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WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — US pharmaceutical company Pfizer on Tuesday asked regulators to authorize its Covid pill after it was shown to cut hospitalization or death by nearly 90 percent among newly-infected high risk patients. The move comes a few weeks after Merck also approached the Food and Drug Administration seeking a green light for its antiviral capsule against the coronavirus. Experts see the oral medications as an invaluable addition to vaccines in the […]
NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — New York City will allow crowds into Times Square on New Year’s Eve to ring in 2022, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday, after the pandemic muted last year’s celebrations. Hundreds of thousands of revelers will be able to attend the traditional ball drop at midnight providing they can prove they are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, de Blasio told reporters. Attendees who are unable to get vaccinated because […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna are making combined profits of $65,000 every minute from their highly successful Covid-19 vaccines while the world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated, according to a new analysis. The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to Covid vaccines, which based its calculations on […]
by Abhaya SRIVASTAVA NEW DELHI, India (AFP) — New Delhi authorities announced Saturday a one-week closure of schools and said they would consider a “pollution lockdown” to protect citizens from toxic smog. “Schools will be shut so that children don’t have to breathe polluted air,” Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal told reporters. Delhi is ranked one of the world’s most polluted cities, with a hazardous melange of factory and vehicle emissions, and smoke from agricultural […]
OTTAWA, Canada (AFP) — Relentless rain battered Canada’s Pacific coast on Monday, forcing a town’s evacuation and trapping motorists as mudslides, rocks and debris were washed across major highways. “Heavy rains and subsequent mudslides/flooding have impacted various highways in the BC interior,” British Columbia’s transportation ministry said on Twitter. Rescuers were deployed to free people trapped for hours in 80-100 cars and trucks between two mudslides near the town of Agassiz, the province’s safety minister, […]
by Julia ZAPPEI and Blaise GAUQUELIN VIENNA, Austria (AFP) — Austria on Monday became the first country in the European Union to impose a lockdown on the unvaccinated and start inoculating children as young as five after coronavirus cases surged across the continent. Infection rates have surged, placing Western Europe once again at the heart of the global epidemic and governments are being forced to take action, with the Netherlands already announcing the region’s first […]
by Camille BAS-WOHLERT Agence France Presse COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP) — Premature deaths caused by fine particle air pollution have fallen 10 percent annually across Europe, but the invisible killer still accounts for 307,000 premature deaths a year, the European Environment Agency said Monday. If the latest air quality guidelines from the World Health Organisation were followed by EU members, the latest number of fatalities recorded in 2019 could be cut in half, according to […]
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel gave the green light Sunday to start vaccinating children aged between five and 11 against Covid-19 using Pfizer/BioNTech jabs, following the example of the United States. “The director general of the ministry of health… authorised the vaccination of children aged five to 11 years,” the health ministry said in a statement. Israel was one of the first countries to launch a vaccination campaign last year using the jabs thanks to a […]
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AFP) — Three patients died in a fire that broke out early Sunday on a coronavirus ward in a hospital in southeast Bulgaria, the rescue services said. The three male patients, aged 66, 70 and 81, were all ill with Covid-19 and died on the fourth floor of a hospital in the city of Sliven, the head of the local rescue services, Vladimir Demirev, told Bulgarian television. Six other patients on neighbouring […]
PARIS, France (AFP) — The Covid-19 pandemic continued to pick up speed across Europe this week and also began to accelerate in Latin America. Here is the global state of play based on an AFP database. – Global rise – The number of new daily cases increased globally for a fourth week in a row, jumping eight percent compared to last week, with an average of 472,800 daily infections, according to an AFP tally […]
GENEVA, Switzerland (AFP) — As Covid-19 cases balloon again in Europe, the World Health Organization called Friday for more targeted vaccination efforts to ensure the most vulnerable worldwide get the jabs. The UN health agency said Europe, once again at the epicentre of the pandemic, registered nearly two million Covid cases last week. That is “the most in a single week in the region since the pandemic started,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told […]
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AFP) — Africa is set to see diabetes cases more than double to 55 million by 2045, the biggest increase across the globe, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned Thursday. “The Covid-19 pandemic will eventually subside, but Africa is projected in the coming years to experience the highest increase in diabetes globally,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa. Twenty-four million people are living with diabetes today in Africa, which […]
