A new study says 1 in 10 Australian health care workers has had thoughts of suicide or self-harm during the pandemic.

The authors of the Australian Frontline Health Workers survey believe it is the world’s largest study of suicidal thoughts among health care workers. It canvassed the opinions of 8,000 staff, in a range of positions and professions, including support staff, cleaners, doctors and nurses.

The survey finds 10% of respondents have had thoughts of self-harm or suicide during the pandemic, but fewer than half had sought help from a mental health professional.

Even before the emergence of COVID-19, Australian health workers had higher rates of suicide than those in other occupations.

The study’s authors said that emotional exhaustion and burnout were common among many respondents. What is unclear is the impact stress, which could cause more medical errors, has had on the quality of patient care.

Georgina Lonergan, a nuclear medicine technologist in Victoria state, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that her job was extremely stressful.

“There is an undercurrent of anxiety, I think, for everyone working in health care,” she said. “I have definitely had an undercurrent of anxiety increasing over the last couple of years. Some days you just really do not want to come. There has been a couple of days where I have been close to tears on the way in just from anxiety and just being tired of it all.”

The survey was published Wednesday in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.

Much of Australia continues to battle a wave of omicron variant infections. Government data has shown that more than 3,500 people are in the hospital with the virus.

Since the pandemic began, Australia has detected 2.4 million coronavirus cases; 4,366 people have died, according to the Health Department. 

 
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The COVID pandemic exposed stark vaccine inequities between high- and low-income nations and underscored Africa’s dependence on outside countries for jabs. However, a new initiative in Senegal hopes to reduce that inequity Annika Hammerschlag reports from Dakar, Senegal.
Camera: Annika Hammerschlag
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Health care workers in Somalia suffer from high rates of anxiety, depression and stress because of their work with COVID-19 cases, a new study finds.

The study was presented at a health research conference in the Somali town of Garowe last week. Initial findings recorded a high prevalence of anxiety in the workforce at 69.3%, 46.5% for depression and 15.2% for stress.

The study used the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS), widely used in scientific circles to measure the three emotional states. Researchers interviewed 186 health care workers in three hospitals in Mogadishu between May and August 2021.

Dr. Abdirazak Yusuf Ahmed, the study’s lead author and director of the De Martino Hospital, the main COVID-19 medical facility in Mogadishu, said several factors played a role in the prevalence of these traumatic experiences in the health care workforce.

“The first one is that this disease is associated with deaths,” Ahmed said. “They (workers) were afraid they could take the virus to their homes and pass on to their loved ones.”

He also mentioned low motivation among the COVID-19 workers.

Doctors working in Somalia are not surprised that the multiplier effects from COVID-19 contributed to the workers’ ill health.

Since March 16, 2020, when the first case was detected, Somalia has recorded 1,340 COVID-19 deaths and 26,203 positive cases, at a fatality rate of 5.1%. But independent studies and press reports argued that COVID-19 deaths in Somalia have been enormously undercounted. Somalia has administered more than 1.6 million COVID-19 vaccine doses so far, with only 5.6% of the population fully vaccinated.

The discovery of personal health challenges among frontline workers comes at a time when the country lacks enough health care workforce to provide services.

Last week’s conference, which was attended by federal and regional health officials, local doctors and international health workers, including representatives from the World Health Organization, recognized the severity of the lack of enough health care workers.

A statement issued at the end of the conference stated that the low workforce density in the country stands at 5.4 doctors, nurses, and midwives per 10,000 population. WHO recommends a ratio of 44.5 per 10,000.

The statement further said that according to WHO’s health workforce guidelines, there is a gap of 55,000 skilled health professionals in the country.

It said the gap affects all components of the health system, ranging from service delivery, health workforce, health information systems, access to essential medicines, financing and leadership, policy and governance.

This shortage is attributed to the migration of health workers from Somalia because of war and crisis, according to Dr. Mamunur Rahman Malik, WHO’s Somalia representative.

“This shortage means that the country doesn’t have adequate health workers who are required to run and manage primary health centers or hospitals,” he said. “So, services are below optimal or of poor quality as the services are provided by lay health workers.”

Good news for child mortality

The conference predicted progress in reducing child mortality and maternal mortality in Somalia in coming years.

With investment and implementation of basic health services, the maternal mortality ratio is expected to decline to 332 deaths per 100,000 live births by the year 2030, signifying a 50% reduction from the present level, the statement said.

Similarly, the mortality rates for neonatal, infant and children younger than 5 are expected to decline from 122, 77 and 38 per 1,000 live births in 2020 to 63, 42 and 20 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively, by the year 2030.

Child mortality in Somalia is believed to be the highest in the world, according to a report published by Amnesty International in August 2021, with an estimated 15% of people having access to medical care in rural areas.

This report originated in VOA Somali service’s “Investigative Dossier” program.
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The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that even though she was encouraged by dropping COVID-19 hospitalizations and case rates, the pandemic was still not at the point at which the agency could recommend dropping nationwide indoor mask requirements.

During a White House COVID-19 response team briefing, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters the team was very encouraged by current trends that have shown overall cases dropping more than 44% in the past week and hospitalizations down nearly 25%.

But Walensky said that while hospitalizations were down, U.S. deaths from COVID-19 rose by 3% in the past week, and that both indicators were too high to change the CDC guidance on indoor masking in areas of high transmission. 

“We aren’t there yet,” she said. 

More state and local governments are announcing plans to begin lifting their mask requirements. Wednesday, New York state became the latest, with Governor Kathy Hochul saying infection rates had declined to a level at which it was safe to rescind the broad masking order. 

Hochul said masks would still be required in schools, health care facilities, certain types of shelters and public transit. Private businesses will be free to set their own masking rules for staff and patrons. 

Walensky said that many states like New York were lifting their mandates in phases, and that she recognized the need for local governments to be flexible. But she said the CDC was basing its guidance on nationwide surveillance and data, with hospitals, in particular, being a barometer.  

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said that, in terms of the pandemic, January was a difficult month, but data showed the nation was moving toward a time when COIVD-19 would no longer disrupt our daily lives.  

He said 210 million people had been fully vaccinated, and, in the last three weeks, nationwide, daily cases were down 65% and hospitalizations were down 40%.
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SpaceX says a geomagnetic storm brought down 40 satellites launched last Thursday as part of its Starlink satellite internet service.

In a release posted to the company’s website, the private space company said the satellites were among 49 Starlink satellites launched from the Kennedy Space Center, and that they were deployed to their intended orbit 210 kilometers above Earth.  

The company explained it deploys its satellites into lower orbits so that, in the event they do not pass initial system checkouts, it can quickly and safely bring them out of orbit by atmospheric drag.  

But SpaceX says the satellites were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ((NOAA)) Space Weather Prediction Center had posted a watch late last week for minor to moderate geomagnetic storm activity.

The company said the storms cause the atmosphere to warm and increase its density at altitudes where the satellites are deployed. SpaceX reports GPS readings on the satellites suggests the storm increased atmospheric drag 50 percent higher than normal.  

The SpaceX ground control team set the satellites into a “safe-mode,” changing their flight attitude to minimize drag to effectively “take cover from the storm.”

The company says its preliminary analysis shows the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe mode and they failed to return to their intended orbits. It said 40 will reenter or already have reentered Earth’s atmosphere.  

The company says the satellites pose no collision risk with other ones and are designed to disintegrate upon re-entering the atmosphere with no orbital debris expected to hit the ground.   

SpaceX has launched nearly 2,000 satellites as part of a network to provide high-speed internet service to users anywhere in the world. Service in the northern United States and Canada is expected to start later this year.
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World Health Organization officials say insecurity and bureaucratic difficulties continue to prevent medical supplies and other crucial relief from reaching millions of beleaguered civilians in conflict-ridden northern Ethiopia.

An estimated 9.4 million people in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Millions are suffering from severe food shortages, acute malnutrition is rising, disease and chronic illnesses are going untreated.

The World Health Organization reports dozens of mobile health and nutrition teams are operating across the three regions. However, treating those in need remains challenging. It says essential medical equipment and medical supplies, vaccines and basic medicines are not reaching the people in need.

WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier says the situation is particularly critical in Tigray. He says the number of people needing health assistance has risen from 2.3 million during the first half of December to an estimated 3.9 million.

However, he says there is, what he calls, light on the horizon. He notes a shipment of medical supplies reached Mekelle, the capital of Tigray at the end of January. And, he adds the Ethiopian government has announced it would facilitate daily relief flights to augment the transportation of crucial goods by land.

“WHO is preparing to airlift critically needed medicines, medical supplies and equipment to Tigray,” he said. “The first shipment of this is expected to be dispatched this Friday,11 February when 10 metric tons of the total 33 metric tons of supplies will be airlifted. Most clearances for this have been secured and the remaining permits will be processed over the next few days.”

Nevertheless, he says humanitarian agencies are being forced to downsize their operations because they are running out of supplies, fuel, and cash. He warns these operations may have to shut down in the coming weeks if the situation does not improve.

He says an integrated measles campaign at the end of January highlights some of the difficulties aid agencies run into. The campaign, he says targeted nearly 800,000 children under age five using vaccines provided by the Ethiopia Ministry of Health.

“During this phase, 145,000 children of the targeted population were reached because the campaign faced challenges, including cash, lack of fuel, and cold chain capacity,” he said.

Lindmeier says WHO continues to negotiate with the authorities for access to the regions. Despite ongoing difficulties, he says some things are moving and that is a good development.

 
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An international collaboration led by researchers in Canada and Brazil is applying innovative funding and testing methods to determine whether existing medications can provide cheaper and more effective treatments for COVID-19 and is encouraged by its initial results.

Calling it the “TOGETHER Trial,” researchers predominantly in Brazil and Canada refer to their method as “adaptive platform clinical trial,” which permits several potential treatments to be tested simultaneously, reducing costs and the number of people who need to be tested.

The researchers have also speeded up the search for effective COVID treatments by relying on financing and support from private foundations, universities and the private sector, rather than the time-consuming process of seeking government funding.

One such trial conducted in Brazil beginning in June 2020 found fluvoxamine, a common anti-depressant, helped reduce hospitalization and death of COVID-19 patients by 32%.

Ed Mills, a clinical epidemiologist who teaches at Ontario’s McMaster University, is helping to coordinate the project from offices in Vancouver, Canada. He explained the “adaptive platform” model in which more than one drug is tested at the same time.

“Typically, in a clinical trial, you expect to see a drug versus placebo,” Mills told VOA. “Well, in our circumstance, we’re doing five drugs versus placebo, six drugs versus placebo.”

While uncovering promising data on fluvoxamine, discovering what does not work has been equally important. Mills said the group’s trials showed that hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir, metformin, doxazosin and ivermectin do not help prevent hospitalization from COVID-19.

Two of those drugs, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, gained notoriety in the United States as some COVID-19 patients have insisted on taking them despite warnings by U.S. health officials that the drugs are ineffective at best for treating a coronavirus infection.

Amid a global wave of infections driven by the omicron variant, the project is recruiting about 100 participants a day, with trials now underway in South Africa, Pakistan and Brazil. About 5,000 people have participated to date in the trials, which currently involve about 2,500 people.

Mills said the researchers are studying several other existing drugs, and combinations of those drugs, to gauge their effectiveness.

“One would be a drug called peginterferon lambda, which is a single subcutaneous injection, single-dose drug to treat COVID. I’m extremely optimistic about that. We’re also now evaluating combination strategies,” he said.

“So, we know that fluvoxamine works. We also know that budesonide works — an inhaled steroid. What would happen if you put them together? So, I think that’s going to be a really great, cheap intervention that can be applied,” he said. Both drugs are widely available and — in some countries — economical.

Mills said he expects further results within the next few weeks.

Dr. Brian Conway, the medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, sees the work being conducted by the TOGETHER Trial as a model for some future medical research.

New medications require rigorous and time-consuming clinical trials before they can be approved for use, he noted. But progress can be quicker “if a medicine’s been around for a while, it’s been licensed, it’s available for sale, and you’re trying to decide if there’s a new indication for it.”

Conway, who is not involved with the TOGETHER Trial, was also impressed with the researchers’ methodology.

“I think that going forward, they’re quick. They are rigorous. They generate the kind of information that we need to help guide clinical practice,” he said. “These adaptive platforms are, to my mind, a very appropriate way of figuring out if they work against something for which they have not yet been tested or approved.”

Conway also sees the program as a good way to counter unsubstantiated rumors about unproven medications.

“And it avoids us from getting into a situation where someone says, ‘I gave this treatment to eight or 10 people and it saved their lives. So you should do this, too,’” he said.

“That’s not how we should do science. That’s not how we should practice medicine, especially in the era of COVID,” he said. “And it helps us be rigorous, responsive, and as helpful to our patients as we can be.”

Among the takeaways from the studies, according to Mills, is that the “Global South” — developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere — has a lot to teach the so-called “Global North,” or more developed nations.

“Although we are the ones that tend to come up with the rules on epidemiology, they’re the ones that apply those rules on epidemiology and have practical experience,” he said.

“If you think about a country like Rwanda, for example, where I’ve spent a long time, they deal with Ebola monitoring all the time, they deal with malaria, deal with HIV all the time. They’re very, very experienced at infectious diseases,” Mills said.

This is not the first time Vancouver has played a role in advancing epidemiology. MRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna rely on lipid nanoparticles to enter human cells. That technology was first researched at the University of British Columbia in the late 1970s.
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The U.S. needs a nimble, multipronged strategy and Cabinet-level leadership to counter its festering overdose epidemic, a bipartisan congressional commission advises.

With vastly powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl driving record overdose deaths, the scourge of opioids awaits after the COVID-19 pandemic finally recedes, a shift that public health experts expect in the months ahead.

“This is one of our most pressing national security, law enforcement and public health challenges, and we must do more as a nation and a government to protect our most precious resource — American lives,” the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking said in a 70-page report released Tuesday to Congress, President Joe Biden and the American people.

The report envisions a dynamic strategy. It would rely on law enforcement and diplomacy to shut down sources of chemicals used to make synthetic opioids. It would offer treatment and support for people who become addicted, creating pathways that can lead back to productive lives. And it would invest in research to better understand addiction’s grip on the human brain and to develop treatments for opioid use disorder.

The global coronavirus pandemic has overshadowed the American opioid epidemic for the last two years, but recent news that overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 in one year caught the public’s attention. Politically, federal legislation to address the opioid crisis won support across the partisan divide during both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Rep. David Trone, D-Md., a co-chair of the panel that produced the report, said he believes that support is still there, and that the issue appeals to Biden’s pragmatic side. “The president has been crystal clear,” Trone said. “These are two major issues in America: addiction and mental health.”

The U.S. government’s record is also clear. It has been waging a losing “war on drugs” for decades.

The stakes are much higher now with the widespread availability of fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 80 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. It can be baked into illicit pills made to look like prescription painkillers or anti-anxiety medicines. The chemical raw materials are produced mainly in China. Criminal networks in Mexico control the production and shipment to the U.S.

Federal anti-drug strategy traditionally emphasized law enforcement and long prison sentences. But that came to be seen as tainted by racial bias and counter-productive because drug use is treatable. The value of treatment has recently has gained recognition with anti-addiction medicines in wide use alongside older strategies like support groups.

The report endorsed both law enforcement and treatment, working in sync with one another.

“Through its work, the commission came to recognize the impossibility of reducing the availability of illegal synthetic opioids through efforts focused on supply alone,” the report said.

“Real progress can come only by pairing illicit synthetic opioid supply disruption with decreasing the domestic U.S. demand for these drugs,” it added.

The report recommends what it calls five “pillars” for government action:

Elevating the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy to act as the nerve center for far-flung federal efforts, and restoring Cabinet rank to its director.
Disrupting the supply of drugs through better coordinated law enforcement actions.
Reducing the demand for illicit drugs through treatment and by efforts to mitigate the harm to people addicted. Treatment programs should follow science-based "best practices."
Using diplomacy to enlist help from other governments in cutting off the supply of chemicals that criminal networks use to manufacture fentanyl.
Developing surveillance and data analysis tools to spot new trends in illicit drug use before they morph into major problems for society.

Trone said it’s going to take cooperation from both political parties. “We have to take this toxic atmosphere in Washington and move past it,” he said. “Because 100,000 people, that’s husbands, sisters, mothers, fathers. As a country, we are better than that.”
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Paris — Plastic has infiltrated all parts of the ocean and is now found “in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale” wildlife group WWF said on Tuesday, calling for urgent efforts to create an international treaty on plastics.

Tiny fragments of plastic have reached even the most remote and seemingly pristine regions of the planet: it peppers Arctic sea ice and has been found inside fish in the deepest recesses of the ocean, the Mariana Trench.

There is no international agreement in place to address the problem, although delegates meeting in Nairobi for a United Nations environment meeting this month are expected to launch talks on a worldwide plastics treaty.

WWF sought to bolster the case for action in its latest report, which synthesizes more than 2,000 separate scientific studies on the impacts of plastic pollution on the oceans, biodiversity and marine ecosystems.

The report acknowledged that there is currently insufficient evidence to estimate the potential repercussions on humans.

But it found that the fossil-fuel derived substance “has reached every part of the ocean, from the sea surface to the deep ocean floor, from the poles to coastlines of the most remote islands and is detectable in the smallest plankton up to the largest whale.”

According to some estimates, between 19 and 23 million tons of plastic waste is washed into the world’s waterways every year, the WWF report said.

This is largely from single-use plastics, which still constitute more than 60% of marine pollution, although more and more countries are acting to ban their use.

“In many places (we are) reaching some kind of saturation point for marine ecosystems, where we’re approaching levels that pose a significant threat,” said Eirik Lindebjerg, Global Plastics Policy Manager at WWF.

In some places there is a risk of “ecosystem collapse,” he said.

Many people have seen images of seabirds choking on plastic straws or turtles wrapped in discarded fishing nets, but he said the danger is across the entire marine food web.

It “will affect not only the whale and the seal and the turtle, but huge fish stocks and the animals that depend on those,” he added.

In one 2021 study, 386 fish species were found to have ingested plastic, out of 555 tested.

Separate research, looking at the major commercially fished species, found up to 30% of cod in a sample caught in the North Sea had microplastics in their stomach.

Once in the water, the plastic begins to degrade, becoming smaller and smaller until it is a “nano plastic,” invisible to the naked eye.

So even if all plastic pollution stopped completely, the volume of microplastics in the oceans could still double by 2050.

But plastic production continues to rise, potentially doubling by 2040, according to projections cited by WWF, with ocean plastic pollution expected to triple during the same period.

Lindebjerg compares the situation to the climate crisis — and the concept of a “carbon budget,” that caps the maximum amount of CO2 that can be released into the atmosphere before a global warming cap is exceeded.

“There is actually a limit to how much plastic pollution our marine ecosystems can absorb,” he said.

Those limits have already been reached for microplastics in several parts of the world, according to WWF, particularly in the Mediterranean, the Yellow and East China Seas (between China, Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula) and in the Arctic sea ice.

“We need to treat it as a fixed system that doesn’t absorb plastic, and that’s why we need to go towards zero emissions, zero pollution as fast as possible,” said Lindebjerg.

WWF is calling for talks aimed at drawing up an international agreement on plastics at the U.N. environment meeting, from February 28 to March 2 in Nairobi.

It wants any treaty to lead to global standards of production and real “recyclability.”

Trying to clean up the oceans is “extremely difficult and extremely expensive,” Lindebjerg said, adding that it was better on all metrics not to pollute in the first place.
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Millions of people around the world enjoy a daily cup of coffee; however, their daily caffeine fix could be under threat because climate change is killing coffee plants, putting farmers’ livelihoods at risk.

Inside the vast, steamy greenhouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in the leafy suburbs of west London, Aaron Davis leads the research into coffee.

“Arabica coffee, our preferred coffee, provides us with about 60% of the coffee that we drink globally. It’s a delicious coffee, it’s the one we love to drink. The other species is robusta coffee, which provides us with the other 40% of the coffee we drink – but that mainly goes into instant coffees and espresso mixes,” Davis explains.

The cultivation of arabica and robusta coffee beans accounts for millions of livelihoods across Africa, South America and Asia.

“These coffees have served us very well for many centuries, but under climate change they’re facing problems,” Davis says.

“Arabica is a cool tropical plant; it doesn’t like high temperatures. Robusta is a plant that likes even moist conditions; it likes high rainfall. And under climate change, rainfall patters are being modified, and it’s also experiencing problems. In some cases, yields are dramatically reduced because of increased temperatures or reduced rainfall. But in some cases, as we’ve seen in Ethiopia, you might get a complete harvest failure and death of the trees.”

The solution could be growing deep in the forests of West Africa. There are around 130 species of coffee plant – but not all taste good. In Sierra Leone, scientists from Kew helped to identify one candidate, stenophylla, growing in the wild.

“This is extremely heat tolerant. And is an interesting species because it matches arabica in terms of its superb taste,” Davis says.

Two other coffee species also show promise for commercial cultivation in a changing climate: liberica and eugenioides, which “has low yields and very small beans, but it has an amazing taste,” according to Davis.

Some believe the taste is far superior. At the 2021 World Barista Championship in Milan, Australia’s Hugh Kelly won third prize with his eugenioides espresso. Kelly recalled the first time he tasted it at a remote farm in Colombia. “It was a coffee like I’ve never tasted before; as I tasted it, it was unbelievably sweet … I knew that sweetness and gentle acidity were the bones for an incredible espresso,” Kelly told judges in Milan.

Researchers hope Kelly’s success could be the breakthrough moment for these relatively unknown beans.

The team at the Botanic Gardens is working with farmers in Africa on cultivating the new coffees commercially. Catherine Kiwuka of the Ugandan National Agricultural Research Organization, who oversees some of the projects, says challenges still lie ahead.

“What requirements do they need? How do we boost its productivity? Instead of it being dominated by only two species, we have the opportunity to tap into the value of other coffee species.”

It’s hoped that substantial volumes of liberica coffee will be exported from Uganda to Europe this year. Researchers hope it will provide a sustainable income for farmers – and an exciting new taste for coffee drinkers.
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Pope Francis on Sunday decried the genital mutilation of millions of girls and the trafficking of women for sex, including openly on city streets, so others can make money off of them. 

In remarks to the public in St. Peter’s Square, the pope noted that the day was dedicated worldwide to ending the ritual mutilation, and he told the crowd that some 3 million girls each year undergo the practice, “often in conditions very dangerous for the health.”

“This practice, unfortunately widespread in various regions of the world, humiliates the dignity of women and gravely attacks their physical integrity,” Francis said.

Female genital mutilation comprises all procedures that involve changing or injuring female genitalia for non-medical reasons and violates the human rights, health and the integrity of girls and women, the United Nations says in championing an end to the practice.

The practice can cause severe pain, shock, excessive bleeding, infections, and difficulty in passing urine, as well as consequences for sexual and reproductive health. While mainly concentrated in some 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, it is also a problem for girls and women living elsewhere, including among immigrant populations.

According to U.N. figures, at least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone the practice.

The pope also told the faithful that on Tuesday, there will be a day of prayer and reflection worldwide against human trafficking.

“This is a deep wound, inflicted by the shameful search of economic interests, without respect for the human person,” Francis said. “So many girls — we see them on the streets — who aren’t free, they are slaves of the traffickers, who send them to work, and, if they don’t bring back money, they beat them,” the pope said. “This is happening today in our cities.”

“In the face of these plagues on humanity, I express my sorrow and I exhort all those who have responsibility to act in a decisive way to impede both the exploitation and the humiliating practices that afflict in particular women and girls,” Francis said.
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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in an address on the nation’s Waitangi Day observance that the country has an obligation to make sure everyone has access to the health care they need, and that no one dies younger than everyone else in New Zealand because they are Maori.”

The commemorative day is named for the region on the North Island where representatives of the British Crown and more than 500 Indigenous Maori chiefs signed a founding treaty in 1840.

The Maori, however, lost most of their land during British colonization and have staged demonstrations on Waitangi Day to rally for their civil and social rights.

Last year New Zealand established the Maori Health Authority to ensure better health care access for the Maori who have been overwhelmed by COVID pandemic.

“We all have a duty to do everything we can to protect our communities with all the tools that science and medicine have given us,” Ardern said Sunday, as she called for a united battle against the coronavirus.

Turkey’s president is the latest world leader to reveal that he has contracted the coronavirus.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed on Twitter Saturday that he and his wife, Emine, have been infected with the omicron variant of the COVID virus and are experiencing mild symptoms.

The news came just two days after the Turkish leader’s visit to Kyiv, where he met with Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart.

Two Miami men have each received a sentence of 41 months after stealing 192 ventilators worth approximately $3 million, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

The U.S. Agency for International Development shipment was in a tractor trailer headed for Miami International Airport.  The shipment was stolen when the driver left the trailer on a parking lot overnight.

The ventilators “were part of an aid program to treat critically ill COVID-19 El Salvadorian patients,” according to the statement.  Most of the ventilators were recovered.

The Johns Hopkins Resource Center reported early Sunday that it has recorded more than 393 million global COVID infections and almost 6 million deaths. More than 10 billion vaccines have been administered, according to the center.

Some information in this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.  

 
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