Africa News

Archive for December, 2010

Kabiro Health Care Trust
Kawangware 46
P.O. Box 55454, Nairobi
Tel: 020-565162

Kasarani Maternity & Nursing Home
Kasarani – Kangundo Road
P.O. Box 31524, Nairobi 00600
Tel: 020-860026, 862742
Beds: 60

Kayole Hospital
Kayole Estate
P.O. Box 67617, Nairobi 00100
Tel: 020-790600, 782473
Beds: 40

Kilimanjaro Nursing Home
Major Kinyanjui Street
P.O. Box 43920, Nairobi
Tel: 020-3760773, 3765265

Komarock Nursing Home
Komarock Estate Section II
P.O. Box 19340, Nairobi 00200
Tel: 020-783648
Beds: 10

Hospitals

those list are incomplete, both government and private hospitals in Zimbabwe , please help us to add more list. send your list to : info@africahealthnews.org

MAUN, Small charter planes fly tourists from all over the world to safari camps in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they view wildlife by day and pay up to US$1,000 a night to stay in luxury lodges or rough it in five-star tents.

The safari camps are mainly expatriate owned and managed, but guests are waited on, cooked for and guided through the bush by people from Maun, the largest town in the district and the gateway to the Okavango. After the government, safari camp operators are the biggest employers.

Most of the camps are only reachable by air, so employees spend three months at a time in the bush, working and living together. Many are young and single, while those who are married are rarely employed as couples and usually leave their spouses behind in Maun.

In other parts of the world, after-hours boredom would not be considered a dangerous occupational hazard, but this is Botswana, where one in four adults is infected with HIV.

“Let’s say a camp has 12 staff and you’re there for three months. You finish work and it’s boring and it’s quiet,” said Bonti Botunile, a relief manager who has worked at a number of safari camps. “People are social creatures; they’re going to get together and then break up and move on, and some won’t disclose their [HIV] status because they fear rejection.”

Companies have to foot the bill for HIV/AIDS-related absenteeism; sick employees must be flown out and relief workers flown in. A few years ago, safari camp operators began waking up to the fact that HIV/AIDS was bad for business.

“A lot of people died, a lot had to be flown to hospital; they were constantly having to retrain,” said Botunile. “They realised that if we don’t do something, our businesses are going to suffer.”

A number of the companies met with local health authorities to form a committee that now meets every two months to coordinate HIV/AIDS programmes for camp employees.

“Companies do their best”

The companies pay the costs of regularly flying doctors, nurses and counsellors from the Maun District Health Team into the camps to attend to staff members’ health needs and to conduct voluntary counselling and HIV testing. Many companies also employ full-time welfare officers and have a nurse on call to provide medical advice.

Before becoming a welfare officer for A&K Safaris, Mary Hastag worked for 10 different safari camp operators between 2004 and 2006, providing HIV/AIDS education. “At the time, there wasn’t much happening, but now most companies have workplace policies, welfare officers and lay counsellors. It’s a big improvement,” she told IRIN/PlusNews.

”A lot of people died, a lot had to be flown to hospital; they were constantly having to retrain.”
Lecco Masoko, a welfare officer and AIDS councillor for a company that operates three camps in the Okavango, gives employees information on how to stay healthy and encourages them to be tested. “By October last year, virtually all of our staff knew their status,” he said.

Although he knows that about 36 percent of employees are HIV positive, he doesn’t know an individual’s status unless they decide to disclose it, but said many employees were open about being HIV positive.

“People tend to be more open about their HIV status in the camps than they are in town,” commented Allison Brown, a nurse contracted by 25 safari operators to provide medical advice and evaluations.

By special arrangement with Maun Hospital, camp employees who are on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment and have been declared stable by a doctor can pick up a three-month supply of the drugs when they come home on leave, but Brown said the HIV/AIDS clinic at the hospital did not always have enough stock to give them medicine for three months at a time.

Hastag said the safari operators’ good intentions often came up against the limitations of the local public health service. “There’s a shortage of medical staff and drugs, so even if the companies do their best, at times the District Health Team doesn’t go to the camps every month because of staff shortages.” February was one such month, when A&K had to fly employees in need of medical attention to Maun.

According to Brown, newly arrived expatriate managers also sometimes lacked sufficient support and information to help them deal with HIV and AIDS. “Management is under a lot of pressure,” she said. “They’ve got busy lodges, guests who’re paying a lot of money, and staff who are sometimes sick.”

Behaviour change a challenge

Ensuring that HIV-positive employees receive all the medical care and healthy food that they need is one thing; making sure that HIV-negative employees stay that way is more difficult.

Male and female condoms are available at all the camps, and some companies have built sports fields and installed satellite television to combat the boredom factor, but convincing employees to change their behaviour is not easy.

Staff receive information about how to minimise their HIV risk, but “most are single, and there’s a habit of having one partner in camp and one in Maun,” said Hastag. 22 February 2008 (PlusNews)

NAIROBI, (IRIN) – At least 34 cases of acute watery diarrhoea (AWD) have been reported in the Rift Valley town of Nakuru in the western region, a senior health official has said.

“Two deaths have also been reported in the hospital,” Shahnaaz Sharif, the senior deputy director of medical services, said. Another two deaths have been reported in the community, but not confirmed, Sharif said.

The cases had been reported in the Kasabara area in the Gilgil division of the town. The cases were attributed to the contamination of a spring in the Mbaruk area in the district. Intervention measures included supplying the residents with clean water, along with a ban on the hawking of food in the area, he said.

“We are also going to protect the spring and chlorinate it,” he said. In addition, a mobile clinic run by the Kenya Red Cross Society distributed prophylaxis treatment to 986 people, as well as health and hygiene education, in Mbaruk. At the same time, water kiosks will be set up along the Nakuru-Naivasha highway.

Sharif said he was awaiting laboratory results to confirm whether the AWD was cholera. Meanwhile, an outbreak of cholera in the western district of Kisumu East has still not been brought under control.

“There has been an on-and-off recurrence of the disease,” Sharif said. The latest outbreak in the district, which began on 6 June, mainly affected the slum areas of Manyatta, Nyalenda and Obunga and was attributed to seepage from latrines, which contaminated wells.

An earlier outbreak of the disease in January affected the districts of Bondo, Homa Bay, Kisii South, Kisumu West, Migori, Nyando, Rongo, Siayathe and Suba in the western region, leading to the deaths of 46 people, with 832 cases being reported, according to a UN World Health Organization (WHO) report on 19 April.

So far, no new cases had been reported in the other districts, he said. Cholera is an acute bacterial infection whose symptoms include copious, painless, watery diarrhoea that can easily lead to severe dehydration and death if not treated promptly. 3 July 2008

JOHANNESBURG, More international aid has been dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS than any other disease, but what impact have all those donor dollars had in countries where HIV/AIDS funding often exceeds total domestic health budgets?

The three largest HIV/AIDS donors – the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the World Bank’s Multi-Country AIDS Programme (MAP) – have spent US$20 billion on combating AIDS since 2000.

But a new report by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, “Seizing the opportunity on AIDS and health systems”, launched at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City last week, suggests that AIDS donors may actually have weakened the health systems necessary for an effective AIDS response.

“The big HIV donors are creating AIDS-specific systems that compete for health workers and administrative talent, share the same inadequate infrastructure, and further complicate already complex flows of information,” said Nandini Oomman, lead author of the report.

Noting that “The future of the global HIV/AIDS response cannot be considered independently from that of national health systems,” the study examined interactions between the three donors and health systems in three countries where they work: Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia.

”The future of the global HIV/AIDS response cannot be considered independently from that of national health systems”
Focusing on three components of those health systems – health information systems, supply chains for essential drugs, and human resources – the researchers found that donors had developed AIDS-specific processes, often creating a drain on resources essential to the country’s broader health system.

In the area of health information systems, for example, all three donors have their own reporting requirements, which burden already overstretched health facility staff with multiple record-keeping duties. “This extra effort takes away time from helping AIDS patients or providing other health services,” Oomman pointed out.

With the goal of distributing antiretroviral drugs more efficiently, donors have also supported the development of procedures that are separate from those for other essential medicines.

The report warns that “As antiretrovirals come to be offered at more and more facilities, maintaining the separate systems will become increasingly complex,” and recommends integrating the two systems.

All three countries covered in the report are experiencing severe shortages of qualified health workers, but instead of training additional workers, the three donors have funded specific training in HIV/AIDS for existing staff. In some cases, they have rewarded staff for the extra work administering their programmes with salary top-ups.

“Such top-ups … focus the attention of clinical staff on HIV/AIDS – in some cases reducing the time they give to other health services,” the report’s authors argued.

PEPFAR has also funded the hiring of large numbers of non-governmental organisation (NGO) health workers, who often earn significantly more than their counterparts working for the state. A clerk working for a PEPFAR-funded programme in Zambia, for example, makes about twice as much as a registered nurse in the public sector, according to the study.

Not surprisingly, donor funding for better paying jobs with NGOs has sometimes pulled desperately needed staff away from the state sector.

The report concludes that donors should shift their response from an initial emergency mode, in which they circumvented weak areas of national health systems to set up systems that could achieve quicker results.

15 August 2008 (PlusNews) –