Day: June 25, 2021

Malanje – Angola spends around US$428 million per year on buying wheat, the representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Guertha Barreto said in Malanje Friday.

Addressing the FAO’s vision to boost cassava as food of the 21st century, at the first International Cassava Congress, she said that the amount spent could have been applied to the local production and industrialisation of the product, whose derivatives, such as flour, can replace wheat.

Wheat is essentially used to make bread and other pastry products, which can also be processed from cassava, if the tuber is industrialised.

She said that the implementation of the school meals law in Angola is a great opportunity to incorporate cassava in the students’ diet, as well as its industrialisation.

He made it known that besides being a food for human, cassava also serves for the manufacture of animal feed and as raw material for a wide range of value added products to flour, as well as pressed wood, paper and textiles, production of sweeteners, fructose, alcohol, high technology starch gel and other by-products.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

SYDNEY – Workers and residents in Sydney were ordered to stay home for a week on Friday, as authorities locked down several central areas of Australia’s largest city to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.

Sixty-five COVID-19 cases have been reported so far in the flare-up linked to a limousine driver infected about two weeks ago when he transported an international flight crew from Sydney airport to a quarantine hotel.

But authorities have since identified scores of potential infection sites visited by thousands of people across central Sydney, including the city’s main business district.

Authorities have been alarmed by instances of people passing on the virus during fleeting encounters in shops and then quickly infecting close family contacts.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian of New South Wales state, which includes Sydney, called it the “scariest period” since the pandemic broke out more than a year ago.

On Friday, she ordered anyone who lived or worked in four central Sydney neighborhoods to stay home for at least a week, only venturing out to purchase essential goods, obtain medical care, exercise or if they are unable to work from home.

The restrictions included central business district workers over fears that commuters were potentially spreading the virus into other parts of the city, Berejiklian said.

“We’ve done better than expected in terms of contact tracing and getting on top of all those links,” she said.

“But what this does is make sure that we haven’t missed any chains of community transmission.”

An earlier ban on Sydneysiders leaving the city was also extended until next Friday, as traces of the virus were detected in sewage in the far-flung outback town of Bourke, about nine hours drive northwest of Sydney.

It was a dramatic development for a city that had returned to relative normality after months of recording very few local cases.

Australia Medical Association President Omar Khorshid chided New South Wales authorities for not taking tougher action, including locking down the entire Sydney metropolitan region, home to some 5 million people.

“The Delta virus is different; it is being transmitted far more easily,” Khorshid told media in Canberra. “Sydney has not faced this before.”

Korshid warned that although the economic impact of a lockdown was hard, a wider outbreak could be “catastrophic” for the whole country.

It is the latest in a string of snap “circuit-breaker” lockdowns across major cities around Australia, with most cases linked to returning travelers held in hotel quarantine.

Australia has been among the world’s most successful countries in containing COVID-19, with more than 30,000 cases and 910 deaths in a population of about 25 million.

Source: Voice of America

“Africa is facing a fast-surging third wave of COVID-19 pandemic, with cases spreading more rapidly and projected to soon overtake the peak of the second wave the continent witnessed at the start of 2021,” according to the World Health Organization’s regional office in Africa.

WHO said in a statement the pandemic is resurging in 12 African countries. Meanwhile, the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, first identified in India, has been detected in 14 African countries.

“The third wave is picking up speed, spreading faster, hitting harder. With rapidly rising case numbers and increasing reports of serious illness, the latest surge threatens to be Africa’s worst yet,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, WHO regional director for Africa said.

The third wave comes as Africa is experiencing a vaccine shortage. WHO says just slightly more than 1% of Africans have been fully vaccinated. While approximately 2.7 billion COVID-19 vaccine shots have been administered globally, WHO says just under 1.5% of those shots have been administered on the African continent.

The Associated Press reports that its analysis of recent COVID-19 deaths reveals that nearly all the deaths occurred in people who were unvaccinated. The news agency said the results of its assessment are “a staggering demonstration of how effective the shots have been.” In addition, AP said the deaths per day “could be practically zero if everyone eligible got the vaccine.”

Workers and residents in several neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia, have been told to stay home as officials attempt to bring a COVID-19 outbreak under control. Authorities say they believe they outbreak started with a limousine driver who transported an international flight crew to a quarantine hotel in Sydney.

The directors of the WHO, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization say they met earlier this month to determine how they can collectively “tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressing global challenges at the intersection of public health, intellectual property and trade.”

The three organizations said in a statement that their initiatives will include:

• a series of “capacity-building workshops to enhance the flow of updated information on current developments in the pandemic and responses to achieve equitable access to COVID-19 health technologies.”

• the creation of a “joint platform for tripartite technical assistance to countries relating to their needs for COVID-19 medical technologies, providing a one-stop shop that will make available the full range of expertise on access, IP and trade matters provided by our organizations, and other partners, in a coordinated and systematic manner.”

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Friday that global count of COVID-19 infections has reached more than 180 million. The three countries with the most cases are the U.S. with 33.6 million cases, India with more than 30 million infections and Brazil with 18.2 million.

Source: Voice of America