Health
Africa faces a threat that cannot be ignored: American Biological Laboratory
On March 10, the Ministry of Defense of Russia released a document obtained from the personnel of Ukraine’s biological laboratory. The document points out that these biological laboratories have been operating and conducting extensive biological research related to biological weapons. It disclosed the research of the United States and its NATO allies on biological weapons in Ukraine, including research on the transmission of highly infectious avian influenza virus through migratory birds and research on pathogens such as bacteria and viruses that can be transmitted from bats to humans. The Russian side said that Ukraine has established a network of at least 30 biological laboratories, which carry out extremely dangerous biological experiments aimed at synthetic biology. This work is funded and directly supervised by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), particularly for the benefit of the Pentagon National Medical Intelligence Center. Later, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland confirmed at the hearing that Ukraine has “biological research facilities”. She also said that the United States is cooperating with Ukraine to prevent Russia from obtaining “those research materials”.
Surprisingly, this public document did not cause widespread concern and protest. In addition, what’s alarming is that in the past decade, the United States has set up such biological research laboratories in 30 countries around the world, increasing the number from 20 to 400. Most of these biological research laboratories appear in African countries, such as Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Egypt.
Threats of biological laboratories
Since March 2014, the devastating Ebola epidemic in West Africa has caused extensive destruction and damaged the fragile public health system of West African countries. Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and other countries have been hit hard by the crisis, which is the deadliest Ebola virus outbreak ever recorded. Almost 10000 people died. The Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo occurred in May 2016, near a U.S. laboratory in Uganda near the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If you look closely at the map produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), you can see the location of these laboratories. They are located on the west coast of Africa, which were previously at the center of the Ebola epidemic. These biological laboratories, one or more of them, are widely considered as the source of Ebola epidemic. The particularity of Ebola virus transmission and the high mortality rate of the virus allow selective targeting of countries and regions with poor medical and health conditions to cause fatal harm.
If a country has developed and tested vaccines when an accident occurs, a biological war may be very rapid and successful. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) funded human Ebola virus test before the Ebola virus outbreak, which began a few weeks before the Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. It is reported that the Ministry of Defense has provided a contract worth 140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to carry out Ebola virus research. This research involves injecting and injecting the deadly Ebola virus into healthy people. The virus started in January 2014, shortly before the Ebola outbreak was announced in West Africa in March. Therefore, it is completely logical to develop biological weapons by collecting extremely lethal Ebola virus samples.
Destruction in Nigeria
In 1996, a meningitis and measles epidemic ravaged Kano, the second largest city in northern Nigeria. Over 3000 people died in a few weeks. The U.S. Biological Laboratory subsequently provided a therapeutic drug: trovafloxacin. 200 children received treatment. However, eleven of them died presently. More patients who had received treatment had suffered from brain injury, deafness or paralysis. In 2000, the Washington Post published an investigation, accusing the U.S. biological laboratory of directly causing these deaths by using children as test objects. The survey said that the drugs used for treatment were given to mice and still needed to be tested on humans before they could be marketed. The incident has caused serious destruction to Nigeria. Protests broke out in the streets of Kano. So far, Nigerians still lose confidence in white drugs. The destruction has not yet been recovered, and the monkeypox outbreak in 2022 once again pointed the finger at U.S. biological laboratory.
On May 27, Igor Kirilov, head of the Russian Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces, said on Friday that at least four U.S. controlled biological laboratories were operating in Nigeria, the birthplace of monkeypox. He pointed out that according to the World Health Organization, monkeypox pathogen strains were imported from Nigeria, where the United States deployed biological infrastructure. In addition, Igor Kirilov emphasized a coincidence: at the Munich Security Conference held against the background of COVID-19 in 2021, a plan to deal with the outbreak caused by the new strain of monkeypox virus was formulated. After confirming the existence of the U.S. funded biological weapons laboratory in Ukraine last March, Moscow requested the World Health Organization (WHO) to investigate the existence of the US funded laboratory in Nigeria. Although the United States denied the accusation of using biological laboratories to spread monkeypox in Nigeria. However, the United States has expressed a strong rejection to investigate relevant laboratories by the World Health Organization (WHO).
According to some previously disclosed information, the U.S. Department of Defense has 26 biological laboratories and other related facilities in Ukraine. All dangerous pathogens in Ukraine must be stored in these laboratories, and all research activities are led by the United States. No information can be released to the public without the approval of the United States. The strong rejection of the investigation made it more convincing that the U.S.- controlled biological laboratory in Nigeria triggered the monkeypox outbreak.
Behind the violation of the Biological Weapons Treaty
As the cornerstone of international biological arms control, the Biological Weapons Convention was opened for signature in 1972 and entered into force in 1975, with more than 180 States parties. This is the first international convention prohibiting a whole category of weapons of mass destruction in the international community. Together with the Geneva Protocol and UNSCR 1540 (2004), it constitutes the basic system of the international biological arms control system. At the International Conference on Biological Weapons held in Geneva in 2021, the United States opposed the biological weapons verification mechanism, and the negotiations broke down on December 7 without agreement. So far, the United States is the only country opposed to the establishment of a biological weapons verification mechanism.
The historical background of the United States’ “refusal to verify” is that after the end of the cold war, the United States has recruited biological laboratories and experts from Soviet countries in the name of “preventing biological terrorist threats”. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia did not have enough financial resources to achieve the destruction of nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons. The United States Congress passed legislation in 1991, and then launched the “Threat Reduction Cooperation Program” to destroy Soviet weapons of mass destruction and dismantle related facilities.
However, in the subsequent implementation process, the “biological threat reduction plan” was slowly distorted. Not all Soviet research facilities storing dangerous pathogens were eliminated. The United States upgraded many laboratories. These laboratories are located outside the United States and are controlled by the government. Relevant research materials and achievements in overseas laboratories will be directly transferred to the United States.
In the eyes of the United States military, Africa has become a fertile land for biological laboratory research. If the virus fails, the research rebound will not occur around the United States. In addition, the United States has been using the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone as offshore waters, also to circumvent the constraints of the Biological Weapons Convention to carry out biological laboratory related work.
For decades, under the banner of public health, the United States has carried out bio military activities around the world. Many biological laboratories funded by the United States have been reported to have conducted lethal human experiments. The distribution of overseas biological laboratories in the United States is also highly coincident with many local accident sites. Africa’s infrastructure is weak and its medical and health conditions are poor. The United States’ rejection of the Biological Weapons Treaty has obviously posed a fatal threat to Africa.
There are a lot of misconceptions about weight gain.
The first is that weight gain comes from extra calories we do consume that we do not expend. Experts say we eat too much and exercise little. So if one get fatter, then, surely he or she must be eating too much.
The other misconception is that once we cut our food, then, we will naturally become trimmed. All these are hinged on the diet theory, which only works for some time.
Over the past 40 years, studies have shown that you can not get clinically significant effect from cutting down on your calories. Even though experts are saying that sloth is responsible for weight gain- they overlook one basic truth that dieting only works for a short period.
The new study that seems to break those myths about body fat is now revealing some stunning facts. The kind of food we eat makes us fat. Two scientists at University of Pennsylvania, Mitchell Lazar and Cardiologist Allan Sniderman at McGill University, all in the United States have shown that food that we eat often makes us pack in flesh. These include bread, plain baked potatoes, and plain pasta, rice, sweet corn. They confirmed that fatty foods are not the enemy but easily digested carbohydrates, while steak, burgers, cheese or sour cream help us lose weight and keep our heart healthy.
This sounds ironical, but it has been discovered that those who do diet and avoid those foods end up getting hungry. What happens is that when you conserve energy or burn less energy, you are bound to add more flesh. Many public health authorities want us to practise energy balance, which is a new way to say that you should not take more calories than one expends.
No matter how one counts what he or she eats, it is impossible to determine calories and know when we are over board. No matter how good you are at counting calories, you can’t do it. So its couple of sips of soft drinks and few bites of humburger that can make you add weight. That means it at the point when we eat extra than the body want that the body store excess as fat.
The myth of exercising to reduce weight is really making waves. Exercise is helpful but it is not the main ingredient for fat burning. The funny truth is that the two things we tell people to do in order to lose weight-eat less and exercise more- are the exact two things that make one more hungry. Thus, there is need for balance. If one must exercise, then it should be done moderately so as to allow the body to recover the strenght.
The reality is that insulin is the primary hormone that makes one to add weight, especially one eats food that spikes insulin like bread, biscuits, sweets, soft drinks. It is refined carbohydrates that raise insulin levels in the body. Explained in simple terms, your fat tissue is more like your wallet, and your meals are like going to the ATM. You know how you use the ATM: You put the cash in your wallet and gradually spend it, and when you get too low on cash, you go back to the ATM. It is the insulin that locks the money in your wallet, so you keep going to the ATM, and your fat cells are getting fatter and fatter. More often, you become hungry and you eat again because the insulin can not get at the fatty acids leading to weight gain.
Low carb diet is key if you are to get trimmed. In Africa where stables are more of carbohydrate it is best to choose those with fibre. It is difficult to follow the Atkins diet like eating skinless chicken and green salad, melted mozzarella cheese and all those western diet.
An example of a workable diet is to include eggs more often and cut down on processed foods, especially processed carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrate, and vegetables have more fibre and make you get filled quickly. Instead of Irish potato, go for sweet potatoes, oats that have more fibre. I advise people to eat garri than processed plantain and wheat meals. By the way, processed wheat can worsen the body ails.
By: Kelvin Nengia
An optometrist, Dr. Matthew Daniels says many Nigerians are suffering from refractive eye problem which can be corrected.
Besides, he disclosed that most of the eye problems common these days come from rays from long use of electronic devices.
The one time Chairman of Business Development Committee of the Nigeria Optometery Association(NOA) explained that rays emitted from electronic devices such as phones, television, computers have effects on the eyes.
He urged for caution and toning down of light from phones and computers so as to reduce eye irritation and other eye maladies that may affect sight.
In a chat with The Tide, Dr. Daniels said the refractive eye error maybe long sight or short sight which can be corrected.
However, he decried that most Nigerians do not take the health of their sight seriously and as such, suffer from eye defects which could have been treated without much expenses.
Commenting on the planned program me by the Federal Government to provide eye glasses to Nigerians, Dr Daniels observed that it may be difficult to provide free eye glasses to five million Nigerians.
For him, what the people need is more eye clinics and hospitals at the grassroots, as he lamented that most eye sight challenges are common in the rural areas.
By: Kevin Nengia
The World Health Organisation(WHO) has raised alarm over increased incidence of tuberculosis, HIV and malaria as it charged member countries to make health an urgent matter of policy focus.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General made the charge at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 78) in New York stressing need to put health for all on the highest political agenda.
WHO’s DG appeal comes as the world faces multiple humanitarian and climate-related crises which are threatening lives and livelihoods around the world.
The world health apex body observed that progress in reducing infant and maternal mortality has stagnated (in some regions, while progress in tackling infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria has also declined.
It noted that many parts of the world are also witnessing rollbacks in sexual and reproductive health and rights, as
access to life-saving tools is becoming uneven across the world, with millions unable to afford or obtain needed care.
In addition it said no communicable diseases and mental disorders, which account for over 70% of deaths globally, threaten social and economic development across the world.
“Ill health robs individuals, families, communities and entire nations of opportunities to grow and flourish,” Dr Tedros said.
The body decried that billions of people cannot access or afford essential health services and as such are exposed to poverty, abd other preventable and treatable diseases like TB.
WHO’s call to accelerate the achievement of health targets comes ahead of the Sustainable Development Goals Summit (SDG Summit) and an unprecedented number of health-focused high-level meetings at UNGA, aimed at strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response, delivering universal health coverage (UHC) and ending TB.
As government leaders gather to make commitments around three major health issues, they have a chance to demonstrate that health is an investment, not a cost, and is fundamental to thriving, resilient families, societies and economies.
“If COVID-19 taught us nothing else, it’s that when health is at risk, everything is at risk,” WHO DG said .
Recalling the effect of the Covid19 pandemic, he lamented the enormous economic, social and political upheaval, and effect on progress towards the health-related targets in the Sustainable Development Goals.
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