Malawi Wire

Black and Hispanic adults on dialysis experience more staph bloodstream infections than white patients receiving the treatment for kidney failure, U.S. health officials said Monday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing 2017-2020 data, said adults on dialysis for end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) were 100 times more likely to have a Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection than adults not receiving the treatment.

According to the CDC, more than 800,000 people in the United States live with ESKD. Seventy percent are being treated with dialysis and 30% have a functioning kidney transplant.

African Americans constitute some 33% of all U.S. dialysis patients although they make up only 12% of the population.

About one in every five dialysis patients is Hispanic.

Members of both groups have significantly higher rates of staph bloodstream infections than white patients on dialysis, the CDC said, with Hispanic patients experiencing a 40% higher risk.

The CDC said the higher prevalence of ESKD among Blacks and Hispanics is due in part to underlying conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.

Needles and catheters are used to connect patients to dialysis machines that clean their blood, and bacterial infections such as staph can enter a patient’s bloodstream.

Some staph infections are resistant to common antibiotics, making them particularly deadly.

The CDC said bloodstream infections in dialysis patients in the United States have decreased since 2014 but more needs to be done to prevent them.

“Preventing staph bloodstream infections begins by detecting chronic kidney disease in its early stages to prevent or delay the need for dialysis,” CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry said in a statement.

“Health care providers can promote preventative practices, including methods to manage diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as providing education on treatment options,” Houry said.

The CDC said 4,840 dialysis facilities reported 14,822 bloodstream infections in 2020 and 34% of them were due to staph.

Source: Voice of America

For Wilfred Cadet, buying soup on Sunday is the equivalent of going to church.

Seated on plastic chairs next to a street food stand tucked in an alleyway, the 47-year-old Haitian slurps orange-colored soup out of a metal bowl next to his 9-year-old son.

Haitians mill past them cradling larger plastic containers, each eager to get a giant spoonful of the stew boiling in two human-sized pots behind them.

Made of pumpkin, beef, carrots, cabbage – ingredients produced on the island – soup joumou is a cultural staple in Haiti.

And in a moment of deepening crisis in the Caribbean nation, it’s one of the few points of enduring national pride.

To this day, when you mention the soup, Haitians are quick to crack a smile.

“It’s our tradition, our culture. It makes people proud. No matter what happens (in Haiti), the soup is going to stay around,” said Cadet.

During the colonial period, slaves were banned from eating the spicy dish, and would have to prepare it for French slave owners.

But Haitians claimed soup joumou as their own in 1804 when they staged one of the biggest and most successful slave rebellions in the Western Hemisphere.

The uprising put an end to slavery in Haiti far before much of the region, and the dish gained the nickname “independence soup.”

In 2021 – the same year the country spiraled into chaos following the assassination of its president – the soup was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List, the first cuisine Haiti has on the list.

“It is a celebratory dish, deeply rooted in Haitian identity, and its preparation promotes social cohesion and belonging among communities,” reads the UNESCO entry.

It’s traditionally eaten on Sunday mornings, and on Haitian Independence Day in early January.

That’s when customers begin filing through a pair of black metal gates into 50-year-old Marie France Damas’ makeshift restaurant at 7:30 a.m.

Tucked behind rows of parked cars, a brick wall with a painted sign reading “Every Sunday: Soup Joumou” and a pile of local pumpkins, Damas labors away over her two big pots just like she has for the past 18 years.

Her husband weaves between plastic tables taking orders while her daughter chops vegetables behind her. It’s a family affair, but Damas is clear.

“I’m the boss of the soup,” she said with a grin.

The business has allowed her to put her children through school and give a good life to her family in a place with some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the region.

To each Haitian, the cuisine means something different.

For Cadet and his son, it represents one moment of an escape from the day-to-day pandemonium of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

It has also allowed Cadet to pass on a cherished part of Haitian culture at a time when they’re slowly fading away. Celebrations like Carnival that once took center stage on the island have withered due to deep gang violence tearing apart the nation.

“The violence in the country is making everyone leave, and over time, we’re going to lose a lot of cultural traditions,” Cadet said. “My son, of course, (will go). Right now, he doesn’t like Haiti.”

He hopes that when his son goes, he’ll remember their Sunday mornings together.

To others, like 35-year-old Maxon Sucan, it’s a way to reconnect with family and home in the countryside.

He grew up in a rural town in western Haiti in a farming family cultivating the very vegetables used to make the soup.

He came to Port-au-Prince 13 years ago to support his family, and works as a manager at a nightclub.

He would once visit his family six to eight times a year, but because of kidnappings and gang control of the countryside, he’s now unable to go home.

So Sunday mornings, he drinks the soup just like he once did as a kid, and he thinks about his daughter who he sometimes goes weeks without speaking to.

“She’s 3 years old and it hurts me that I can’t see her,” Sucan said. “(When I eat soup joumou) I remember my family.”

As he gets ready to leave the restaurant alone, cradling a large Tupperware filled with steaming soup, he pauses.

“When I go home today, I’ll call her. And when I do, I’ll ask if she ate the soup,” he adds.

Source: Voice Of America

Cybersecurity agencies in Europe are warning of ransomware attacks exploiting a two-year-old computer bug as Italy experienced widespread internet outages.

The Italian premier’s office said Sunday night the attacks affecting computer systems in the country involved “ransomware already in circulation” in a product made by cloud technology provider VMware.

A Friday technical bulletin from a French cybersecurity agency said the attack campaigns target VMware ESXi hypervisors, which are used to monitor virtual machines.

Palo Alto, California-based VMware fixed the bug back in February 2021, but the attacks are targeting older, unpatched versions of the product.

The company said in a statement Sunday that its customers should take action to apply the patch if they have not already done so.

“Security hygiene is a key component of preventing ransomware attacks,” it said.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Sunday it is “working with our public and private sector partners to assess the impacts of these reported incidents and providing assistance where needed.”

The problem attracted particular public attention in Italy on Sunday because it coincided with a nationwide internet outage affecting telecommunications operator Telecom Italia, which interfered with streaming the Spezia v. Napoli soccer match but appeared largely resolved by the time of the later Derby della Madonnina between Inter Milan and AC Milan. It was unclear whether the outages were related to the ransomware attacks.

Source: Voice Of America

Firefighters were battling dozens of raging wildfires in Chile on Sunday, seeking to gain control of one of the country’s worst natural disasters in years as the death toll rose to at least 24 with nearly 1,000 more injured.

International help was set to arrive Sunday from a handful of countries that have pledged resources, including planes and expert firefighting teams, as the most intense wildfires torched forests and farmland clustered around three regions near the middle of the South American country’s long Pacific coastline.

The government of President Gabriel Boric has issued emergency declarations for the largely rural southern regions of Biobio, Nuble and Araucania to speed relief.

The fires have consumed some 270,000 hectares (1042 square miles), officials said Sunday, or an area roughly the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

A searing heat wave in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer has complicated efforts to extinguish the flames, as temperatures in some of the most affected areas have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

Pockets of intense fire could be seen leaping out from the forested hills off the coast near the town of Dichato just outside the city of Concepcion in the Biobio region Saturday night, as light from the flames illuminated boats in the small harbor.

Thirteen of the dead — more than half of the fires’ reported victims — come from Biobio, which, like Nuble and Araucania, is home to extensive forests as well as farms that grow grapes and other fruit for export.

Some 260 fires are active across the parched region, interior ministry officials said Sunday, with 28 of them considered especially dangerous.

Nearly 1,500 people have fled to area shelters. At least 26 of the 970 injured are listed in grave condition at local hospitals.

Chilean officials have sought international assistance to battle the fires, with new ones sparking to life each day.

While authorities said Saturday assistance would soon arrive from countries including the United States, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela, a specialized team of personnel from Spain was en route Sunday.

Source: Voice Of America

As it marks World Cancer Day, the World Health Organization is calling for action to tackle breast cancer, the most common and leading cause of cancer deaths among women.

Every year, more than 2.3 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and nearly 700,000 die of the disease, which disproportionately affects women living in low- and middle-income countries.

WHO officials say women who live in poorer countries are far less likely to survive breast cancer than women in richer countries.

“Breast cancer survival is 50 percent or less in many low- and middle-income countries, and greater than 90 percent for those able to receive the best care in high income countries,” says Bente Mikkelsen, director of the Noncommunicable Diseases Department at the WHO.

She says the odds are stacked against women who live in poor countries, noting many must sell their assets to pay for the treatment they need.

She notes that women also are discouraged from seeking and receiving a timely diagnosis for their condition because of the stigma attached to breast cancer.

“A woman subjected to racial and ethnic disparities will receive lower quality care and be forced to abandon treatment,” she says.

WHO data show more than 20 high income countries have successfully reduced breast cancer mortality by 40 percent since 1990. It finds five-year survival rates from breast cancer in North America and western Europe is better than 95 percent, compared to 66 percent in India and 40 percent in South Africa.

Mikkelsen says by closing the rich-poor inequity gap, some 2.5 million lives could be saved over the next two decades.

“Time is, unfortunately, not on our side. Breast cancer will be a larger public health threat for tomorrow, and the gap in care will continue to grow.

She says that “by the year 2040, more than 3 million cases and 1 million deaths are predicted to occur each year worldwide. Approximately 75 percent of these deaths will occur in low- and middle-income countries.”

Coinciding with World Cancer Day, the WHO is launching a global breast cancer initiative to tackle the looming threat. The initiative contains a series of best practices for addressing this significant public health issue.

The strategy rests on three main pillars: early-detection programs so at least 60 percent of breast cancers are diagnosed and treated as an early-stage disease; starting treatment within three months of diagnosis; managing breast cancer to ensure at least 80 percent of patients complete their recommended treatment.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, says, “Countries with weaker health systems are least able to manage the increasing burden of breast cancer … so, it must be a priority for ministries of health and governments everywhere.

“We have the tools and the knowhow to prevent breast cancer and save lives,” he says.

Benjamin Anderson, medical officer and lead of the WHO’s global breast cancer initiative, says one of the best ways to implement the initiative is through primary health care systems.

“The patient pathway is the basis of the three pillars of the global cancer initiative framework. What we anticipate is that by using awareness, education in the public, combined with professional education, it sets us up for the diagnostic processes that must take place and the treatment that has to follow.”

The World Health Organization warns failure to act now to address cancer in women, including breast cancer, will have serious intergenerational consequences.

It cites a study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that reported that because of “the estimated 4.4 million women who died from cancer in 2020, about 1 million children became maternal orphans in that year,” 25 percent of which was due to breast cancer.

Mikkelsen observes, “the children whose mothers die from cancer experience health and educational disadvantages throughout their lives.”

WHO officials acknowledge the cost of drugs to treat breast cancer could be a matter of life or death. It notes the price of certain oral drugs is less than $1, while others range from $9,000 to $10,000.

As many countries are unable to negotiate prices, they say the WHO is working to increase the availability and affordability of breast cancer medication.

Source: Voice Of America