Kenya starts its first national wildlife census ... report from Reuters

Kenya began its first national wildlife census on Friday, aiming to aid conservation and identify threats to its vast but threatened wildlife populations.

The census will run until July, with rangers, researchers and community members counting animals on land and from helicopters.

It will focus on counting rare species such as the pangolin, which has been identified as a potential intermediary species for COVID-19, and the Sable antelope, of which fewer than 100 remain in Kenya.

Expanding human settlements, a changing climate that makes resources scarcer, and poaching have contributed to declines in wildlife populations. Giraffe populations in Kenya have fallen about 40% over the last three decades, according to the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

The 250 million shilling ($2.3 million) project was launched by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the tourism ministry at the Shimba Hills National Reserve, the coastal home of Kenya's last population of Sable antelopes.

Some of Kenya's most vulnerable animals, including rhinos and elephants, are counted periodically. But it will be the first time animals are counted systematically in all areas of the country.

"We know there are major gaps. We probably don't know much about what is going on in northern Kenya," said Winnie Kiiru, acting chairperson of the Kenya Wildlife Research Training Institute.

Detailed information about wildlife in northern Kenya's less populated and less visited parks is limited.

The aim is to better understand population sizes and their distribution, to identify threats to animals and suggest conservation strategies.

Tourism accounted for 8.2% of Kenya's GDP in 2019, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, much of it from visits to nature parks, but has fallen drastically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plunge in international travel has also had some benefits. Last year was the first since 1999 in which no rhinos were poached, the KWS said.

Northern White Rhino .... is it possible to bring them back ?

 More embryos developed to save white rhinos

Embryos to be used on surrogate female southern white rhinos to create herd of nearly extinct nothern white rhinos.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on Thursday announced that four new embryos of the nearly extinct northern white rhinos had been developed, promising the endangered animal a new lease on life.

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died in 2018 in Kenya leaving behind only two infertile females.

Scientists, who had stored Sudan’s sperm, have been working hard to develop embryos which they plan to use on surrogate female southern white rhinos multiple times to create a herd of pure northern white rhinos which will be reintegrated into the wild.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy on Thursday said: “The international consortium of scientists and conservationists working towards preventing the extinction of the northern white rhino through advanced assisted reproduction technologies is pleased to announce that in March and April 2021, four additional northern white rhino embryos were produced.”

Next phase to save rhinos

Kenya’s Tourism and Wildlife Minister Najib Balala said in a statement that with nine embryos successfully developed, it was time that scientists moved on to the next phase to use surrogate rhinos to develop a herd of northern white rhinos.

“We are excited with the laboratory outcome of the last ovum pick-up in March. With nine pure northern white rhino embryos now developed, the partners in the project should embark on the next phase of the project – embryo transfer to the surrogate southern white females at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. We are eager to get the progeny from the project that will guarantee survival of the species.”

The conservancy said this is the most successful series of procedures – from oocyte collection in Kenya to in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation in Italy.

The team working to save the nearly extinct rhinos includes Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), Safari Park Dvůr Králové, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy and Avantea.

There were hundreds of thousands of northern white rhinos roaming in East and Central Africa, but civil war and years of poaching brought its populations to near extinction.

(from Anadolu Agency)

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Not quite understanding the biology of genetics, I wonder how the progeny can be 'pure' whites .... they collected sperm from Sudan, but where did the eggs come from, if there are no more living female whites ?   I need to investigate further !

~     ~     ~ 

see:-     http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-end-of-sudan.html

Death of Mama Sarah Obama

 

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sarah Obama, the matriarch of former U.S. President Barack Obama's Kenyan family has died, relatives and officials confirmed Monday. She was at least 99 years old.

Mama Sarah, as the step-grandmother of the former U.S. president was fondly called, promoted education for girls and orphans in her rural Kogelo village. She passed away around 4 a.m. local time while being treated at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city in the country's west, according to her daughter Marsat Onyango.

“She died this morning. We are devastated,” Onyango told The Associated Press on a phone call.  "Mama was sick with normal diseases; she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman said, adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

President Barack Obama had been informed of the death and has sent his condolences.

She will be buried Tuesday before midday and the funeral will be held under Islamic rites.  “The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman, a matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

She will be remembered for her work to promote education to empower orphans, Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o said while offering his condolences to the people of Kogelo village for losing a matriarch.  “She was a philanthropist who mobilized funds to pay school fees for the orphans,” he said.  Sarah Obama, was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The family is part of Kenya's Luo ethnic group.

President Obama often showed affection toward her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond. She attended his first inauguration as president in 2009. Later, Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

For decades, Sarah Obama has helped orphans, raising some in her home. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents — providing school supplies, uniforms, basic medical needs, and school fees.  In a 2014 interview with Associated Press, she said that even as an adult, letters would arrive but she couldn’t read them. She said she didn’t want her children to be illiterate, so she saw that all her family’s children went to school.

She recalled pedaling the president’s father six miles (nine kilometers) to school on the back of her bicycle every day from the family’s home village of Kogelo to the bigger town of Ngiya **   to make sure he got the education that she never had.      **( Ng'iya, is where we lived when we first arrived in Kenya, and was the home of Joseph Adhiambo, photo on the right)

“I love education,” Sarah Obama said, "because children learn they can be self-sufficient, especially girls who too often had no opportunity to go to school.  If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village,” she said.

In recognition of her work to support education, she was honoured by the United Nations in 2014, receiving the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award.  

(Report from abc News)

Palm Sunday

Continuing from yesterdays thoughts about palm fronds on the track into Eliye Springs, this photo is from todays Mill Hill newsletter, and shows just what I was thinking about yesterday !  People carrying palm branches, walking down from the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley into Jerusalem.    I have twice walked this very steep path, but never at Easter .... 

Lake 'Rudolf' part 2

El-Molo Island & Nyiru Range beyond, from Porr

Having written a little about the Omo River dam and what its effect will be on the people of the Turkana area, I found myself thinking a lot about our expeditions to that area. 

I found the above photo from one of our trips, and by the late 1970's El Molo island was scarcely populated; the El Molo were a dying tribe, being absorbed into other tribes of the area.   Wikipaedia says "historians have noted that there are few "pure" El Molo left. Most group members are today admixed with adjacent Nilotic populations, primarily Samburu, with only a handful of unmixed El Molo believed to exist. Many El Molo speakers have also adopted cultural customs from these communities. In 1994, there were reportedly only eight unmixed El Molo remaining."   I had noted a few days ago that El Molo was one of the Kenyan languages now thought to be extinct.  

"The El Molo are believed to have originally migrated down into the Turkana Basin around 1000 BC from Ethiopia in the more northerly Horn region. Owing to the arid environment in which they entered, they are held to have then abandoned agricultural activities in favour of lakeside fishing"  (Wikipaedia)

We saw a few El Molo people with scrawny cows and couldn't think what the animals could possibly find to eat among all the lava boulders and gravel that covered the area for miles and miles inland from the lake shore .... until we realised that the cows were driven into the shallow lake to eat the water weeds near the shore ... aquatic cows !

It is Palm Sunday tomorrow, and if we could go to church, (covid lock-down still applies to some churches) we would be given palm crosses, to remember the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem .... when people were waving and strewing palm branches, traditionally used as a celebration of victory.   This came to mind when I was remembering our trip to the west side of Rudolf, to Ferguson's Gulf.   The 'road' up the west side of the lake was then just a rough and sandy track, and the sand had been covered (presumably where the sand was deep and hard to drive over) with palm leaves to give grip to vehicles tyres.  Memories !  

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

(Added later:-)

See what I wrote in 2018 .... http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/06/lake-turkana-formerly-lake-rudolf.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/ancient-kenyan-burial-site.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/more-on-lothagam-burial-site.html

Lake Rudolf .... sorry, Turkana !

 

So much is changing in Africa, and a lot of it not for the better.   What we knew as Lake Rudolf and visited two or three times, was a place for nomadic tribes with their camels and donkeys and goats, living a simple but very hard life.  As I see it, 'development' is rarely for the benefit of the people who live where the development is taking place, and so it would seem in the northern deserts of Kenya/the southern areas of Ethiopia.    There are dams being built across the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, which is the main source of freshwater flowing into Lake Turkana.

"Encompassing swathes of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya, the Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the oldest landscapes in the world that is known to have been inhabited by Homo sapiens and is now one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of ethnic diversity. In the lower Omo Valley alone, a varied history of cross-cultural encounters has played out to produce eight distinct ethnic groups, speaking many languages from Afro-Asiatic to Nilo-Saharan.

In a cattle camp on the bank of the ancient Omo River a Mursi elder implored me to “tell our story so that others might know us before we are all dead in the desert”. Where the river ends in Lake Turkana, this sentiment was echoed by local fishermen: “You will find our bones in the desert.” The story of the Omo-Turkana Basin is now that of the Ethiopian state exploiting its periphery in the name of “development”, trampling on the human rights of its citizens in the process.

Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government has pushed ahead with a huge hydro-electric dam on the Omo, known as Gibe III. Without any meaningful consultation with the communities affected, the state has also appropriated grazing lands and freshwater, threatening their vital resources and local heritage.

All of this has happened despite the area gaining the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. As Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician put it, “these happenings are profoundly disturbing”.

The completion of Gibe III, Africa’s tallest dam to date, has eliminated the annual flood and radically reduced the Omo’s flow, which produces 90% of Lake Turkana’s freshwater input. In doing so, it has reduced sediments and nutrients critical for traditional agriculture, riverside pastures and fish habitat.

Over 30% of the lake inflow will be diverted for commercial irrigation projects. The result could be a fall in lake level comparable to that of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has shrunk by over two thirds since the 1960s because of irrigation abstractions and which has been called “the world’s worst environmental disaster”. To make way for the commercial plantations planned for the Omo Valley, tens of thousands of hectares of land will be expropriated and thousands of local people displaced.

The need to see “development” as more than a simple matter of an increase in GDP is well established. In his seminal work, Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrated that sustainable development must be based on universal access to social and economic necessities as well as political and civil rights. The many communities in the Omo-Turkana Basin have suffered a systematic curtailment of their most basic and essential rights.

International agreements which the Ethiopian government signed up to, such as the 1993 International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights require it to protect and promote the rights of minority cultures and ensure the “right of everyone to take part in cultural life”.

Since 1948, Ethiopia has also been signed up to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II provides against the destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, famously defined the specific need to protect against the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups”.

It is difficult not to conclude that what we are seeing in the Omo is the wholesale disregard of these commitments by the Ethiopian government. Its development policies are not only transforming landscape and heritage but destroying complex systems of sustainable living that have endured for millennia. The huge injustice of all this is that the ecological costs will be borne by local communities while the profits will be enjoyed by central and international corporations.

Meanwhile, centuries of collective wisdom relating to livestock diversification, flood dependant cultivation and customary obligations and mechanisms of livestock exchange, will be made redundant.

This is not to deny, of course, that development, in the sense defined by Sen, is a laudable and necessary enterprise. But we must also recognise that large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to have far reaching consequences for the lifestyles and cultural identities of those they displace.

Projects which set out to increase economic growth without regard for social justice and individual rights are not worthy of the name “development”. Development must benefit locals and for this to happen their voices must not only be heard but also given a central and determining role in any discussions about the future of their lands and livelihoods.

Both cradle and crucible of our species, the Omo-Turkana Basin is unique and precious. Its heritage and history, as well as responsibility for its future, are shared by us all.

(from The Conversation.com)

Is there really no way of moving into the modern world for nomadic peoples without destroying their lives ?   I'm not sure that the invasion of rich tourists is quite the answer, but where lodges and game reserves have been set up by local communities, such as the Samburu, tourists with money to burn have come in droves, and the profits of such ventures benefit the local people, without destroying the ecology and history of an area.   We loved visiting the north of Kenya, and especially the area to the east of Lake Rudolf .... oops !     Turkana !   

It was arid, hot and with no 'facilities' whatsoever, but we took the children there for several days; they splashed around in the shallows of the lake (with an adult in attendance watching for crocodiles !)  They spent the hottest part of the day in shade, catching up with school lessons (I was teaching them myself); they found interesting rocks, and even some fossils !

Lost languages ?

 

(Report from  Anadolu Agency  news)

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, rap music artist Martin Nderitu, 24, is having trouble laying down lines in his mother tongue for an album expected to drop in early March.  His album is composed in a slang called Sheng – a mix of Swahili, English, and 42 local languages, popular among the urban youth of the East African country.

In modern Kenya, the entertainment industry, politicians, schools, and even places of worship use this slang, which has now developed into a hybrid tongue.Like many other kids in his country, Nderitu grew up speaking a foreign language, a practice which has become a status symbol for many.

“My lines are very deep, they speak about society and our day-to-day life,” he said.  Unable to speak in his local language, he holds society and his parents responsible for not teaching him his mother tongue. He said that he can speak the English part of Sheng, but has trouble pronouncing his own mother tongue.   “My parents speak Swahili and Kenya’s slang called Sheng. They don’t speak their traditional languages. I blame them for the person I’ve become because it was their duty to pass the language onto me,” Nderitu said.

Similarly, Peter Waithaka, 25, said he can understand Kikuyu, his mother tongue, but is unable to use it to speak.  “I can hear the Kikuyu language but I can’t speak it. I feel like mother languages are just things of the past which in this modern era where we have computers, laptops, and the internet, these languages will disappear,” he said.

With over 40 tribes inhabiting Kenya, it is home to numerous languages and dialects, passed down from generation to generation.  The country has adopted Swahili and English, which are taught in schools, as the two national languages. The local languages which connect people to their ethnic groups are only learned at home when children grow up.

Worrisome phenomenon

According to studies by linguists, most Kenyan youths can barely speak their ethnic languages.  Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Clara Momanyi, a linguist at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, described the phenomenon as worrisome.   “The upbringing of kids these days isn’t like the way we were brought up, because parents are neglecting some of the traditional roles which we’ve had in Kenya since time immemorial,” she said. “They’re not teaching kids our culture nor our languages.”

She said that many young parents do not know their languages themselves, so they cannot teach them to their own children.  They feel it is better to teach them Swahili and English than their own mother tongue, which is why they grow up not knowing these languages.  “Sooner or later we have these languages disappearing because of a lack of teachers,” warned Momanyi. “They will disappear and of course, our culture will also disappear because languages are the vehicle in which languages are passed on from generation to generation.”

Waithaka, who is a young musician, says that in big cities, schools punish students for speaking in vernacular or ethnic languages.  “We’ve been urged to speak mostly English. You can speak Swahili twice a week,” he explained. “This has been [policy] in Kenya for a long time to improve English speaking and comprehension of students at the cost of languages like Kikuyu, Luo, and Kamba.”

Parents to blame?

Many also worry that the government is indifferent to documenting and doing research to keep the local languages alive.  

Kimani Njogu, a university teacher of Swahili and African languages, said parents have to take most of the blame for not passing down these languages to their children. She also faults the government for its indifference.   “It’s important that we try and learn our mother tongues because they connect us with our history and our identity and give us a sense of belonging,” she said.   The government has also failed to preserve the languages, says Njogu.

Martin Njoroge, a linguist at the US International University in Nairobi, said the Sheng has evolved and is being used as a first language by some speakers. He said it is no longer slang.   “A language must have culture, history, geography, and solidification of its grammar and vocabulary, so in my view, Sheng is on the path to becoming a language,” he explained.   “I do not think that Sheng will go away, it will continue adjusting itself and very soon we will have first language speakers of Sheng.”  He said Sheng has a future now, as other communal languages are on their way to extinction.

The Yaakunte language of the Yaaku tribe, once indigenous to Ethiopia and Kenya, has been listed among six local languages (Sogoo, Lorkoti, Kinare, Kore, and Elmolo) which have gone extinct, according to Jennifer Koinante, executive director of the Yiaku Laikipiak Trust, a local advocacy group .

The Yaaku tribe, former hunter-gatherers and beekeepers who once numbered over 5,000, have been assimilated into the Maasai tribe.  The Yaaku over time gave up their language in favor of the Maa language of the Maasai.  Today, only seven people speak Yaakunte, all of them over 70 years old.

I find this very sad indeed.  About ten years ago when I was in Kisumu for a month, I met a charming African family of mother and three daughters, all very well educated .... private schools for the girls .... and together as a family they spoke English.   But the mothers 'mother' tongue was/had been Dholuo, and her greater family all spoke Luo in their homes.   Tragically, the mother felt that her children should be 'modern' and forget their 'primitive' heritage.   How sad.

However, the girls spoke fluent English and French, adequate Kiswahili .... and absolutely NO Dholuo.  I spoke more Dholuo than they did !!  This meant they couldn't speak to their own grandparents, who knew no English and so rarely saw the grandchildren .... probably even as little as 25 years ago they would have visited and spent time together, and learned from their grandparents the traditions and stories of their heritage ... and when the grandparents die, that cultural history, their heritage, will be gone.  

Locusts again

 

I briefly mentioned locusts towards the end of a previous blog entry .... 

http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2020/07/mama-pat-african-updates-and-qavs.html

.... and now the plague is back in Kenya in ever greater swarms.

The Daily Telegraph recently had a report:-  "Biblical plague or manageable threat? Swarms of the pests, driven by climate change, are wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region regularly facing acute bouts of hunger"

From the air, the mountain valleys are awash with millions of flitting white dots. A swarm about twice the size of the City of London ready to devour every bit of vegetation in its wake looks like this from the air.

    

"Last year, East Africa was hit by a once-in-a-lifetime invasion of voracious desert locusts. Billions of insects poured across the border into Kenya from the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia and Ethiopia. 

Commentators compared it to something from the Old Testament – a biblical plague of Abraham, driven on by climate change, wreaking havoc on the food supply of a region which regularly faces acute bouts of hunger.

There had been nothing like it in Kenya since the 1950s and officials were caught flatfooted, trying to battle swarms roughly the size of Luxembourg with a handful of planes and almost no proper equipment. 

Pilots tasked with spotting the swarms sent their locations back to base on WhatsApp on shoddy rural internet connections.

A single locust swarm can contain up to 80 million locusts and fly 30 to 80 miles in one day depending on the wind. By the time, spraying planes arrived at the WhatsApp coordinates the next day, it was often too late. 

The locusts had warmed up in the morning sun and moved off into the wilderness, laying millions of eggs. Every day, each locust can eat its weight in vegetation daily and multiplies twenty-fold every three months. A swarm can easily eat as much food as 35,000 people in a single day and multiple two dozen times in three months."

Pilots of small planes and helicopters more used to flying celebrities to game lodges are now tracking swarms as they settle for the night, and are ready at dawn to spray the settled swarm as they start to warm up in the dawn sun .... and spray with a U.N. approved pesticide.  

(summarised from a Daily Telegraph report)

'Old Africa' ... issue 93 has come !

 

I was interested to see a photo of a visit to Kenya by HRH Prince Charles, supposedly from "early 1970's"

I have my doubts about that date, as I remember when we lived in Nakuru, all the families and the children from my daughters first school gathered at the airstrip near Lanet to 'meet and greet' .... HRH was on his way to have lunch with Mzee Kenyatta at State House, and when he went for his lunch, the air crew from HRH's plane invited the children to have a look around the aircraft, and I believe they were given sweets !

Here, I've got a vast collection of letters that we sent 'home' to our parents, probably around 500 or 600 of them, which I've sorted into date order, so was easily able to find the letters for the relavent time; which wasn't "early 1970's" as the children were too young to have been in school then, and we didn't move to Nakuru until about 1976.   

Bingo .... I found a mention of the visit in a letter to my mother from  May1977, but D.W., my old Maseno friend, found the article below in the New York Times, which dates this visit to March '77 .... so I am now wondering why I didn't write home about it until May, and only to my mother and not also the parents in law ?   One of lifes mysteries .... 

~     ~     ~     ~     ~ 

Prince Charles Leads Newshounds on a Merry Chase in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya, March 9—Prince Charles, who is in Kenya on a photographic safari, is himself the quarry in a journalistic hunt mounted by a Fleet Street caravan.

The press caravan, composed of nine top reporters and photographers of the British popular press, was at Nairobi Airport on Sunday when the Prince of Wales arrived, landing his own plane. He met the group affably, saying, “Sorry I'm late. Had to check the controls. Pleasant flight. Bit bumpy.”

That was all he said before disappearing for unknown places. It was hardly enough to justify expenses for a trip to Greenwich, let alone Africa.

Members of the group, however, are an indomitable breed. Among them is a man who once spent tens of thousands of dollars tracking a milkman in Argentina in the belief that he was Martin Bormann. He found out that he was a milkman.

Through charm, guile and the disbursement of money, the reporters have, among them, ferreted out hundreds of circulation‐boosting secrets and true confessions.

Still, by Sunday night, they had not learned the whereabouts of the Prince. Messages from their London offices demanded stories, offered suggestions, provided goads. Obviously, the situation was serious.

By very early Monday morning there was a breakthrough. The reporters had reliably learned that the Prince was in the Aberdares. This is a forested mountain region about the size of Rhode Island, only much bumpier.

Mau Mau fighters hid in these dense forests for years from thousands of British troops. Could the terrain provide enough covering for Charles to evade the Fleet Street pack?

The journalists set off in LandRovers for Treetops, a lodge for viewing game in the area. It was at this lodge that Charles's mother became Queen when King George VI died a quarter century ago.

The reporters saw elephant and buffalo but no sign of royalty.

For a while the resident Nairobi press corps, all colleagues and admirers of the Fleet Streeters, lost contact with the group. Some of the Fleet Street pursuers had said they would be back in Nairobi for dinner. When they did not show up, one resident journalist explained, “Newsmen in Lion Horror,” offering as well a paradigm of a British headline.

Yesterday came word by telephone that—except for no Prince—all was well. The journalists moved to the Outspan Hotel. Many funny stories were reportedly being told. Expenses were mounting. The man from The Sun said that royal tracking was being impeded by Kenyan soldiers under orders to keep the newshounds at bay.

“They're not playing about,” said the man from The Sun.

But neither are tilt reporters. Those who have watched them in action before are not eager to bet against them. After all, they haven't yet used disguises or hired bearers. They may yet burst upon the royal encampment, emerging from a thicket of thorns, ragged but triumphant, cornering their quarry with a “Your Royal Highness, I presume?”

(from New York Times, 10  March 1977)

Kenya says it will get first coronavirus vaccines this month

 (Its a pity the lady in blue isn't wearing her mask correctly !)

NAIROBI (BLOOMBERG) - Kenya expects to get its first Covid-19 vaccines by the end of this month and inoculate 16 million of its roughly 53 million people by June next year, according to Health Secretary Mutahi Kagwe.

The country will procure vaccines made by AstraZeneca Plc, Pfizer Inc and Johnson & Johnson, and any others in the Covax facility, an initiative for developing countries to access doses, Mr Kagwe said Friday (Feb 12) in a statement.

East Africa's biggest economy targets 24 million doses from Covax and will buy another 11 million shots from other mechanisms.

The first vaccination phase covering 1.25 million people will prioritise health, security and immigration workers.

Kenya will decide by the end of next week whether to approve vaccines from China's Sinovac Biotech Ltd and AstraZeneca, and a Russian version known as Sputnik V, Fred Siyoi, head of the country's drug regulatory authority, said by phone.

(From The Straits Times)

Ebola again ...

 

At least three people have died of Ebola in Guinea, with five others testing positive for the virus, health officials say.

They fell ill with diarrhoea, vomiting and bleeding after attending a burial.

Between 2013 and 2016 more than 11,000 people died in the West Africa Ebola epidemic, which began in Guinea.

But in response to that epidemic several vaccines were developed, which have since been used to fight outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ebola infects humans through close contact with infected animals, including chimpanzees, fruit bats and forest antelope.

It then spreads between humans by direct contact with infected blood, bodily fluids or organs, or indirectly through contact with contaminated environments.

Community funerals, where people help wash the body of the person who has died, can be a key way of spreading Ebola in the earlier stages of an outbreak.

The bodies of victims are particularly toxic. The incubation period can last from two days to three weeks.

Dr Sakoba Keita, head of Guinea's national health agency, said more tests were being done to confirm the situation in the south-eastern region near the city of Nzérékoré, and health workers were working to trace and isolate cases.

The World Health Organization's Africa director, Matshidiso Moeti, tweeted that the global health agency was "ramping up readiness and response efforts" given the potential resurgence of Ebola in Guinea.

An Ebola vaccine was first trialled over four months in 2015 in Guinea - started by the Public Health Agency of Canada and then developed by US pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD).

One hundred patients were identified and then close contacts were either vaccinated immediately, or three weeks later. In the 2,014 close contacts who were vaccinated immediately there were no subsequent cases of Ebola.

(from BBC news)

Good news !

 

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has said that no rhino was poached in the East African nation in the year 2020, a rare occurrence to be witnessed in the country since 1999.

According to the latest poaching statistics from KWS, poaching is all-time low since the onset of COVID-19 that saw travel bans in many African countries.

In a statement, KWS Director-General Brigadier (Rtd) John Waweru said: “For the first time in 21 years, KWS reported zero poaching of rhinos in the year 2020. Rhino poaching has reduced from a high of 59 cases in 2013 when poaching was at its peak to zero poaching in 2020. The last time this feat was achieved was in 1999.”

Waweru attributed the achievement in reducing rhino poaching to working with stakeholders, anti-poaching and intelligence-led operations.

KWS said during the COVID-19 pandemic period, there were increased threats of poaching as the authority recorded an increase in bushmeat poaching and associated crimes.

KWS said there were increased cases of human-wildlife conflicts due to rising demand for agricultural land and space for human settlement.

Kenya also recorded the lowest number of elephants poached in 2020, Waweru said, adding: “Elephant poaching has also reduced from a high of 384 cases in 2012 when poaching was at its peak to a record low of 11 in 2020, the lowest ever in KWS history.”

According to the Kenya Wildlife, by the end of 2017, Kenya had a rhino population of 1,258 (745 black rhinos, 510 southern white rhinos and 3 northern white rhinos). The last male northern white rhino died, bringing the total number of northern whites in Kenya and across the world to just two.

Some 500 northern white rhinos were roaming in several countries in East and Central Africa, south of Sahara till 1970. Poaching reduced the population of the species to 15 by 1980 and then 32 in 2003. There are now just two female rhinos left, both born in captivity.

(from Anadolu Agency)

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