A similar East African free-trade zone was set up in 1967, but collapsed in 1977 as wars devastated the region.

Under the terms of the agreement creating the East Africa Community Customs Union, Kenya, which has a more industrialized economy than Tanzania and Uganda, will pay duties on goods it exports to the other two until 2010, when such duties will disappear.

The three countries will also set identical tariffs for imports from outside the three countries.

Source:

East Africa trade accord launched. The BBC, January 1, 2005.

Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda Trade Bloc Accord Goes Into Effect is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

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Typically, AZT is used to reduce the risk of transmission. Unfortunately, AZT treatment has two drawbacks. First, it has to be given numerous times — the mother receives AZT every three hours during labor and then the infant receives it every day for a week after childbirth. Secondly, the need for numerous doses raises the cost of the treatment.

The John Hopkins and Makarere University researchers tested a much simpler regimen involving anti-HIV drug nevirapine. In the study, a control group was administered the AZT therapy and the experimental group was given nevirapine once to the mother during labor and then once to the infant immediately after birth.

The result was that the infants administered nevirapine were less likely to be HIV positive 18 months after birth than were those administered AZT. That represents a 41 percent lower risk for infants given nevirapine.

This confirmed results of a 1999 study, also in Uganda, in which infants and mothers were given either zidovudine or nevirapine. That study found that those receiving zidovudine were twice as likely to be HIV positive as those receiving nevirapine, though that study only tracked the infants several months after birth rather than the extended period of the latest study.

Johns Hopkins researcher Dr. J. Brooks Jackson said of the finding,

This use of nevirapine, if widely implemented, has the potential to prevent several hundred thousand new infections every year. This regimen is extremely simple, safe and inexpensive, but access to HIV testing and counseling remains a huge obstacle. Fortunately, the recent availability of funds for HIV prevention and treatment for Africa from the Bush AIDS relief plan will likely make a huge difference in the implementation of this nevirapine regimen.

Sources:

Article: Newer HIV Drug Protects Babies Better Against Virus. Reuters Health, September 13, 2003.

Cheap drug ‘prevents HIV births’. The BBC, September 12, 2003.

Drugs to Newborns Block HIV Infection from Moms. Kenna Brigham, Johns Hopkins University, October 13, 2003.

Finding a Way to Fight Mom/Baby HIV Transmission. Johns Hopkins University, September 15, 2003.

Study Suggests Cheaper, More Effect Method to Prevent HIV Transmission to Newborns is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

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But a survey of African patients in Botswana, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda found that, in fact, HIV patients in those countries were more likely to stick to their regimen of AIDS drugs than were Americans.

On average, the survey reported that AIDS patients in those four countries take about 90 percent of the prescribed drugs. That ranks favorably with American AIDS patients who, in similar surveys, reported taking about 70 percent of their anti-HIV drugs.

Interestingly, there is also evidence that African patients are more truthful in reporting their compliance with the anti-HIV regimen than American patients. According to the New York Times’ report of the survey results,

Moreover, doctors say, most African patients are zealous about their regimens. They are also more truthful when estimating their adherence, said Dr. David Bangsberg, a professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco who has studied compliance patterns here and abroad.

On average, he said, American patients tell their doctors that they are doing 20 percentage points better than they really are — that is, a patient who says he takes 90 percent of his pills will, when tested with unannounced home pill counts or electronic pill-bottle caps, turn out to be taking 70 percent.

A study of 29 Ugandan patients found that, on average, they estimated that they were taking 93 percent of pills and proved to be taking 91 percent.

There are a number of possible reason for the difference, including that in African nations a number of people in the AIDS patient’s extended family may be contributing to help pay for the relatively expensive drugs, and that AIDS patients in Africa have a more immediate experience with numerous fatalities from the disease given the relatively high death rate from AIDS in Africa compared to the United States.

Sources:

Africans Outdo Americans in Following AIDS Therapy. Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times, September 3, 2003.

Do Africans Follow Anti-HIV Drug Regimen Better Than Americans? is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

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Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe withdrew their armed forces from the DR Congo as part of an agreement to bring a halt to that country’s civil war. But the United Nations report maintains that the military officials who were using their armies to strip DR Congo of precious minerals and gems have simply set up deeply entrenched criminal organizations to accomplish the same thing in their absence.

According to the report,

Three distinct criminal groups linked to the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe and the Government of the DRC have benefited from overlapping micro-conflicts [and] will not disband voluntarily even as the foreign military forces continue their withdrawals.

. . .

The looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves has been replaced with organised systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and diversion of state funds conducted by groups that closely resemble criminal organizations.

The report cites 54 specific individuals and recommends a variety of actions be taken against them, such as freezing their assets and barring them for travel, if they do not cease such activities within a few months.

Of course the real problem is less that these individuals are willing to pay large bribes and use other means to gain access to the DR Congo’s wealth, but rather that the DR Congo government is so weak and corrupt that this appears to be the normal, accepted way of doing business in that country.

The reaction of the African nations was predictable — the report was all lies. After all, who ever heard of official corruption on the African continent?

Source:

Focus on UN Panel report on the plunder of the Congo. UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, October 21, 2002.

Africa fury at U.N. looting report. Reuters, October 22, 2002.

States set up cartels to plunder Congo UN. Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, Business Day (Johannesburg), October 22, 2002.

First Quantum denies U.N. accusations on Congo. Reuters, October 22, 2002.

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Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygeine reported in The Lancet that Uganda used a number of questionable statistical practices to create the appearance that AIDS infections had declined so dramatically.

Among other things, Uganda relied on a small number of reports from urban clinics and then extrapolated from those figures, even though 87 percent of Uganda’s population is rural. Uganda officials also apparently used the rate of prevalence as the rate of infection, even though prevalence rates are subject to fluctuations when people with the disease die.

Parkhurst concluded that, “Statements of success have often been based on misinterpretation of epidemiological data, and can sometimes not be supported when all the Ugandan evidence is assessed . . . Unfounded claims of Ugandan success have persisted in international policy discourse.”

Source:

Uganda: Row over HIV/AIDS success story. Africa Online, August 26, 2002.

Was Uganda’s AIDS Success a Fraud? is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

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Over a million people die every year from malaria related complications, and one reason so many people die is that few people have immunity to malaria. Typically large numbers of people die when malaria epidemics break out in areas where the disease is not common.

Tarekegn Abeku of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told the BBC, “Most people don’t have immunity to malaria, so all the adult population and the children are affected. So the mortality rate can be very high in these areas when epidemic occur.”

Abeku is helping Kenya and Uganda predict when and where outbreaks are likely to occur through a combination of weather and disease monitoring.

On the weather side of things, unexpected malaria outbreaks tend to occur due to shifting weather patterns. According to Abeku,

Mainly, these epidemics are related to changes in weather conditions so we are also trying to set up data collection systems to collect material — meteorological data — that we can link with this morbidity data. We will use this information to develop a system that can be used for forecasting the average weather conditions and to use that to predict the probability of occurrence of epidemics.

In addition, health facilities will report malaria cases and death rates every week to health management teams which will be used with the weather data to predict any possible epidemics.

When researchers believe that conditions are right for an outbreak, they will treat people in the area for malaria in order to reduce the level of malaria parasite in the local population as well as possibly using insecticide to lower the mosquito population.

If the system proves successful in preventing malaria outbreaks, it could be used in other developing countries where malaria is a serious health problem.

Source:

Africa gets malaria early warning system. The BBC, May 5, 2002.

Kenya and Uganda to Test Malaria Early Warning System is a post from: Overpopulation.Com

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