The Medical Research Council (MRC) has awarded a grant of £3.5m to researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of Cape Town (UCT) to carry out a trial to determine whether a weekly vitamin D supplement can prevent tuberculosis (TB) in South African primary school children.
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SANDEMA, Ghana — For more than a year, Rebecca Ajadogbil had been living alone in her head, convinced that strange men were coming to capture and murder her.
Confined to a room in her family’s mud-walled compound here, not far from the border with Burkina Faso, she was hundreds of miles from the nearest psychiatric ward. Those closest to her suspected that she was possessed and called in local healers, who plied her with herbal brews and chanted incantations over her.
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Havana, Oct 2 (Prensa Latina) Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chairwoman of the African Union Commission (AU), continues today her agenda of activities in the context of her official visit here, which includes meetings with officials from the island.
Dlamini-Zuma will hold official talks today with Cuban Acting Foreign Minister, Marcelino Medina, and then proceed to the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Republic of Cuba and the AU Commission.
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British architect Norman Foster proposes drones which would fly from three ports from 2020, delivering ‘precious supplies to remote areas’.
It sounds like science fiction: unmanned drones carrying emergency medicine zooming above the rolling hills of Rwanda.
But there are proposals – including one by the eminent British architect Norman Foster – to set up “cargo drone routes capable of delivering urgent and precious supplies to remote areas on a massive scale”, and the East African nation of Rwanda has been chosen as a test case.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded approximately $36.5 million over the next five years to promote junior faculty training in research careers at academic institutions in Africa.
This move is part of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), which started in 2010 and seeks to transform medical education in sub-Saharan Africa. The goal is to improve community-based training sites, upgrade curricula, and strengthen communications technology and e-learning resources.
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The next chapter of the global development agenda – the sustainable development goals – will shift the global focus and debate around health systems.
As the follow up to the millennium development goals, which were designed in 2000 as eight anti-poverty targets to be attained by the end of 2015, the sustainable development goals with their new targets will change how development in the global south is progressing. The goals are aimed at finishing what the millennium development goals started.
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Kenyan investors challenged to tap into Central Africa countries

Kenyan companies have been challenged to invest in the central African region to expand trade and cultural ties between the Eastern and Central African countries.
Kenya’s Ambassador to DR Congo, Republic of Congo, Gabon and Central African Republic, Dr George Masafu, said Equity Bank has, for instance, acquired majority shareholding in Pro Credit, one of the biggest banks in the region. “It will be the first Kenyan financial institution in DRC and it will help businessmen expand their interests in the region,” he said on the sidelines of the 11th All Africa Games, which ended in Brazzaville on Saturday.
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What do you do when over half of health sector spending is available to less than a fifth of the population? When only 16% have private health insurance and the 84% who do not are forced to turn to a public sector overstretched and understaffed?
The problems are manifold, the solutions never easy, but South Africa is on the brink of overhauling its health care system — and it’s a plan 70 years in the making.
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A Laser Medical Application Laboratory is to be set up in Ghana to serve as a centre for the training of medical professionals in West Africa.
The laboratory, which will be funded by development partners, will make use of laser technologies in the fields of urology, ophthalmology, dentistry and general surgery.
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There’s a lot of bad news in the world these days–conflict, terrorism, refugee flight, not to mention worries about natural disasters and the economy.
Sometimes, things can seem so hopeless.
But now and then you hear something that gives hope. That’s what I felt recently when I talked to a young woman from Calgary who is making surgery safer for patients in some of the world’s poorest countries.
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