Malawi Wire

Displaced women and girls at Sekeni Primary School Camp in Chikwawa have expressed gratitude to UNFPA – the United Nations agency dedicated to preventing maternal deaths, advancing family planning and ending gender-based violence – for its timely intervention after the district was hit by Tropical Storm Ana on 24 January.

During the distribution of dignity kits in Nchalo on 9 February, Yankho Alufandika (21), a resident in the shelter, said since people moved to the camp late January, this was the very first relief assistance that this community received despite their dire situation.

“The support by UNFPA has come at a right time as many women and girls in the camp were struggling to maintain their hygiene,” said Alufandika who spoke on behalf of more than 300 residents of the camp. “Many came to this camp with nothing as their personal possessions were swept away by the floods.”

UNFPA with funding from KFW, a German development aid agency, procured 5,000 dignity kits, which were prepositioned in the disaster prone southern region. When Tropical Storm Ana hit the country, the supplies were quickly released to the affected districts, targeting women of child bearing age and adolescent girls. The distributed kits kept in the buckets included soaps, sanitary pads, and underwear – essential items for ensuring hygiene and restoring dignity of the pregnant women, lactating mothers and adolescent girls.

At Sekeni Camp, UNFPA distributed 209 dignity kits. Another 365 kits were distributed at Matsukambiya camp in the district. Chikwawa is by far the hardest hit district by the flooding. According to the latest statistics, the district has 92 camps where people are seeking temporary shelter and relief.

The displaced people here in Nchalo spend nights in the classrooms of a nearby school without provision of light or mattresses. During the day, they wait for relief to arrive siting under the trees, while the classrooms are occupied by the students.

“Women and girls are, particularly, in a vulnerable situation, for example not only faced with their health and hygiene challenges but also with potentially heightened risk of gender based violence.” says UNFPA Deputy Representative, Masaki Watabe, during his visit to the affected areas in Nchalo.

“That is why we are focusing on this particular group of people and working closely with our districts’ counterparts and NGO partners.”

Critical information such as how to respond to and report on gender-based violence cases was also provided during the distribution.

Cyclone Ana disrupts health services

Chikwawa district has a total of 24 facilities and 21 are having access challenges as roads are still cut-off by water, resulting in disruption in the provision of life-saving maternal, neonatal and under five services in health centers, health posts and outreach clinics. In addition, many of the health facilities in the district are still without electricity due to Cyclone Ana induced floods.

Watabe also visited Nchalo health centre which was closed for a week after floods submerged part of the facility. Currently, the maternity wing of the centre is only operating during the day as there is no power. Those delivering in the evenings have to be referred to the district hospital. The facility is also yet to get reconnected to running water.

“We received reports on the water and electricity supply situation,” says Watabe. “UNFPA has set aside some funds to respond to the most immediate needs as requested by Chikwawa District, and we will try to prioritize the quickest restoration of maternal services in facilities such as Nchalo Health Centre. This will enable the displaced people, especially pregnant women, to have access to critical health care.”

UNFPA calls for more resources to scale up response

Watabe added that UNFPA needs more resources to ensure that pregnant women deliver babies safely and the displaced have continued access to family planning and relevant information to remain healthy.

“Malawi urgently needs additional resources to tackle this situation that has affected the hundreds of thousands of people,” says Watabe. “We are calling upon the international community for support to enable us to scale up the response as quickly as possible.”

Source: United Nations Population Fund

NASA’s new space telescope has captured its first starlight and taken a selfie of its giant, gold mirror.

All 18 segments of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope seem to be working properly 1½ months into the mission, officials said Friday.

The telescope’s first target was a bright star 258 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

“That was just a real wow moment,” said Marshall Perrin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Over the next few months, the hexagonal mirror segments — each the size of a coffee table — will be aligned and focused as one, allowing science observations to begin by the end of June.

The $10 billion infrared observatory — considered the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope — will seek light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. It will also examine the atmospheres of alien worlds for any possible signs of life.

NASA did not detect the crippling flaw in Hubble’s mirror until after its 1990 launch; more than three years passed before spacewalking astronauts were able to correct the telescope’s blurry vision.

While everything is looking good so far with Webb, engineers should be able to rule out any major mirror flaws by next month, said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager.

Webb’s 21-foot (6.5-meter), gold-plated mirror is the largest ever launched into space. An infrared camera on the telescope snapped a picture of the mirror as one segment gazed upon the targeted star.

“Pretty much the reaction was, ‘Holy cow!’ ” Feinberg said.

NASA released the selfie, along with a mosaic of starlight from each of the mirror segments. The 18 points of starlight resemble bright fireflies flitting against a black night sky.

After 20 years with the project, “it is just unbelievably satisfying” to see everything working so well so far, said the University of Arizona’s Marcia Rieke, principal scientist for the infrared camera.

Webb lifted off from South America in December and reached its designated perch 1.6 million kilometers away last month.

Source: Voice of America

HIGHLIGHTS

• Tropical Storm ANA has caused floods, destruction, and fatalities in Malawi

• Malawi President declared a State of National Disaster on 26th January 2022

• 21,127 households (995,072 people) are affected across 19 districts

• 46 people died, 206 people were injured while 18 people still reported missing

• 32,935 households (152,786 people) displaced

• 178 displacement camps across affected districts

• Food and non-food items being delivered to affected populations across the districts

• UN and partners are supporting the life-saving emergency flood response.

• Main Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) was set up in Blantyre on 25th January. It will be based in Lilongwe from Monday 14th February and 2 sub EOCs opening up in Chikwawa and Nsanje

SITUATION

• Tropical Storm Ana caused heavy flooding in a number of districts in Malawi, especially in the Southern Region due to a lot of heavy rainfall and strong winds.

• According to the Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services, while the 2019 Cyclone Idai was a tropical cyclone, Ana is not a cyclone. Rather, it is a moderate tropical storm, yet Idai had rainfall amounts of 150 mm within 24 hrs while Ana had 250 mm and above rainfall recorded within 24 hrs.

• Displaced persons are seeking shelter in evacuation centres, schools, churches, hospitals, shelters, and made-up camp sites. Chikwawa, Nsanje, Phalombe and Mulanje and are the most affected districts.

• While road repairs are underway, many areas are still cut-off, making it difficult to fully assess the damages.

• The damage includes:

o Blown-off house roofs; loss of livestock; collapsed houses, toilets, and brick fences; damaged road network, bridges, culverts, and other road structures; loss of household items; and damaged public and private infrastructure, including schools, health facilities and churches.

o Destroyed teaching and learning materials; crops washed away, logging of crops from the strong winds, damage on power plant causing power supply disruptions; and contamination of water sources.

Source: UN Country Team in Malawi

French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said.

Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area’s city hall said. No other details were released.

Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi.

The French minister for higher education and research, Frédérique Vidal, praised Montagnier’s work on HIV in a written statement Thursday and expressed her condolences to his family.

Inspired by discoveries

Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.

According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.

He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.

“My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new, mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.

In 1983, a working group led by him and Barré-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later become known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused AIDS.

American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have found the same virus at almost exactly the same time, sparking a disagreement over who should get the credit. The United States and France settled a dispute over the patent for an AIDS test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as the discoverer of the virus, Gallo as the creator of the first test.

Shunned for recent views

Since the end of the 2000s, Montagnier started expressing views devoid of a scientific basis. His opinions led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community.

As COVID-19 spread across the globe and conspiracy theories flourished, Montagnier was among those behind some of the misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus.

During a 2020 interview with French news broadcaster CNews, he claimed that the coronavirus did not originate in nature and had been manipulated. Experts who have looked at the genome sequence of the virus have said Montagnier’s statement was incorrect.

At the time, AP made multiple unsuccessful attempts to contact Montagnier.

Last year, he claimed in a French documentary that COVID-19 vaccines led to the creation of coronavirus variants.

Experts contacted by The Associated Press explained that variants found across the globe began emerging long before vaccines were widely available. They said the evidence suggests new variants evolved as a result of prolonged viral infections in the population and not vaccines, which are designed to prevent such infections.

Earlier this year, Montagnier delivered a speech at a protest against vaccine certificates in Milan, Italy.

Montagnier was emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus research director at the CNRS. He received multiple awards, including France’s highest decoration, the Legion of Honor.

Source: Voice of America

More than two weeks after tropical storm Ana hit Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi, hundreds of thousands of people are still struggling with access to safe, clean water, as the storm damaged boreholes, sanitation and other facilities.

Restoring these facilities in the aftermath of the storm is vital to prevent the outbreak of water borne diseases such as cholera, WaterAid said.

In Malawi alone, many face an increased risk of disease outbreaks, having to walk for miles for safe water or drinking expensive bottled water. Tropical storm Ana impacted or destroyed an estimated 1,000 boreholes and twenty larger water supply facilities, which at least 500,000 people depend on. It also damaged close to 80,000 hectares of farmland.

In Mozambique, where the storm mainly hit in the provinces Zambezia, Nampula and Tete and flooded over 70,000 hectares of land, water systems were also impacted. In Zambezia alone, some 40,000 people were affected. Sanitation and water resources were contaminated or completely destroyed in homes, schools and health facilities as sanitation and water systems collapsed.

Madagascar was hit by tropical storm Ana, mainly affecting water systems in the capital, and last weekend by cyclone Batsirai, which impacted vulnerable communities in the southeast of the country.

WaterAid is responding in the aftermath of storm Ana through the provision of emergency water, sanitation and hygiene supplies, to help prevent the spread of disease. It also works to restore impacted water and sanitation facilities, and will run awareness raising campaigns in communities.

With climate change driving more erratic weather events, including heavy rains and flooding, it is paramount new facilities for water, sanitation and hygiene are set up in a sustainable way that can withstand the impacts of the climate crisis, WaterAid said.

“It is vital people have access to water and sanitation, no matter what the weather”, said Mercy Masoo, country director of WaterAid in Malawi. “Storm Ana has impacted that security for hundreds of thousands of people in Malawi alone, erasing some of the progress that was made over the past years. We can’t let that happen again with future climate shocks.”

The newly established Water and Sanitation Ministry in Malawi earlier this week warned populations living around rivers to refrain from settling or cultivating crops and to be alert for flooded waterways.

WaterAid’s Regional Programme Manager Elijah Adera, said: “The destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure in homes, schools, health care facilities and other public spaces increases the risk of water borne diseases.

“When a disaster of this magnitude strikes, affected populations urgently need access to clean and safe water, sanitation facilities and hygiene supplies. Especially for women and girls, who are usually hardest hit in disasters.

“This immediate support helps to mitigate or even prevent further disaster caused by disease.”

Storm Ana swept across Madagascar and Mozambique, killing dozens of people before it hit Malawi. WaterAid Mozambique is working with a partner in Zambezia province to help prevent the spread of diseases like cholera. In Madagascar, WaterAid has been providing clear water and hygiene kits to people who had to flee their homes in the wake of storm Ana.

Source: WaterAid