by about 12 per cent in northern Côte d'Ivoire," Bama Koné, coordinator of the research, told SciDev.Net. He added that annual temperatures increased by almost one degree Celsius during the same timeframe. Koné said that the rainy season has shortened, while the dry season has become longer.

"Conditions in the region have become harsher and longer, vegetation has been damaged, many species are endangered, and many rivers and streams have dried up," he said.

More than two thirds of farmers have experienced a decline in crop productivity — particularly of highly prized crops such as sorghum, yam and millet — while 60 per cent have had their farms flooded during the rainy season.

Traditional practices have also been affected. For example, traditional doctors have been affected by the paucity of medicinal plants. According to the deputy mayor of Korhogo, Salimou Coulibaly, villagers sow crops such as cotton, maize and rice, according to the lunar month. When the rains do not come, they worship fetishes and pray in mosques, all the while ignoring the negative effects of climate change, Coulibaly said....

Locator map of the Ivory Coast, image by Vardion, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license