While many countries' fight against the coronavirus pandemic is already being challenged by vaccine shortages and weak healthcare infrastructure, doubts about the available vaccines in Africa are also slowing down inoculation, which serves as another obstacle to reducing the number of new cases. When Edith Serem received her COVID-19 vaccination last month at a Nairobi hospital where she works as a doctor, nurses jokingly warned that she could start speaking a foreign language. Serem said some…

More than 650,000 children have been vaccinated against malaria across Kenya, Ghana and Malawi since the start of the pilot project two years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Tuesday. Global immunization and malaria advisory bodies are expected to meet in October to review vaccine data and consider whether to recommend wider use. The RTS, S vaccine is the only existing jab shown to reduce malaria in children. It acts against Plasmodium falciparum - the deadliest malaria parasite globally and the…

The Democratic Republic of Congo, where the deadly Ebola virus first appeared in 1976, has begun a countdown to the official end of its latest outbreak, this time in the east of the country, health officials said on Tuesday. The last patient to be treated for Ebola tested negative for the second time on Sunday, triggering a 42-day countdown from Monday, the World Health Organization's (WHO) DR Congo office said. The period represents twice the average maximum duration of Ebola's incubation, the Agence…

Nearly 4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in the Nigerian capital Abuja, the third and largest delivery to date to an African country through the global COVAX initiative, which was created to ensure that low- and middle-income countries have access to vaccines. The COVAX program sent 3.94 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, from Mumbai to Abuja, according to a joint statement from UNICEF, working in collaboration with the World Health…