Category: Government Policy

The nation’s top public health agency on Thursday relaxed its COVID-19 guidelines, dropping the recommendation that Americans quarantine themselves if they come into close contact with an infected person.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said people no longer need to stay at least 6 feet away from others.

The changes are driven by a recognition that — more than 2 1/2 years since the start of the pandemic — an estimated 95% of Americans 16 and older have acquired some level of immunity, either from being vaccinated or infected, agency officials said.

“The current conditions of this pandemic are very different from those of the last two years,” said the CDC’s Greta Massetti, an author of the guidelines.

The CDC recommendations apply to everyone in the U.S., but the changes could be particularly important for schools, which resume classes this month in many parts of the country.

Perhaps the biggest education-related change is the end of the recommendation that schools do routine daily testing, although that practice can be reinstated in certain situations during a surge in infections, officials said.

The CDC also dropped a “test-to-stay” recommendation, which said students exposed to COVID-19 could regularly test — instead of quarantining at home — to keep attending school. With no quarantine recommendation anymore, the testing option disappeared too.

Masks continue to be recommended only in areas where community transmission is deemed high, or if a person is considered at high risk of severe illness.

School districts across the U.S. have been scaling back their COVID-19 precautions in recent weeks even before the CDC relaxed its guidance.

Masks will be optional in most school districts when classes resume this fall, and some of the nation’s largest districts have dialed back or eliminated COVID-19 testing requirements.

Some have also been moving away from test-to-stay programs that became unmanageable during surges of the omicron variant last school year. With so many new infections among students and staff, many schools struggled to track and test their close contacts, leading to a temporary return to remote classes in some places.

The average numbers of reported COVID-19 cases and deaths have been relatively flat this summer, at about 100,000 cases a day and 300 to 400 deaths.

The CDC previously said that if people who are not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccinations come into close contact with a person who tests positive, they should stay home for at least five days. Now the agency says quarantining at home is not necessary, but it urges those people to wear a high-quality mask for 10 days and get tested after five.

The agency continues to say that people who test positive should isolate from others for at least five days, regardless of whether they were vaccinated. CDC officials advise that people can end isolation if they are fever-free for 24 hours without the use of medication and they are without symptoms or the symptoms are improving.

Source: Voice of America

Luanda – Angola is to take part in the meeting of the SADC Council of Ministers, slated for 13 and 14 August in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The event takes place within the framework of the 42nd Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) scheduled for the 17th and 18th of the current month.

The 42nd Summit of the SADC Heads of State and Government will take place under the motto “Promotion of Industrialisation, through Agro-Processing of Mineral Resource Transformation and Development of Regional Value Chains, in favour of an Inclusive and Resilient Economic Growth”.

The Angolan delegation is headed by the secretary of State for Cooperation, Vieira Lopes, and includes the secretary of State for Public Health, Franco Mufinda, the Angolan ambassador to the DRC, Miguel Costa, the national secretary of SADC, Nazaré Salvador, the Angolan ambassador to Botswana and permanent representative to SADC, Beatriz Morais.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is an intergovernmental organisation created in 1992 and devoted to socio-economic cooperation and integration, as well as cooperation in political and security matters.

The organisation comprises Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Seychelles.

Its main objectives are the promotion of economic growth and development, poverty reduction, increasing the population quality of life, peace and security, sustainable development, strengthening and consolidating the cultural, historical and social affinities of the region, among others.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

A Nebraska woman has been charged with helping her teenage daughter end her pregnancy at about 24 weeks after investigators obtained Facebook messages in which the two discussed using medication to induce an abortion and plans to burn the fetus afterward.

The prosecutor handling the case said it’s the first time he has charged anyone for illegally performing an abortion after 20 weeks, a restriction that was passed in 2010. Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, states weren’t allowed to enforce abortion bans until the point at which a fetus is considered viable outside the womb, at roughly 24 weeks.

In one of the Facebook messages, Jessica Burgess, 41, tells her then-17-year-old daughter that she has obtained abortion pills for her and gives her instructions on how to take them to end the pregnancy.

The daughter, meanwhile, “talks about how she can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body,” a detective wrote in court documents. “I will finally be able to wear jeans,” she says in one of the messages. Law enforcement authorities obtained the messages with a search warrant, and detailed some of them in court documents.

In early June, the mother and daughter were only charged with a single felony for removing, concealing or abandoning a body, and two misdemeanors: concealing the death of another person and false reporting. It wasn’t until about a month later, after investigators reviewed the private Facebook messages, that they added the felony abortion-related charges against the mother. The daughter, who is now 18, is being charged as an adult at prosecutors’ request.

Burgess’ attorney didn’t immediately respond to a message Tuesday, and the public defender representing the daughter declined to comment.

When first interviewed, the two told investigators that the teen had unexpectedly given birth to a stillborn baby in the shower in the early morning hours of April 22. They said they put the fetus in a bag, placed it in a box in the back of their van, and later drove several miles north of town, where they buried the body with the help of a 22-year-old man.

The man, whom The Associated Press is not identifying because he has only been charged with a misdemeanor, has pleaded no contest to helping bury the fetus on rural land his parents own north of Norfolk in northeast Nebraska. He’s set to be sentenced later this month.

In court documents, the detective said the fetus showed signs of “thermal wounds” and that the man told investigators the mother and daughter did burn it. He also wrote that the daughter confirmed in the Facebook exchange with her mother that the two would “burn the evidence afterward.” Based on medical records, the fetus was more than 23 weeks old, the detective wrote.

Burgess later admitted to investigators to buying the abortion pills “for the purpose of instigating a miscarriage.”

At first, both mother and daughter said they didn’t remember the date when the stillbirth happened, but according to the detective, the daughter later confirmed the date by consulting her Facebook messages. After that he sought the warrant, he said.

Madison County Attorney Joseph Smith told the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper that he’s never filed charges like this related to performing an abortion illegally in his 32 years as the county prosecutor. He didn’t immediately respond to a message from the AP on Tuesday.

The group National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which supports abortion rights, found 1,331 arrests or detentions of women for crimes related to their pregnancy from 2006 to 2020.

In addition to its current 20-week abortion ban, Nebraska tried — but failed — earlier this year to pass a so-called trigger law that would have banned all abortions when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone defended the way the company handled authorities’ request for information in this case after a gag order about it was lifted Tuesday.

“Nothing in the valid warrants we received from local law enforcement in early June, prior to the Supreme Court decision, mentioned abortion,” Stone said. “The warrants concerned charges related to a criminal investigation and court documents indicate that police at the time were investigating the case of a stillborn baby who was burned and buried, not a decision to have an abortion.”

Facebook has said that officials at the social media giant “always scrutinize every government request we receive to make sure it is legally valid.”

Facebook says it will fight back against requests that it thinks are invalid or too broad, but the company said it gave investigators information in about 88% of the 59,996 times when the government requested data in the second half of last year.

Source: Voice of America

The heavy rains and floods experienced over the 2022 rainy season severely impacted agricultural activities particularly in the Southern Region. This followed a very late start to the rainy season coupled with prolonged dry spells. WFP Malawi conducted post-floods assessments to analyse not only the impact of Tropical Storm Ana and Tropical Cyclone Gombe in areas where WFP has invested in resilience activities to understand the impact on assets but also on participants in these interventions in the wake of the storms.

Key highlights

Only three of the community-level assets out of the 96 total assets monitored through satellite imagery by WFP’s Asset Impact Monitoring System (AIMS) were damaged by one or more storms. The remaining 93 assets (97 percent) required only maintenance works, or nothing at all.

WFP’s integrated resilience activities targeted beneficiary households resorted to fewer and less severe negative coping mechanisms and were able to recover more quickly, meaning that the development gains made to building and maintaining their resilience were not lost.

Participants in WFP’s income- generating activities lost less overall income than non-beneficiaries in the aftermath of the storms.

Source: World Food Programme

As south-east Africa continues to intensify efforts to stop a wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) outbreak detected in Malawi in February, the Africa Regional Certification Commission for Polio Eradication (ARCC) – the independent regional advisory body guiding Africa’s eradication effort – called for urgent action to stop all forms of poliovirus affecting the continent, be it wild or variant.

Reviewing the regional epidemiology at its bi-annual meeting on 6 June, the ARCC commended the governments’ commitments in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, in launching a series of emergency outbreak response campaigns, in response to the detected WPV1 in February. With two campaigns already implemented, further activities planned later in the summer will also feature Zimbabwe participating in the subregional outbreak response effort. The campaigns are supported by partners of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), notably WHO, UNICEF, BMGF, US CDC, GAVI, and local Rotarians, and by the Africa Rapid Response team.

The ARCC put forward four key recommendations to help ensure the outbreak can be rapidly stopped, namely:

implementing plans to improve campaign quality, based on lessons learned and quality-response assessments from the initial two rounds;

assessing WPV1 risks for older age groups and, as appropriate, expand target age groups of further outbreak response;

further expanding and strengthening subnational surveillance sensitivity to more clearly assess potential spread of this outbreak and eventually verify that the outbreak has been successfully stopped; and,

implementing surveillance-focused assessments in all five participating countries. Commenting on the outbreak response and the group’s deliberations, ARCC chair, Professor Rose Leke said: “Countries must be reminded that wild poliovirus is endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and south-east Africa is now infected. The risk of poliovirus being re-introduced or re-emerging is high, and the best thing countries can do to minimize the risk and consequences of polio is to strengthen immunity levels and subnational surveillance sensitivity.”

Countries, supported by GPEI partners, are also intensifying efforts to stop a number of variant poliovirus outbreaks in the Region, notably in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) and other areas. To combat this development, the ARCC encouraged partners and countries to prioritize the new novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2) supply to highest-risk areas.

“Novel OPV type 2 is an important new tool,” continued Professor Leke. “But at the same time, it must reach the children it is intended to reach. Variant polioviruses paralyze children and affect their families and communities in the same way that wild polioviruses do, and hence must be responded to with the same level of urgency and political commitment and oversight.”

Professor Leke and the ARCC members underscored the importance of building up routine immunization capabilities and surveillance sensitivity, both of which are critical in combatting a wide range of infectious diseases, including COVID-19 on the continent. According to Professor Leke: “The decline of routine immunization in the Region is of particular concern and puts the most vulnerable children at an increased risk to diseases such as polio.” An immunization and surveillance gap formed in many African countries due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as health workers were limited in routine activities by social distancing restrictions. While national surveillance activities have been renewed, persistent gaps remain at subnational levels. The various outbreaks across Africa in 2022 demonstrate that surveillance and routine immunization activities must be improved.

In its concluding remarks, the ARCC noted with appreciation critical milestones achieved, including the recent successful closure of 32 outbreaks from ten countries, at the end of Q1 2022, clearly demonstrating that outbreak response strategies work when fully implemented and resourced. “We have the opportunity of reaching zero polio cases,” concluded Professor Leke, “but only if we reach the remaining zero-dose children. Let us all focus our efforts on that, and if that happens, success will follow.”

Source: Global Polio Eradication Initiative

Malawi’s government and conservationists have announced plans to move 250 elephants from a park in the country’s south to a central one that has lost nearly all its population to poaching. But communities living near the park fear the new arrivals could lead to greater human-wildlife conflict.

The month-long exercise starts Monday, when the animals will be transported approximately 350 kilometers by road from Liwonde National Park in southern Malawi to Kasungu National Park in central Malawi.

Brighton Kumchedwa, Malawi’s Director of National Parks and Wildlife, said that in addition to boosting Kasungu’s elephant population, the relocation will minimize human-wildlife conflict in the communities surrounding Liwonde.

He said there are currently about 600 elephants in Liwonde, twice as many as the park was intended to hold.

“The elephants in Liwonde have exceeded the carrying capacity of the park,” he said. “Now what is happening is the destruction of the habitats, as they go about looking for food and water. And also, at the same time human-elephant conflict whereby people have been killed, their property damaged. So, now one way of minimizing that problem is to have these animals relocated.”

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) supports the transfer of the elephants. It says Kasungu National Park was home to about 1,200 elephants in the 1970s.

The population drastically declined because of poaching, with only 50 elephants left by 2015. Since then, anti-poaching efforts have helped boost the population back to 120.

Patricio Ndadzela, a top IFAW official. said the new elephants will help Kasungu attract more tourists, and that more animals may follow.

“Looking at Kasungu to be the center of tourism attraction to the country, we thought that by bringing more animals in the park, including elephants, and in the future, we are thinking of bringing the big five; there are already leopards there,” he said. “So, we are talking about lions and other species associated with that.”

But communities living near Kasungu fear the new elephants, which will triple the park’s elephant population, may lead to more human-wildlife conflict. Rosemary Banda, a small-scale farmer at Linyangwa village in the Kasungu district, is among wary local residents.

“Our worry is that the presence of many elephants here would contribute to food shortages because elephants have in the past been destroying our crops,” she said. “There was a time when elephants destroyed my crops and left me without enough food as a person who relies on farm produce for survival.”

Allaying local fears, Kumchedwa said the government has constructed a 40-kilometer-long fence in Kasungu to prevent the elephants from entering villages.

“If well maintained, it’s an effective barrier,” he said. “You don’t get elephants frequently going into the community. But also, to support that when these animals get dropped into Kasungu, some of them will be collared for easy monitoring. But also, we have teams for both on ground and aerial support so that we give real time protection to the communities should these elephants be breaking off.”

Malawi undertook one of the largest elephant relocations in history in 2016 when 520 elephants were moved to repopulate the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve.

At the time of its last survey in 2015, Malawi had about 2,000 elephants in all, a drop of 50% since the 1980s.

Source: Voice of America