Tag Archives: Congo

The World Health Organization writes: The World Health Organization (WHO) today launched a global Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan to stop outbreaks of human-to-human transmission of mpox through coordinated global, regional, and national efforts. This follows the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO Director-General on 14 August. The plan covers the six-month period of …

Politico Europe reports: A drug used in the last global mpox outbreak in 2022-23 is not effective against the more severe virus spreading rapidly in Africa, researchers have found. The antiviral, tecovirimat, did not reduce the duration of lesions among children and adults with clade I mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to the initial results …

The Times Of Israel reports: The “voluntary” resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption. Zman Israel, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site, has learned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition is conducting secret contacts …

Anti-gay politicians are pushing the Democratic Republic of the Congo to follow Uganda’s lead on criminalizing homosexuality. Via Think Africa Press: Last December, Steve Mbikayi, an MP with the Parti Travailliste Congolais (PTC), introduced a draft bill to the Congolese National Assembly that would explicitly criminalise homosexuality. The DRC is one of the relatively few African countries in which homosexual …

The Washington Post has published a fascinating history of the origins of HIV, based on the fairly widely-accepted theory that the virus sprang from chimp to human during the tumultuous colonial days of western Africa, possibly beginning in the 1880s. Most of this colonial world didn’t have enough potential victims for such a fragile virus to start a major epidemic. …

The New York Times reports that armed militias are raping male villagers in the Congo in order to force them into submitting to their control. According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations …

I was going to headline this post Cock-Jacking, but that might have been misleading. From Kinshasa, Congo: Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, …