Health workers responding to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone ended their strike that stated on December 24. Staff stopped working due to a dispute over risk allowance pay. From the Guardian:
About 130 nurses and doctors downed tools on 24 December at the Magbenteh community hospital, leaving Makeni, the fourth largest city in the country, without any maternity cover. It usually sees about 30 pregnant women a day. Staff said the government had failed to pay the $45 a week hazard payment since September despite aid flooding into the country.
Henry Conteh, representative of the staff, told the Guardian that the district Ebola coordinator had met the payments “on the spot” after publicity both locally and internationally. “It was pressure from the media. Pregnant women went crazy and went to radio and TV. The president heard about it and that was when we got our payments.”
Conteh said back payments were being made for November and December and that it had also been promised funds to pay for regular salaries.
The charity that runs the hospital is running out of money. Over the past three months, the Swiss Sierra Leone Development Foundation has paid only half of staff’s basic pay. Its founder, Harald Pfeiffer, has appealed for aid since the Ebola outbreak began and has been promised a grant of $350,000 from the government. It is also waiting on a consignment of two containers of food and medical supplies organised by two radiographers in Dublin.
Figures released by the UN Ebola mission Unmeer at the end of December showed signs that the incidence of the disease in Sierra Leone is no longer increasing, although infection levels remain a concern.
There were 979 cases reported in the three weeks up to 28 December. In the same period, Guinea and Liberia together reported less than half that number (438).
In his New Year’s Day address, the president of Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma, said schools would reopen soon, although it is unlikely that this will be on a national level.
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Global Health and Development Beat
“An army of women” in Ethiopia has been recruited to teach friends and neighbors how to prevent trachoma, an eye disease that’s preventable but still very common in many parts of Ethiopia.
China pledged $33 million Tuesday to help modernize Juba Teaching Hospital, which is the main medical center in South Sudan and one of very few hospitals in the young country.
Medical charities say they have started trials of untested drug treatments on Ebola patients in Liberia and Guinea for the first time in an effort to control an epidemic that has killed more than 8,000 people in the region.
Johnson & Johnson has started clinical trials of its experimental Ebola vaccine, which uses a booster from Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic, making it the third such shot to enter human testing.
One surgeon in India is delivering cardiac care to people regardless of their financial means and by taking a few ideas from the assembly line, reports NPR.
Western states are focusing too much on tackling Islamic State and are forgetting the daily suffering of ordinary Syrians in areas of the country where the medical situation has become catastrophic, a group of Syrian doctors said.
UNICEF says children’s education as one of the prime victims of Syria’s ever-worsening war.
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Spotlight on PSI
Our president and CEO Karl Hofmann gazes into the development crystal ball and shares four ideas for 2015, with Devex. Here are two:
1. We won’t be ready for the next pandemic.
Despite the searing experience of Ebola in West Africa, it won’t be possible to close the performance gap among national health systems in the most fragile parts of the world. All of the institutions are simply weaker there. Our global health and pandemic response infrastructure, despite years of investment and the particularly robust previous decade, remains weaker than it should be. Therefore, Médecins Sans Frontières and other first responder institutions won’t have a quieter 2015 than 2014.
4. Development funding will hold its own.
Europe is slowing economically, and the BRICs are as well for a variety of reasons, but U.S. economic growth is picking up. Energy prices are low and holding. The political events of the last year have reinforced the inevitability of global engagement for any country hoping to protect its interests or promote its values. So, fiscal pressures will constrain but not significantly cut official development assistance spending in 2015 versus 2014. (OK, this is more of a hope than a projection.)
See the rest here.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
Chris Purdy and Phil Harvy of DTK Internationa (Harvy also co-founded PSI) say these are some of the family planning trends to watch in 2015:
More women using contraceptives.
In July 2012 at a meeting in London, the family planning community agreed on a target of 120 million more women to be using contraceptives by the year 2020. A recent FP2020 report announced that 8.4 million women had been added to the contraceptive user list in 2013 but the pace will have to accelerate if the goal is to be met. The 8.4 million number may be too low; contraceptive users of socially marketed contraceptives alone have increased by an estimated 6 million between 2012 and 2014.
Contraceptive social marketing.
Anticipate continued growth in contraceptive social marketing. 2013 saw an increase of 6.4 percent over the prior year and indications for 2014 suggest a similar rise. New programs are opening up and new products and services are being introduced. An increase of 10 percent by social marketing groups would cover an incremental 7 million women, contributing towards the FP2020 goals.
New leaders.
2015 will see a world without Tim Black, the iconoclastic and passionate family planning pioneer who founded and led Marie Stopes International and co-founded Population Services International. The family planning world will require a new generation of leaders to innovate, take risks and challenge the status quo. We will miss him.
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Capital Events
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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