Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Africa’ Category

From Africa to Glastonbury: global health protection

Posted in Africa, Global Health, Health Protection, India, Mental Health, Uncategorized, tagged on July 25, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Health protection is a global issue – and there are lessons to learn and share from all incidents, wherever they occur. That was the message from the global health protection workshop at FPH’s annual conference in Cardiff on 19 July.

Delegates heard how the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has built a worldwide reputation for its work, in part because the global nature of health protection means that planning needs to go beyond national borders. The World Health Organisation has 10 collaborating centres in the UK, while the HPA has sent teams on international secondments to South Africa, India and Australia. One of the speakers talked about how the HPA had been involved in giving high-level advice to government agencies after the earthquake and nuclear power failure in Fukushima.

Closer to home, the delegates heard from Dr Sarah Finlay about how she and her colleagues from the charity Festival Medical Services dealt with an outbreak of H1N1 at the Glastonbury festival in 2009. The festival had a population of 135,000 ticket holders, and 35,000 artists and staff, many of whom were the kind of healthy, young people most likely to contract the virus. The infrastructure of the event meant that living conditions were poor. People’s behaviour, as would be expected at a music festival, was not typical. The combined circumstances meant that it was easy for communicable diseases to transfer.

Risk was mitigated by following the protocols for managing H1N1, having immediate access to antiviral stocks and good transport to the onsite medical facilities, despite the mud. Good advice was given to festival goers before, during and after the festival, stressing the ‘Catch It. Kill It. Bin It.’ message and the importance of using the hand gels that were available across the site.

Information was circulated via the Glastonbury festival website, music press and general media. Just as the HPA team working on Fukushima had regular updates throughout each day to share information, so the Glastonbury health team relied on situation updates three times each day.

There were six cases of swine ‘flu at Glastonbury in 2009, all of which were confirmed by laboratory test results and each of whom left the site for further treatment. One of these cases was a 16-year old girl who had been sharing a tepee with 12 other people, each of whom had to be tracked down in the chaos of festival life.

In the circumstances, the team felt the outbreak had been well managed, and the lessons learnt from this example of mass gathering medicine were shared with the organisers of the Berlin World Athletics and the Hadj.

Dr Finlay summed up by saying that the success of the festival’s approach to H1N1 was due to having a well thought-through approach, early detection, awareness of the issue and by sharing the lessons learnt.

Read Full Post »

Highland things

Posted in Africa, Chronic Disease, Climate change, Disaster relief, Global Health, HIV, tagged , , , , , , on October 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

Gelada baboons
Move along there: Gelada baboons

By Dr Jackie Spiby

We are still here in Addis Ababa. We have survived the rainy season and the sky is blue again.

Many of you will have seen the news about the famine in the south east of Ethiopia where it borders Sudan and Kenya. Sitting in Addis, it is as difficult to understand the whole story here as it is at home. We pick up the news and some of the debate from the BBC when the internet is working. When we travelled to the south recently, everywhere looked really fertile and verdant as it was just after the rains. But at work I do hear about problems with food-aid delivery and families that can’t feed their children.

As recipients of Global Fund money, my organisation has to have pristine financial arrangements. The management audit letter we received recently could have been one found in any PCT. By the way do PCTs still exist? The only difference was that they were querying why a goat had been bought. I recently found myself on an appointments committee for an internal auditor – something I have managed to avoid in the UK. Amazingly my interviewing instincts rose to the fore. I was delighted that my first choice was the same as the finance director’s. It did help that the interviews were in English. So, another country another culture but actually much is the same.

We took a few days off to travel north to trek in the Simien mountains. Ethiopia lies in the East African Rift Valley so much of the north and central areas are hilly in stark contrast to the desert areas bordering Sudan and Somalia. We were walking at three to four thousand metres and were surprised that it was still scattered with villages, and, wherever we went, small children were keeping an eye on the cattle and sheep. They said they went to school but I wasn’t really convinced.

Walking into a BBC crew filming the gelada baboons was quite surreal. We had just stopped to put on our macks as it was raining when we heard a very posh voice asking if we could move please as they were trying to film the baboons running down that particular hill. If you ever see a documentary on these baboons in the Simiens we were there, and we saw the locals on the other side of the hill ‘encouraging’ the baboons to move.

One of my areas of work is developing a volunteers’ strategy. Not international volunteers but local volunteers. PLHIV associations are similar to charitable organisations in the UK so their boards are all volunteers and most of the programmes workers are also volunteers. However they do get expenses. The latter get 206 birr a month for travel. That is £7.60. In the focus groups they tell me they do it for humanitarian reasons. However when I asked if they also had paid work, they said it was hard to get work as they were HIV+. So what is a volunteer? I really enjoy the focus groups: however formal I try to make them, we have to have a coffee ceremony, and they usually end with music and dancing. The highlight last week was meeting a 22-year-old woman who finished school at grade 6 but was carrying a beautiful, chubby smiling baby who everyone proudly told me was HIV negative.

Am I making any difference? Not an unusual question for anyone in public health. I’ve been asking it my entire career. I’d better get back to work and make sure that I am.

Read Full Post »

Musings from Ethiopia

Posted in Africa, Climate change, Global Health, Health Inequalities, Health Protection, HIV on June 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Monkey drinks Cola in Addis Ababa

A monkey drinks cola in Addis Ababa

By Dr Jackie Spiby

Hello from Addis Ababa.

It is a warm and sunny morning. By lunchtime it will be hot, but not too hot as we are 2,400m high and there is usually a breeze. When I go out it will be dusty, smelly and, if I noticed it anymore, the air will be polluted. This is mainly due to the huge volume of taxis, buses and lorries, most of which are ancient and belch out dark smoke which hangs around the city. I walk everywhere or go on a crowded, filthy line-taxi; so am I green? I came on a plane so blew my green travel limit and I use plastic water bottles – well I have to as I can’t drink the water but I do boil and filter so I reuse the bottles. Plastic bottles are everywhere.

I am a VSO volunteer and working in a local NGO (though virtually totally funded by external donors).  After 32 years in the NHS it was time for a change. For me that is, not the NHS because, as we know, that happens all the time. It took some time getting through the VSO process especially as my husband is here as an accompanying partner. Attending the assessment day together was a new experience. Try doing a group activity (you know one of those management games) with your partner. VSO then sends your CV out to local VSO programmes for them to see if they want you. You don’t get a choice; you just get to say yes or no to an offer. The first one was way outside of my experience, the next we had to go in five weeks; the next wasn’t viable for my husband.  Despair; but finally Ethiopia came up, an HIV organisation at national level and a country of spectacular scenery with mountains. It wasn’t the Far East which was my preference but we are here and at some point we will get to the mountains.

I am working in an organisation called the Network of Networks of People Living with HIV (PLHIV) or NEP+ for short. The HIV epidemic in Africa is heterosexual. When it emerged in the early ’90s there were no HIV services.  PLHIV started to form groups to help themselves and a few very brave souls (many of whom are dead now) came out and said that they were positive and demanded acceptance and support. My organisation arose out of the formation of these groups. There are nine regional networks, two city networks and three national ones with some 400 local networks. Civil engagement is one area of activity but primarily they are organisations that help provide prevention, treatment and care as well as projects to increase skills and employability. However, that is changing as the government starts to provide a health service. So, as ever, an organisation in change.  To think I didn’t know about the Global Fund six months ago and now I can quote the rules chapter and verse.

HIV is about poverty here, the treatment may be free but food and shelter are not and many PLHIV can’t afford the basics. Nor is the treatment for opportunistic infections free, so TB and malaria are the main killers.

So here I am. NEP+ is some 30 people – all Ethiopian, except me. It is primarily male, except me. Originally the organisation’s staff were PLHIV. As the donors started to require financial statements, governance and the like, the professionals arrived. Now the balance has changed. Is that right? Should there be positive discrimination toward PLHIVs? Can someone who is sero-negative really know or understand what it is like to be positive or even what it is like to live in a family affected by HIV? All questions that I remember discussing in the ’80s when working at the King’s Fund. All answers gratefully received.

Now more and more HIV infected people are getting treatment and living. But there are still 14,000 HIV-positive babies born a year. In the UK and US the numbers are way below a hundred. Why? Many women don’t use antenatal services or won’t get tested. Why? Lots of reasons but for some their husbands won’t let them, accessing services is too difficult or their families tell them to use traditional services. Even if a woman is diagnosed, follow up is logistically difficult and complying to the full treatment and breast feeding regime complex in a developed country, let alone a rural village with no water or electricity. The net result is a take up of about 12% of prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission treatment. One of the worst levels in Africa. Tragedy. All those avoidable deaths and HIV+ kids, let alone the number of women who don’t get treatment. The number of orphans is horrendous. The international, political voice on this one just isn’t there.

VSO volunteers work in local organisations and are paid a stipend which is equivalent to local salaries. So I am paid the same as our drivers, but I do get accommodation. That means we live and work in the community much more than the majority of ex-pats (called Farangis here) who work for international NGOS, the private sector or embassies. I think I am going native as I am starting to really empathise with my colleagues as we try to use the EU process for submitting a bid on a slow dial-up computer link or listen to a well-meaning expert from a big international NGO tell us we must do more on civil rights. Of course we should but at the risk of immediate shut down. There is a law forbidding NGOS to speak about civil rights. A classic case of can you do more inside the system or outside.  Only here is it outside the system but in the country or outside internationally? Oh I have a lot of learning to do.

Public health issues are everywhere including my diet. My hips are vanishing as my diet has drastically changed to minimal dairy with fruit, veg and carbs instead. Having had a fractured hip a couple of years ago I am a bit concerned about my calcium intake. I was taking supplements in the UK but stopped when there was a report on increased incidence of heart disease. I am eating injera, the local, unique dough that is eaten with everything. It looks like a chamois leather but isn’t too bad and is suppose to have some calcium in it.  Should I get Steve (my husband) to bring some calcium tablets back when he visits the UK in the summer?

Must go as visiting a local community project for orphans. More to come.

Read Full Post »