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Summary

  • Marburg virus disease is a rare and deadly disease that has, at times, caused outbreaks in several African countries. It is spread by contact with blood or body fluids of a person infected with Marburg virus.

Dar es Salaam. Tanzania has issued a travel advisory following the outbreak of Marburg Viral Disease (MVD) that has claimed five lives in Kagera region so far. 

The Ministry of Health confirmed an outbreak of MVD in the Lake Zone district of Bukoba on Tuesday, March 21, 2023, four days after reports of a "possibly contagious disease" emerged in the district, killing five people, including a health worker, who developed symptoms of fever, vomiting, bleeding from various body openings, and kidney failure.

Following the outbreak, the government has decided to implement and enhance public health measures to contain the epidemic and further prevent local and international spread in line with the International Health Regulation of 2005.

In a travel advisory Number 12 of 2023, issued by the permanent secretary ministry of health minister Dr Seif Shekalaghe, on March 22 which starts with immediate effect to implement effective measures related to international travel.

Travelers to the affected areas have been recommended to adhere to seven measures as directed in the advisory;

All departing and domestic travellers from Kagera region will be required to truthfully fill out an online Traveller’s Surveillance Form through: www.afyamsafiri.moh.go.tz.

All persons in the contact tracing list should be monitored regularly and prevented from leaving their places of isolation and travel. 

At any point of entry (airport, ground crossing or port), body temperature of all travellers will be checked. All persons with feverish conditions should be prevented from traveling in and out of the country until they complete the monitoring period and are given clearance to travel by the Port Health Authority.

"All travelers will be provided with health information cards with a toll free number, which is 199 and advised to self-monitor and report any signs and symptoms of MVD. Those with signs and symptoms will be tested and treated at designated government health facilities,"

"While in the country, all international travelers should observe adherence to infection prevention and control measures such as hand hygiene, keep physical distance, and report any sign or symptom using the toll free number," the advisory directs.

All Conveyance operators should observe adherence to infection prevention and control, including hand hygiene and the use of alcohol-based sanitizer.

All travellers should adhere to points of entry, exit and domestic screening measures being implemented in the country. This includes adherence to preventive measures by travellers and staff such as hand hygiene, use of alcohol-based sanitizers, and physical distance. 

To support the Tanzania government's efforts in monitoring the outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) is set to deploy an emergency team to the Kagera region to carry out further epidemiological investigations following an outbreak of Marburg, the first ever outbreak of the viral disease in the country.

Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, said the efforts by Tanzania’s health authorities to establish the cause of the disease are a clear indication of their determination to effectively respond to the outbreak.

"We are working with the government to rapidly scale up control measures to halt the spread of the virus and end the outbreak as soon as possible," she said in a statement released on March 21, 2023.

What is Marburg?

Marburg virus disease is a rare and deadly disease that has, at times, caused outbreaks in several African countries. It is spread by contact with blood or body fluids of a person infected with the Marburg virus. It is also spread by contact with contaminated objects (such as clothing, bedding, needles, and medical equipment) or by contact with animals, such as bats and nonhuman primates, who are infected with the Marburg virus.

Marburg virus disease is a viral hemorrhagic fever. Symptoms include fever, chills, headache, muscle pain, rash, sore throat, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, chest pain, and unexplained bleeding or bruising. Infection with Marburg virus is often fatal. There is no specific treatment or approved vaccine for Marburg virus disease. 

According to WHO, there are no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat the virus. However, supportive care – rehydration with oral or intravenous fluids – and treatment of specific symptoms, improves survival.   By Bethsheba Wambura, The Citizen

A 70-year-old man who was set alight in Birmingham has been named as Mohammed Rayaz.

He was attacked as he walked back from a mosque on Monday night and has "horrific injuries".

Video showed him being approached and speaking with a man before being sprayed with an unknown substance and set alight.

A man arrested on suspicion of his attempted murder has now been arrested over a similar incident in west London last month.

Counter-terrorism police have been involved due to similarities to the attack in Ealing on 27 February. The suspect in that incident started a conversation with an 82-year-old man as they both left an Islamic Centre on Singapore Road.

Police said the pair spoke for about five minutes before he was doused with fluid and set alight. He was taken to hospital with severe burns to his face and arms.

A man was arrested on Tuesday afternoon in connection with the Birmingham attack and on Wednesday he was also arrested over the London incident.

He remains in custody on suspicion of two counts of attempted murder.

Mr Rayaz was attacked on Shenstone Road in Edgbaston as he walked back from Dudley Road mosque shortly after 7pm.

West Midlands Police said they would not speculate about potential motives and urged anyone with CCTV, doorbell footage or other video to get in touch.

A friend of Mr Rayaz said he'd been left with life-changing injuries.

"He has serious injuries to the upper part of the body and also his hands and his face at the moment," explained family spokesperson Shahbon Hussain.

"He's not even able to open his eyes, he's undergoing various skin grafts as well as a result of the horrific injuries."

Mohammed Abbkr, 28, has been charged with two counts of attempted murder after two men were set alight in Birmingham and London after leaving mosques, West Midlands Police said.

West Midlands Police said Abbkr is alleged to have sprayed a substance on two men and set it alight in separate attacks, in Ealing on 27 February and Birmingham on 20 March.

The Metropolitan Police said an incident in Edgbaston, Birmingham, in which a man was set alight on his way home from a mosque on Monday has been linked to a similar incident in Ealing, west London, where another man was set on fire in February.

The second attack saw a man set ablaze on a residential Birmingham street (West Midlands Police)
The second attack saw a man set ablaze on a residential Birmingham street (West Midlands Police)

Detectives from the Met’s West Area Command are working with West Midlands Police to establish the full circumstances surrounding the incidents, with the West Midlands force is leading the investigation. 

One of the victims, a 70-year-old man, was set alight just yards from his house as he walked home from a Birmingham mosque.

His son pleaded for help saying “my dad is on fire”, the family’s lawyer has said.

The incident left Mohammed Rayaz, a retired factory worker, with severe burns to his face, hands and chest.

He remains in stable condition in Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital after events unfolded just around the corner from his home in Shenstone Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, at about 7pm on Monday.

Family friend and lawyer Shahbon Hussain, whose office is opposite the mosque, said he got a text message from Mr Rayaz’s son within minutes of the attack.

He said: “I got a text message saying, ‘my dad is on fire – somebody has lit my dad on fire’.

The suspect can be seen speaking with Mr Rayaz before setting him on fire (West Midlands Police)
The suspect can be seen speaking with Mr Rayaz before setting him on fire (West Midlands Police)

“I thought I had misread and that maybe someone had set his car on fire but it became obvious I hadn’t misread at all.

“He heard his dad screaming, the family had gone out the house and seen him on fire.

“I immediately went over and the police, ambulance and fire brigade were already there.”

Mr Rayaz was said to be walking home from the mosque around 6pm on Monday when the suspect began speaking with him. The conversation then became intense and the pensioner was reportedly doused in a liquid before being set on fire.

Mr Hussain, who also chairs the local Streetwatch group, said: “He was taken to hospital and, in the meantime, I started detective work, putting every clue we had onto the community’s WhatsApp group, which is 160 people and managed to collate all CCTV and Ring doorbell footage.

“All that was passed to the counter-terrorism unit officers.”

He added there was a community meeting between police and locals on the Tuesday morning and, after it had ended, Mr Hussain got another call to say a man matching the description of a suspect was at Dudley Road mosque.

Abbkr will appear at Birmingham Magistrates Court on Thursday. By Thomas Kingsley, Sky News/Yahoo News

By James Opondo 

Match fixing is a menace that has plagued Kenyan local sports for years. The vice came to fore in March 12th this year, when authorities arrested 3 suspects as they tried to fix a Kenya Premier League match pitting Nairobi City Stars against Sofapaka Football Club. 

The trio Akhiad Kubiev who is a Russian, Ugandan Bernard Nabende and Kenyan Martin Munga were arrested in Nairobi following an operation involving police and footballers attached to Kenya premier league side Nairobi City Stars. The three had allegedly promised players and their manager some Kshs 1.8 million to manipulate the league match against Sofapaka on march 10th this year. The interesting bit is in the varied opinions among the Kenyan public on the arrest of match fixing suspects. 

Festo Omukoto who in 2020 was among the four locally based players banned by the world football governing body FIFA from/for taking part in match fixing was key to the police operation as he was the link to the fixers. Omukoto explained that the fixers engaged him for one month asking him to connect them with City Stars players. 

Match fixing ruined my career and continues to destroy our football. I did not want the players to go through what I underwent,” said Omukoto. 

Speaking during the raid, the Nairobi City Stars CEO Patrick Korir said that when he was contacted by Omukoto about the matter, he called the police after organizing with seven of his players to lay a trap for the fixers. 

I have spoken about it before but people take it (match fixing being rampant in FKF-PL) for granted. I am glad we can now put faces to the noise we have been making,” said Korir. 

Let me take it back a little bit because this incident is not the first in Kenya. Why is it rampant and how is FIFA dealing with the issue of match fixing that is killing the sports? The argument is Kenyan footballers have become so vulnerable to match fixing for just one reason- Kenyan football does not pay. Those taking this direction are somehow right because football clubs in Kenya never pay their players in time or sometimes the players plus staff go for months without pay. This results in players going hungry and some failing to pay their rent. 

Without food on the table, most of these players who entirely depend on their monthly salaries and bonuses from the clubs would simply and happily throw away a match for some extra money. Kenyans generally fancy corruption. Graft is a vice that you can simply put to someone in an argument and they tell you, its normal. The bad news about the vice is that it is here to stay so for as long as these players will get the opportunity to fix a match to be paid, they will simply do it as we are students of our leaders. 

Let’s go back to the trio fixers who were nabbed by the police in Nairobi. They were released on a Kshs 300,000 bond with two sureties of a similar amount. But what are the FIFA rules? As stated in its Statutes, FIFA’s objectives include “preventing all methods or practices, such as corruption, doping or match manipulation, which might jeopardise the integrity of matches, competitions, players, officials and member associations or give rise to abuse of association football.“ The only thing FIFA does is to ban for life or for a period but this as many argue will no help in ending the vice. Various stakeholders in Kenya are now asking the national assembly to consider match fixing a criminal offense. 

Most of the matches never make it to the television screens. There are mummers that this lack of visibility may silently abet match fixing even among compromised referees. With the fixers on the offensive, cash starved players and corrupt authorities who are ever ready for a bribe; it may take years or ever forever to purge match fixing from Kenyan pitches because of the wide net of cartels who yield to the crime.

 

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit has urged the other peace partners to unveil their flag bearers in preparation for general elections.

In December 2022, Kiir’s party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), endorsed him as its chairman and, by extension, presidential candidate in the vote. Kiir has been in office for over a decade.

In August last year, Kiir, First Vice President and opposition leader Riek Machar, and other political leaders announced the extension of the transitional government’s time in office for another two years, meaning general elections would be held in December 2024.

The current transitional coalition government was formed under a 2018 revitalised peace agreement.

Kiir, who was addressing a crowd of citizens at Freedom Square in Aweil town of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State on Tuesday, said it was high time the other political parties who are signatories to the peace agreement settle on their presidential candidates.

“I want all of you to be ready for the elections, and every party has its prepared fighting bull, and I am one of them.  And the contestants must expose themselves so that they can be seen clearer, and when the time comes, we will meet in the field,” Kiir said.

The South Sudanese leader underscored that there will be no more transitional governments after the peace roadmap that was signed by the parties. He appealed to the parties to the peace agreement to help implement the roadmap.

“How many transitional governments have we formed so far? That is not good and by the end of this roadmap, we must go for the elections, and any person who loses the elections must not blame anyone. He/she must go home, and the one who wins shall go ahead with his government,” he said.

“We have held the elections once before our secession from Sudan, and I want all of you to be ready for the elections…Peace implementation is going well, and if there is something that is not done much, it does mean that there is no interest in implementing it. We are working on it, and the roadmap we are implementing now was made by all parties to the agreement,” he added.

Separately, President Salva Kiir warned local communities in Northern Bahr al Ghazal State from the use of girls as a source of wealth rather than sending them to school.

 “We have a problem in girl child education, girl child education is important. There are people who just want the girls to be a source of wealth and cows when they grow up and the girls are not allowed to go to school. This is bad. Girls and boys have the right to go to school,” he said. - Chol Mawel, The Towerpost

Kenyan couple, Gideon Mbatha Mutuka, 43, and Ruth Mulisa Wambusa, PHOTO| COURTESY

By JULIUS MBALUTO 

A Kenyan Couple was among the four individuals who lost their lives after a reckless driver entered the freeway in the wrong direction causing a fatal accident which involved many vehicles.

Gideon Mbatha Mutuku, 43 and Ruth Mulisa Wambusa lived in Lake Elsinore and they lost their lives following the accident which happened at 71 Freeway in Chino Hill, USA. The accident involved six vehicles which collided after a reckless driver entered the freeway the wrong side and the high speed of collision caused some vehicles to burst into flames.  

The Southbound side of 71 Freeway was shut for over 8 hours. 

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