"Summit tackles African concerns" by Deb Riechmann | Associated Press August 05, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration sought Monday to strengthen ties with Africa at an unprecedented summit with dozens of African leaders, grappling with issues such as investment, poverty, terrorism, corruption, and deadly diseases.
Nearly 50 African heads of state attended the gathering focused on how to build democracy and raise investment in the continent, which is home to some of the world’s fastest growing economies and an expanding middle class.
The three-day conference, called by President Obama, is the largest gathering of African leaders ever organized by the United States. At the summit venues Monday, top American officials spoke positively about US-Africa relations and progress on the continent.
I'm already bored.
‘‘I think something like 10 of the 15 fastest-growing countries in the world are in Africa,’’ Secretary of State John Kerry said. ‘‘Africa will have a larger workforce than India or China by 2040.’’
Well, Africa is a CONTINENT and those other two are COUNTRIES! The crisis in Palestine and the Israeli insults must be getting to him.
The Obama administration says it is committed to renewing the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which is set to expire next year. Since 2000, the act has been at the center of US efforts to promote trade and investment in Africa while opening sources of material for US producers.
The United States is competing in Africa with China, which surpassed the United States in 2009 as Africa’s largest trading partner. China has been increasingly investing in natural resources projects in Africa, and Chinese leaders make frequent trips to the continent.
A-HA! This isn;'t about all the goody-goody $hit.
This is about CONFRONTATION with CHINA!
In Kenya, Aly-Khan Satchu, owner of a financial management company and a prominent social commentator, said he believes the United States is ‘‘a bit late’’ to what has been a global reengagement with Africa. That movement in Kenya has been led by China, which is helping build roads and overpasses and skyscrapers rising above Nairobi, the capital.
America blows them up and destroys them.
Vice President Joe Biden warned that corruption was a red light to progress in Africa. He called on African nations to improve the rule of law with better court systems, independent oversight of government departments, and vetting of police and security officials.
Take a look at your own country first, Joe! C'mon!
‘‘Corruption . . . not only undermines but prevents the establishment of genuine democratic systems. It stifles economic growth and scares away investment,’’ Biden said. “It siphons off resources that should be used to lift people out of poverty, and it weakens your military readiness.’’
The outbreak of the Ebola virus, which has killed at least 887 people in West Africa, has cast a pall over the summit. Leaders from Sierra Leone and Liberia canceled their plans to attend.
HAS IT?
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FLASHBACK:
"Obama to host African heads of state; Historic summit will focus on economic vitality" by Juliet Eilperin | Washington Post August 04, 2014
Ah, the CIA's new$paper.
WASHINGTON — Nearly 50 African heads of state and government will gather this week for an unprecedented meeting in Washington that seeks to reframe the continent’s image, from one defined by conflict and disease to one ripe with economic promise.
The US-Africa Leaders Summit — which will mark the first time an American president will convene Africa’s leaders at one conference — faces major hurdles, including the ongoing distraction of conflicts elsewhere and domestic budget constraints.
Obama administration officials have deliberately played down their expectations, saying the event will not conclude with the sort of flashy financial commitments that Chinese leaders have announced at African summits in Beijing.
Translation: all he has for you are flowery words and no money! That money is to be used for military operations and drone strikes to keep control of your continent, with the occasional CIA-sponsored coup when needed.
Instead, the meeting will focus largely on the economic potential that Africa offers the United States — provided that the two can solve ongoing problems of electricity supply, agriculture, security threats, and democratic governance. It could allow President Obama to establish a broader legacy in Africa.
That's a hell of a spin to put on it!
‘‘We want to do business with those folks,’’ Obama said Friday at a news conference, noting that the United States is no longer providing aid only to countries on the continent to stave off malnutrition and the spread of HIV/AIDS. ‘‘And we think that we can create US jobs and send US exports to Africa. But we’ve got to be engaged, and so this gives us a chance to do that.’’
I'm so happy George W. is back in office.
WaPo not saying it, but this is about U.S. dominance of the continent and its resources while keeping China out!
Senator Christopher Coons, a Delaware Democrat, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on African affairs, noted that the United States still has strong ties based on years of development assistance.
‘‘I think history will show Africa is the continent of the greatest opportunity this century,’’ he said. ‘‘We have a moment that is passing us by, and we should build on these relationships.’’
It's the one continent still rich in resources and exploitable.
As the son of a Kenyan father, Obama faced high expectations from Africans and specialists in the region when he became president. His friends and foes say he disappointed many Africans in his first term when he focused largely on the struggling US economy and on passing a far-reaching health care law.
Not trying to be racist or anything, but back of line. Us antiwar people were here first, there are some environmentalists and privacy people in front of you.
The summit ‘‘is not a donor conference,’’ said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, assistant secretary of state for African affairs. It is closer to a networking affair that will bring together foreign dignitaries, American and African chief executives, policymakers, and activists for several days of business deals and panel discussions, as well as private dinners and at least one dance.
Oh, I'm glad the 1% of Africa is coming over here to rub elbows with the 1% over here while their continent suffers sever poverty, hunger, violence, health issues, etc, etc.
At least these guys won't be hurting. Party on, Garth!
There are about 100 side events, plus a three-day conference that includes one day devoted to business issues. Another day will cover more traditional development issues, including food security, health, women’s empowerment, and wildlife trafficking.
Uh-huh.
Although the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa is not on the agenda, Gayle Smith, the National Security Council’s development chief, said, ‘‘We will obviously adapt as needed and in consultation with our partners.’’
The presidents of Liberia and Sierra Leone — two of three nations experiencing the outbreak — have canceled their plans to attend the conference.
Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, who will lead the business segment along with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, is set to announce deals between the United States and Africa totaling $1 billion.
So there is money involved? Chump change considering the size of the place, but a Penny in the can.... now how much more does Israel need to replenish their arsenal and restock Iron Dome?
Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a Democrat, who will cohost a reception at the US Capitol on Monday night and will hold a second networking event with more than 100 chief executives and senior US trade officials Wednesday, said his goal is ‘‘to have some real deals that are cut’’ before Wednesday is over.
Are we going to see some sort of ALPHABET TRADE AGREEMENT and further consolidation of globalism with some sort of regional economic structure coming out of this?
Sure looks like it.
Jennifer Cooke, who directs the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Africa program, said a big question facing the administration is to what extent the summit can deliver results. ‘‘There will certainly be some leaders who walk away and say, ‘What was that all about?’ ’’ she said.
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I didn't see much of a PALL there, did you? Dinners and dancing while making deals?
I noticed the kidnapped Nigerian girls was not mentioned, forgotten because it was all a staged and scripted production and fantastic hoax.
At least Obama achieved further insertion of AmeriKan forces and drone spies with the crisis that has faded down the memory hole.
Related: Scientists Discover Cure For Ebola
Also on the guest list:
"Trade, rather than aid, marks the future of US-Africa relationship | August 05, 2014
THE PORTRAITS of two American presidents hang at medical facilities throughout Africa: George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama is admired for being the first African-American president. Bush remains a hero for establishing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Launched in 2003 with about $15 billion, the program has now spent about $60 billion and saved untold lives with antiretroviral treatments, screening, and counseling for AIDS, as well as by fighting deadly outbreaks of malaria.
Now Obama is trying to build on that goodwill as he convenes about 50 of the continent’s leaders at a first-ever White House summit. The current Ebola virus crisis aside, Obama wants to move the US-Africa relationship beyond medical aid to economic trade. It’s a wise move that should pay clear dividends for the United States.
Obama’s initiative comes at a time when China — through its massive oil, mineral, trade, and infrastructure-building surge — is seeking to become the dominant power in a continent with vast economic potential. According to Reuters, trade between the United States and Africa slipped to $60 billion in 2013, a figure dwarfed by the $200 billion for the European Union and the $170 billion for China — which did only $10 billion as recently as 2000. That puts the United States far behind its economic rivals in forging economic links to Africa.
Obama told The Economist that the United States can be a “central” force in Africa’s advancement, based on the idea that “American traditions of transparency, accountability, rule of law, [and] property rights are ingredients that are critical to unlocking Africa’s future.” The Department of Commerce plans to announce nearly $1 billion in new business deals at the summit, and the US Agency for International Development says US companies are promising to devote billions more to Obama’s Power Africa program of electrification. USAID administrator Rajiv Shah told Reuters that these commitments reflect America’s “big ambitions” in Africa.
AID, huh?
No wonder the Africans are choosing China. I'll bet the Chinese are not spying on them, either.
Nonetheless, Obama is facing resistance from some activist groups, who argue that embracing Africa as a trading partner will ease the pressure on African governments on a range of human-rights abuses, including the repression of women and gays. Human Rights Watch said Monday that the summit appears to have “dispatched Africa’s serious human rights problems to a sideshow.” That’s a misreading of Obama’s initiative. By focusing on economic development, Obama is deepening relationships between the United States and some of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Those ties, like the ones already forged through aid programs, will give Americans far more leverage to press for reforms. Obama is hoping that, if the United States helps build Africa, democracy will come. It’s an investment worth making.
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I'm sorry, readers. I wasn't listening to what they were saying. Didn't seem to worried about Ebola, did they?
"Infected aid workers given experimental Ebola drug" by Marilynn Marchione | Associated Press August 05, 2014
NEW YORK — Two American aid workers infected with Ebola are getting an experimental drug so novel it has never been tested for safety in humans.
The drug, ZMapp, was identified as a potential treatment earlier this year, thanks to a longstanding research program by the US government and the military.
Hmmmmmm!
The workers, Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, are improving, although it is impossible to know whether the treatment is the reason or they are recovering on their own, as others who have survived Ebola have done.
Brantly is being treated at a special isolation unit at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital, and Writebol left Liberia for Atlanta early Tuesday, flown in the same specially equipped plane that brought Brantly.
They were infected while working in Liberia, one of four West African nations dealing with the world’s largest Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the World Health Organization said the death toll had increased from 729 to 887 in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria, and that more than 1,600 people have been infected.
A New York City hospital said Monday that it is performing Ebola tests on a patient who recently traveled to West Africa. Mount Sinai Medical Center said the male patient came in Monday with a high fever and gastrointestinal symptoms. He was placed in strict isolation and was undergoing medical screenings.
OMG, it's in New York City!!
But the city health department issued a statement late Monday saying that after consulting with Mount Sinai and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, “the health department has concluded that the patient is unlikely to have Ebola.’’
The New York Times reported that the case was one of three at metro New York hospitals in which doctors, their awareness heightened by the West Africa crisis, have ordered additional testing and precautionary isolation for patients.
Officials at US international airports are watching travelers from Africa for flu-like symptoms that could be tied to Ebola.
This is it, folks. It's the End Game genocide in action, folks. Either that or a $care for pharmaceutical profits.
In a worrisome development, the Nigerian Health Minister said Monday that a doctor who had helped treat Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American man who died July 25, days after arriving in Nigeria, has been confirmed to have the deadly disease. Tests are pending in Nigeria for three other people who also treated Sawyer and are showing symptoms.
There is no vaccine or specific treatment for Ebola but several are under development. The disease starts with symptoms resembling the flu and can progress to severe hemorrhaging.
The experimental treatment the US aid workers are getting is made by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. of San Diego. It is aimed at boosting the immune system’s efforts to fight off Ebola and is made from antibodies produced by lab animals exposed to parts of the virus.
The company said it is working with LeafBio of San Diego, Defyrus Inc. of Toronto, the US government, and the Public Health Agency of Canada on development and production of the drug.
For something that isn't supposed to be that contagious they sure are making a fu$$.
The Food and Drug Administration must grant permission to use experimental treatments in the United States, but the FDA does not have authority over the use of such a drug in other countries, and the aid workers were first treated in Liberia. An FDA spokeswoman said she could not confirm or deny the FDA granting access to any experimental therapy for the aid workers while in the United States.
Then WHY were they BROUGHT BACK HERE?
Writebol, 59, had been in isolation at her home in Liberia before leaving for Atlanta. She is now walking with assistance and has regained her appetite, said Bruce Johnson, president of SIM USA, based in Charlotte, N.C. Writebol, who works for SIM, received two doses of the experimental drug while in Liberia.
WTF?!!
Johnson was hesitant to credit the treatment for her improvement. “One day is not indicative of the outcome,’’ he said. But ‘‘we’re grateful this medicine was available.’’
Brantly, 33, who works for the international relief group Samaritan’s Purse of Boone, N.C., also was said to be improving. Besides the experimental dose he got in Liberia, he also received a unit of blood from a 14-year-old boy, an Ebola survivor, who had been under his care. That seems to be aimed at giving Brantly antibodies the boy may have made to the virus.
Ebola is only spread through direct contact with an infected person’s blood or other bodily fluids, not through the air.
Related: CDC removed the phrase "contaminated air" from its new Ebola webpage
Chan clammed up quick, too!
The Defense Department has long had a hand in researching infectious diseases, including Ebola. The US military does research related to infectious diseases as a means of staying current on potential threats to the health of troops. It may also contribute medical expertise as part of interagency efforts in such places as Africa, where infectious disease threats arise.
Related: Alan Cantwell On The Origin Of AIDS
Created in a military laboratory and then let loose in Africa.
Are we seeing it again?
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And remember yesterday when it was do not worry?
Today's front page Globe fare:
"Few preparations in event of Ebola in US; Unclear how to allot drugs, equipment" by Deborah Kotz | Globe Staff August 05, 2014
As the death toll from Ebola nears 900 in West Africa, medical ethicists warn that US medical facilities and states have few plans in place to allocate limited supplies of life-saving medications and equipment such as ventilators if such a deadly outbreak were to occur here.
It's almost as if they are getting you ready for such an eventuality, preparing your mind as it were. And if we aren't prepared for such a thing, why were these patients brought back when they should have been quarantined.
Public health officials say it is unlikely the disease would spread widely in the United States because infection control procedures and protective gear are more advanced than in Africa. But the unprecedented number of cases in Africa and the ease of travel have ethicists and emergency preparedness experts pondering what-if scenarios.
Well, if my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle. Then she could roll the hell on out of here.
With no vaccine or drugs to fend off Ebola, they say, an outbreak could overwhelm hospitals as patients compete for supplies of ventilators to help them breathe or beds in intensive care units.
I insist that the wealthy get them first. It's like a Titanic lifeboat situation. The better half should survive over the rest of us scum.
If an experimental vaccine becomes available, its supply would be limited at first — as were supplies of vaccine during the outbreak of the H1N1 “swine” flu in 2009 — and determining who would be the first to get it in a national epidemic could cause widespread panic.
Yeah, it is having the $wine flu feeling again.
Don't forget, they dumped loads of unused and degraded vaccines into the water supplies.
Only a few state health departments have established ethical guidelines for rationing medical care in certain situations. Massachusetts is not one of them, offering no guidance for how hospitals should distribute immunizations or treatments in short supply, according to the Department of Public Health.
“Imagine we have a pandemic in Boston with proven treatments that are in limited supply,” said Dr. Robert Truog, director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics. “We have not adequately thought through how to make the allocation decision of who will get it and who will not.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning for Americans to avoid nonessential travel to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which have Ebola cases.
Then why did they bring it back here?
CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said on the CBS Sunday talk show “Face the Nation” that it’s possible someone could travel to the United States with Ebola and spread the virus to family members through personal contact, but he doesn’t think “it’s in the cards that we would have widespread Ebola in this country.”
This isn't a frikkin' poker game! This is LIFE and DEATH!
Officials said Monday an ailing man, who had recently traveled to West Africa, was being treated at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and kept in isolation while tests for Ebola and other illnesses were performed. New York City’s Health Department, however, issued a statement saying that after consulting with Mount Sinai and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it concluded the patient is unlikely to have Ebola.
Ebola spreads through direct contact with an infected person’s blood and other bodily fluids and is not as contagious as airborne viruses such as the flu and the common cold.
Why do I feel like I'm being lied to? Or did the hollering on the Internet get them to back away from their genocidal plot?
Threats of supply shortages were real during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak and after last year’s Marathon bombing.
At Boston Children’s Hospital, physicians worried on the day of the bombing that they might not have enough ICU beds or staff if 50 injured children showed up at once. While that didn’t happen, “it was a little bit of a wake-up call,” said Truog, who practices critical care medicine at Children’s, “that we need more planning and to build consensus” among public health officials, hospital doctors, patients, and their families.
Bioterrorism fears following the 2001 anthrax attacks led to hoarding of the antibiotic Cipro, which is used to treat it, causing shortages in some states.
They were also given preemptively to top leaders. Hmmmm.
And amid an avian flu outbreak five years later, concerns about a possible flu pandemic prompted then-Governor Mitt Romney to ask Massachusetts legislators to appropriate $36.5 million to stockpile thousands of hospital beds, breathing machines, and doses of medication, but his request was turned down.
New York is one of only a handful of states that has a guideline recommending how hospitals should allocate ventilators should a deadly flu pandemic strike this country, similar to the one in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans.
That could also be back soon because scientists reconstituted inactive samples.
“We use a scoring system that predicts the likelihood of survival,” said Dr. Hassan Khouli, chief of the critical care section and chair of the ethics committee at Mount Sinai Roosevelt in New York City. Khouli serves on the state’s task force that is updating the guideline to include children. “The ethical principle driving this is to save the most lives.”
$tarting at the top.
The CDC and Institute of Medicine have recommended ways to allocate scarce vaccines and ventilators, but these are voluntary. The CDC recommended, for example, that vaccines and anti-viral medications should first be distributed during a flu epidemic to those who preserve the “functioning of society” — vaccine makers, police officers, and hospital workers — over those who are more likely to experience serious complications, such as pregnant women.
Without a federal mandate, however, local health officials are more likely to follow recommendations issued by their municipality or state, said Arthur Caplan, head of the division of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, preferring to, perhaps, distribute immunizations made by a local plant to pregnant women in their community rather than shipping it to the military.
Many hospitals have ethics committees that could set policies for patient triage if an outbreak results in dire shortages. “We’ve thought a lot about this,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, medical director for emergency preparedness for Massachusetts General Hospital. “We’re unlikely to end up in a circumstance where we don’t have enough resources, but it’s not impossible.”
The hospital doesn’t have a specific policy for allocating ventilators or medications and would likely turn to federal recommendations, he added.
Oh NO!
That is the LAST thing you want to do.
In practice, however, such guidelines may be tough to implement....
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UPDATES HERE
Looks to me like there is a major cover-up regarding the seriousness and spread of this thing by the propaganda pre$$. WTF?
SEE: Scientist Working on Gov’t Ebola Drug Joked About Culling Population with GMO Virus
But he is working on a cure, right?
