Photo: Kanya Ndaki/PlusNews

The government has cautioned HIV-positive patients to keep taking their ARVs (file photo)

DAR ES SALAAM,  – A widely used concoction administered by Tanzanian herbalist Ambilikile Mwasapile is ineffective, the country’s health minister, Hussein Mwinyi, has said.

Mwasapile, a former Lutheran pastor who claims God revealed the treatment to him in a dream, has drawn hundreds of thousands to his home in Samunge village, Loliondo, in northern Tanzania’s Ngorongoro district, over the past 18 months.

Believers claim it can cure a variety of diseases, including diabetes, cancer, tuberculosis and HIV. At the peak of his popularity, he was seeing up to 2,000 patients per day, each paying 500 Tanzanian shillings (about US$0.32) for one cup of the liquid.

Mwinyi told parliament in Dodoma, the administrative capital, on 31 July that studies conducted over the past year found no discernible difference between people who used it and those who did not.

“This led us to the conclusion that the herb is not potent and effective at all. There was no change in CD4 count [a measure of immune strength], weight and general health after the herb was administered to the patients,” he said.

In March 2011, a team of experts drawn from the offices of the Chief Government Chemist, the Tanzania Drugs and Food Authority, the National Institute for Medical Research and the Muhimbili National Hospital, endorsed the herb as safe for human consumption. However, the health ministry cautioned people visiting Mwasapile to continue with all other treatments prescribed for them by doctors.

Despite the warnings, many HIV-positive people abandoned their life-prolonging antiretroviral treatment after taking Mwasapile’s herbs.

Residents in Arusha region, where Samunge is located, say Mwasapile’s popularity has waned, with few people seeking his treatment in recent weeks.

Too late

HIV activists welcomed the minister’s comments, but say they came too late. Joseph Kato, executive Director of the Service, Health and Development Organization for People Living Positively with HIV (SHDEPHA-Plus), said in the past six months members of his organization had travelled around in five Tanzanian regions where “hundreds of deaths” had occurred because people stopped taking their ARVs after visiting the herbalist.

Many people have lost their lives after taking the cup at Samunge. It was useless

“Many people have lost their lives after taking the cup at Samunge. It was useless,” said Kato. “There are people who were on first-line ARVs, but after taking the cup and briefly abandoning ARVs, ended up moving to second-line [medication],” he told IRIN/PlusNews.

Failure to adhere to ARVs can lead to resistance, forcing health workers to switch patients to more expensive second- and third-line drugs.

Rodgers Nzota, a founder member of Tanzania’s Network of Youth Living with HIV/AIDS, says the Mwasapile saga should be a warning to the government of the need for more public awareness about HIV/AIDS.

“People sold their property and others borrowed heavily to obtain fare or hired vehicles and travelled to Samunge village braving bad weather including rain. They are now poor or heavily indebted, but still sick. Some are now dead,” Nzota said.

“The government should have stated that there is no proof yet on the potency on the herb against diseases claimed, and advised the public accordingly. It is now too late. People have died and we still don’t know the side-effects, if any, on those who took the cup.”

jk/kr/he
source www.irinnews.org

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Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN

Precious stuff

LONDON,  – Is the world ready to face water shocks? For water shocks are certainly coming; water shocks, in fact, are already here.

A meeting of ecologists, policymakers and water professionals gathered recently at London’s Chatham House to contemplate the prospect. Asia, they heard, was the continent where problems were already most acute.

Pavel Kabat of Vienna’s Institute for Applied Systems Analysis told IRIN: “We have been worried about water in other parts of the world – it’s still a very important issue in Africa – but we were forgetting that the because of the economic growth and the population growth, the surge in food demand will come in Asia. Already now the fresh water for agriculture is being consumed at very high rates. Asia is the hotspot… and I would say that the first big issues will have to be faced by 2020 or 2030.”

Seventy percent of the global use of water is for agricultural purposes, and that is where the crisis is likely to show itself. “In India, 75 percent of all irrigation water comes from groundwater,” says Kabat, “and we are kind of assuming that it will stay like this.” But he points to Europe and the USA, which have seen groundwater levels in some areas dropping by as much as five metres a year, and laws have had to be introduced to restrict the lifting of groundwater for agriculture; the same thing, he says could happen in Asia.

There is also the issue of water quality. With reduced flows of fresh water from Asia’s great rivers reaching the coast, and with sea levels rising, the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Mekong deltas are suffering increasing salt water intrusion, with salinity in some places reaching levels at which normal crops will not grow. Some coastal areas of Bangladesh are already unfarmable.

Developed countries are certainly not immune from the impending problems. In some areas of the USA ancient aquifers have been tapped to allow agriculture in naturally desert areas. This “fossil water” is now depleting fast and not able to be replenished. One speaker told the meeting he could see areas where there would soon be no more groundwater, which means no more agriculture, and, since people only settled there because they could grow irrigated crops, no more viability as a populated area – a prospect so alarming that, he said, “it causes policymakers not to want to tackle that problem.”

Across the border in Mexico, it is the capital city which is threatened by an unsustainable situation. Already Mexico City has a serious water deficit and is facing a drop in rainfall of something like 30 percent. The situation has been made worse by the fact that Mexico subsidizes public services in the capital; water is cheaper there than in the countryside, and the population is growing very fast. And once consumers are used to subsidies it becomes very hard to introduce a realistic price.

Polioptro Martinez Austria, director of the Mexican Institute of Hydrology, says water managers cannot solve this problem on their own. “Today there are huge subsidies for water in the area,” he told IRIN, “and as a result, the aquifers are overexploited, and the public awareness of water use is not enough to save water. I believe we need a new policy of urban development if we are going to solve the water problem.”

In India and Bangladesh, the arid areas of the USA and Mexico City, the impression is of a dreadful inevitability, like a slow-motion car crash. And politicians are not good at dealing with this kind of slow onset event. “We know it has to come,” says Kabat, “but there is a general lack of ability of governments globally to look beyond the next election period, I am sorry to say. We have a lot of studies, as scientists, of the scenarios for the next 10, 20, 30 years, but it is simply too far ahead for politicians to act.”

Policy tools

The Chatham House meeting did offer some policy tools that could address water issues. There was discussion of tariffs and the creation of water markets, where water rights can be bought, sold and leased.

A market of that kind is now working quite successfully in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. There the government “unbundled” land rights from water rights, so that just having water on your land, in the form of a river or groundwater, no longer gives you automatic rights to use it. And allocated water rights can be sold, permanently or on a temporary basis. During the recent severe drought, the result was that farmers stopped growing thirsty but lower-value crops like rice. They sold their water allocations to growers of higher value, less demanding crops like grapes, and the income they received helped them through the drought period until they could resume their normal farming.

A discussion of tariffs revealed that many countries still do not charge for water at all, and some give a kind of buy-in-bulk discount, so that the more water you use, the cheaper the unit cost.

We have a lot of studies, as scientists, of the scenarios for the next 10, 20, 30 years, but it is simply too far ahead for politicians to act

China, which has traditionally sold water very cheaply, is starting to charge more, and has begun moving to so-called “increasing block tariffs” where water gets increasingly expensive the more you use. With different cities currently using different systems, a recent comparative study was able to show that tariffs did have an effect. Beijing, which now has higher prices and a sharply rising tariff, showed a real drop in consumption, while usage is still rising in some other cities.

At the international level there was some discussion of the fact that water was “everywhere and nowhere”, affecting many other agendas, but with no UN agency dealing with water alone, perhaps reflecting the fact that, while the world has one climate and one atmosphere, it has many separate systems of river basins and aquifers, some of which are severely depleted, while others are well supplied.

Negotiated usage

But water systems do cut across political boundaries and as water shortages increase, the use of the water will have to be negotiated by both sides. Tariq Karim, Bangladesh’s ambassador in Delhi, is a veteran in negotiating water-sharing agreements with India, but he told IRIN that there had to be a change of approach. “When you talk about sharing,” he said, “you are talking about dividing something up, and whenever you come to dividing up, it’s like dividing the spoils. There is going to be contention. And you can’t physically divide a river, and you can’t manage it in segments. It makes better sense if you talk in terms of managing the river together.

“In Bangladesh our land space is not increasing but our population is, and for 80 percent of our population their source of livelihood is agricultural, so for us this is absolutely crucial.”

eb/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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JOHANNESBURG,  – Marie*, her husband and their three children, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are about to relocate from South Africa, where they have lived for the past decade, to Australia where they have been accepted into that country’s refugee resettlement programme.

Globally, there are only about 80,000 resettlement places available each year in 26 countries, meaning that the vast majority of refugees will either remain in camps for long periods, eventually integrate into their host countries or return home.

Marie talked to IRIN about why she and her family have been unable to either return home to DRC or settle in South Africa.

“I grew up with my auntie who married a Rwandese. He was like my father and their kids were my sisters, but they looked Rwandese and it was a time in Congo when there was trouble between Rwandese and Congolese.

“My uncle ran away and my husband and I were taking care of those kids so we were also attacked. We saw people being killed with burning tyres around their necks just because they were Rwandese. This was in Kinshasa but it was happening everywhere.

“We were scattered, but my direction was to save those kids, to get them to family members in Goma. There are many Rwandese in Goma so I thought it would be safer for them, but [the Rwandese there] were informed about their brothers being killed in Kinshasa so they wanted revenge on everyone who came from there. They attacked me in every way you can think about. They put us in prison; their plan was to kill us slowly.

“I managed to escape when the volcano (Mount Nyiragongo) was erupting. I went to Tanzania and then Zambia where I gave birth to my daughter. Then I arrived in South Africa in 2002.

“I didn’t know where my husband was, there was no way for us to communicate. Then we met at [the Department of] Home Affairs in Johannesburg. We were both going for extension to our asylum permits. So we reunited.

“But then one day I discovered my son was bleeding from the mouth. I took him to the hospital and they said they couldn’t help. They knew he had haemophilia, but they chased us away and threatened to call the police.

“We stayed nine months without treatment [for him]. We weren’t working and we didn’t speak English at that time, but I kept taking him back to the hospital. Then JRS [Jesuit Refugee Services] started advocating for us.

“Finally, the hospital agreed [to treat my son], but when we were there, the nurses still let us know we were foreigners and then when my third baby was born with the same problem, they again said they didn’t have medicine.

“By 2007, JRS had been helping us all along, we were burdening them. They forwarded our case to UNHCR. The first time I came there, I talked to a social worker for five hours and she said she’d try to resettle us.

“The first country that came up was the US. They came here to interview us and everything went smoothly but when they discovered the children had haemophilia, we could see their attitude change. After waiting for nearly two years, we were rejected.

“After the US, it was Canada, but after they heard about the kids, they started looking for mistakes in our story, and then they rejected us. That was another one and a half years. I’m a university graduate but I thought I was doing something wrong in the interviews.

“Finally, UNHCR forwarded our case to Australia. It was a year plus some months ago that we had the interview. They looked into the medical issue and said the treatment was expensive, but they talked to UNHCR to try to find a solution. Then we got a call a couple of weeks ago that we’re leaving on 30 July. We’re going to Brisbane, we just heard today. We don’t have any information about it.

“We don’t have anything here in South Africa, so there’s nothing to prepare. We’re not accepted here, nothing was working for us. Sometimes there’s an emergency with the boys. Everywhere you go, you’re watching your phone in case the teacher calls and I have to get to the school. Every time they’re bleeding, they have to give them medication intravenously that costs R2,300 [US$280] and sometimes they don’t have the medication at all.

“I’m so excited to be leaving this country, but it’s been a long journey and a painful one.”

*Not her real name

ks/cb
source www.irinnews.org

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