Nigerian Nurse Dies of Ebola

Photo: Samaritans Purse

An Ebola patient in the isolation ward (file photo).

A Nigerian nurse who treated Patrick Sawyer has died from Ebola virus, the government has confirmed.

The Minister of Health, Onyebuchi Chukwu, also confirmed that six more people tested positive of the virus.

All six who tested positive were in primary contact with the Liberian American, Mr. Sawyer, who died in a Lagos hospital late July after arriving from Liberia.

The nurse is the first Nigerian to die from Ebola.

The Nigerian government has asked the U.S. Centre for Disease Control to provide it with the experimental drug being administered to the two American doctors infected in Liberia.

Both are said to be responding to treatment.

Mr. Chukwu, at a press briefing on Wednesday morning, demanded state governments to open up more isolation sites to contain people who might need to be treated or isolated.

He said the government would stop at nothing to contain the spread of Ebola‎.

Tanzania: Analysts, MP Raise Questions Over Leaked Tanzania Gas Contract

Dar es Salaam/Washington — A leaked contract showing ExxonMobil and Norway's Statoil will pay Tanzania no more than 50 percent of the profits from a natural gas field in the Indian Ocean has stirred a furore in the east African country.

Politicians and citizens had expected their country would get up to 85 percent of the profits from the offshore gas field that has been under exploration since 2000. Now the headlines in The Citizen, Dar es Salaam's biggest daily newspaper, declare: "$1 billion loss: Who's Fooling Tanzanians?"

The controversy has exposed how secret government deals can stir fear and suspicion, especially over a natural resource that the International Monetary Fund estimates could bring $5-6 billion a year into Tanzania's coffers by 2029 - equivalent to half its budget and more than enough money to free the country from dependency on foreign aid.

Tanzania has been promised riches before, and the new row has echoes of previous deals that have left a sour taste.

Two decades ago gold mining was to lift the country into the ranks of middle-income nations. While Tanzania is the third largest exporter of gold, problems of political oversight of contracts and mispricing have led to disappointment over the amount of mining revenue that flows into government coffers.

This feeds into fresh concerns that major international oil companies may be taking advantage of the relative lack of experience of the government agency, the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC), in negotiating highly complex exploration and production deals and suspicions that government officials are taking kick-backs.

The leaked Statoil/ExxonMobil contract started to attract attention when blogger Ben Taylor, who is a consultant with the Tanzania governance think tank Twaweza, scrutinised it earlier this month. He estimated possible losses of $900 million a year compared with a model contract.

The contract states that Tanzania will get a 30 percent share of gas profits after production and developments costs, rising to 50 percent as more gas is produced from the offshore field known as Block 2.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

But the model production sharing agreement (PSA) posted on TPDC's website as an example of the type of contracts the government would agree lists 60 percent of gas profits flowing to Tanzania on a sliding scale up to 85 percent.

An initial review of the contract by oil industry experts indicated that the contract terms, struck in February 2012, does not on the face of it throw up red flags. Offshore projects can be risky and require a high level of upfront costs, so contracts will vary according to the specific conditions.

But Zitto Kabwe, an outspoken member of Tanzania's parliament who heads its committee on public accounts, asked why the leaked contract, negotiated behind closed doors, differs so greatly from the example cited by TPDC.

"Why have a model PSA if terms can vary that much? If the contract remains as it is with Statoil, Tanzania will get just 15 percent of its wealth in natural gas" after production and development costs are deducted, he said by email.

"We will campaign for transparency of contracts and renegotiations of better terms," he told Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Statoil said it could not comment on the details of the contract, in accordance with the terms of the agreement.

"However, the contract does consider the totality of taxes, direct government take, local conditions, risks, market access, technical challenges and cost levels," the company said in an emailed response.

OPEN BOOKS

Civil society groups are pressing for open contracts in the extractives industry as a means of heightening government accountability over natural resource wealth and to promote more public discussion over how revenues are invested.

Tanzania has taken a number of steps to be more accountable. It is part of a global initiative to reconcile government accounts on extractives with corporate royalty payments, and it is setting up a sovereign wealth fund to use natural resource revenues for long-term investments. But it does not make public individual contracts.

Isabel Munilla, a senior policy officer on extractive industries at Oxfam America, said such lack of transparency can undermine confidence in government.

"It creates a row for no reason. If you negotiate these with some oversight from the public, you increase trust and get better contracts," she said.

TPDC said that once corporate taxes are added, Tanzania actually will get 61 percent of the profits plus 5 percent royalties. Its director general, Yona Killagane, in a statement issued last week disputed estimates circulating on social media.

"We would like to inform the public that such information is incorrect, misleading and has not been thoroughly researched and analysed, and was disseminated by people with no broad understanding of gas exploration activities," he said.

But the numbers crunched by activists are still raising questions.

Taylor estimated that if production reaches 500 million cubic feet per day, the government could be losing as much as $400 million per year under the Statoil/ExxonMobil deal compared with the model contract and more than twice that if production reaches 1,000 million cubic feet per day.

Mixed Results for Yellow Cassava's Vitamin A Trial

Wageningen — Eating yellow cassava bred to be richer in beta-carotene increased the level of vitamin A in children's blood by only a small amount, according to new results.

But some experts, including the scientist leading the trial, say there is potential for growing yellow cassava in Africa and parts of Asia to correct vitamin A deficiency - which leads to blindness and death in many thousands of children.

Elise Talsma conducted the randomised trial involving 342 children in rural Kenya as part of her PhD at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and plans to submit the results to a peer-reviewed journal.

She measured both beta-carotene, a molecule that the body can turn into vitamin A, and vitamin A itself in blood samples of children who consumed 350 grams of cooked yellow cassava a day for four months, in 2012. Nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of the children had vitamin A deficiency, which is defined as having a vitamin A blood level lower than 0.7 micromoles per litre.

Yellow cassava increased beta-carotene concentration in children's blood by five times compared with a control group who ate traditional white cassava.

But the vitamin A concentrations improved on average only by 0.04 micromoles per litre - not enough to significantly reduce the number of children with vitamin A deficiency.

Despite the limited result, Talsma believes the effect is likely to increase when larger volumes are consumed for a longer period, and with better varieties that are currently being bred to double the current concentration of beta-carotene.

She says biofortification is needed to complement other approaches such as supplementation and fortification of food, which are not reaching enough people. In the district she worked in, existing supplementation reached only 31 per cent of children, according to a paper published this year in the Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health.

And Talsma found through laboratory tests that seven out of eight bottles of different brands of cooking oil bought in Kenya that claimed to be fortified with vitamin A did not contain any more vitamin A than conventional cooking oil.

Talsma previously reported that the majority of children and their caretakers in her survey in three Kenyan primary schools prefer the sweeter yellow cassava to white cassava, in a study she led that was published in PLOS One.

'Major step' for proof of concept

Erick Boy, nutrition manager at the HarvestPlus programme, a joint venture between the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), welcomes the results.

"The efficacy of biofortified cassava has been proved for the first time," he says. "Demonstrating a biologically important effect under strictly controlled conditions, as in this trial, is a major step towards proof of concept for biofortification of cassava with beta-carotene as a potential public nutrition alternative."

Richard Sayre, who leads a group at the New Mexico Consortium that has researched high beta-carotene transgenic cassava, says the results are promising and consistent with previous studies on transgenic cassava.

But Marianne van Dorp, a food and nutrition specialist at the Wageningen University and Research centre, is more critical.

"It is good that the real potential of biofortification in terms of impact on human nutritional situation is assessed," she says. "This research shows that the effect is modest, and that other complementary interventions are needed, such as supplementation, fortification and dietary diversification, especially if micronutrient deficiencies are deep."

Last-Minute Unesco Lobbying Brings SDG Science Success

By Yojana Sharma

Last-minute lobbying by UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is said to have helped reinstate some of science and research commitments into the draft of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) released this month (19 July).

The SDGs will replace the eight Millennium Development Goals after 2015. They are being drafted by an Open Working Group (OWG) of UN ambassadors.

The draft of the SDG 'outcome document' includes a goal of encouraging public and private research and development spending. This goal had been in the zero draft issued on 2 June, but was removed from a later version.

Two week-long sets of negotiations in June and July ended on 19 July after a 30-hour, overnight session. These culminated in 17 goals and 169 targets - down from 212 targets proposed in the zero draft - along with a stronger section on how to implement them.

Commitments to increase the ratio of R&D workers by 2030 and boosting R&D spending were reinstated but in a slightly watered-down form without a specific target for the latter.

Farooq Ullah, executive director of Stakeholder Forum, a civil society group that aims to advance sustainable development, says the language is weaker than it was in the zero draft.

"At this stage, it's important to get things in. That is partly why delegates were willing to compromise to get it in, even in watered down form," he says.

Ullah says the scientific community had been seeking to include more references to cross-cutting and integrated science and research throughout the document. Yet, he adds, some targets remain vague.

According to David Griggs, the director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Monash University in Australia, who attended the June talks, research and innovation "was being seen as a means of implementation, not as a goal", during the earlier part of the negotiations.

Key science clauses were dropped as delegates concentrated on other areas of the document, including poverty, equality, energy and food, says Griggs.

The science community managed to pull the situation back from the brink when UNESCO's New York office organised a 'ministerial breakfast' on 15 July on the margins of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development meeting in New York, to press home the importance of SDGs backed by science and research.

"UNESCO used the opportunity to highlight the issue of science," says one delegate.

"Science and research got a second chance."

In June, the "many delegations [within the working group] were looking at specific goals and concentrating on that, but when they stepped back and looked at the document as a whole they realised something was missing", says Felix Dodds, a fellow at the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, United States, and a close observer of the drafting process.

There was no opposition among delegations to reinstating science, says Dodds.

Science and research is included elsewhere in the document, which now also includes a commitment to help developing countries "strengthen their scientific and technological capacities to move towards more sustainable patterns of consumption and production".

It also commits to: boosting international cooperation on science and technology, technology transfer and knowledge sharing; getting the UN Technology Bank up and running by 2017; and enhancing capacity building support to developing countries on development data and statistical capacity.

"In the area of science and research, there are more mentions than in the previous [zero draft] text," says Dodds. "But the next phase will be a big challenge."

The outcome document has now been handed over to the UN General Assembly for discussion and adoption.

"We have to be realistic," says Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the climate adaptation projects at Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. "This is now going to go into the maelstrom of a more political process."

Sudanese Woman Spared Death Sentence Flown to Italy

Photo: Lapo Pistelli/Facebook

Italian vice-minister of foreign affairs Lapo Pistelli has posted a photo of himself with Meriam Ibrahim and her children. Ibrahim had been arrested for converting from Islam before marrying her husband. The photo was taken a few minutes before they arrived in Rome from Sudan.

 A Sudanese woman who was spared a death sentence for converting from Islam to Christianity, and then barred from leaving Sudan, was due to arrive in Italy on Thursday, an Italian government official said.

Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, was on a plane accompanied by Italy's vice minister of foreign affairs, Lapo Pistelli, according to the official who asked not to be named.

"Mariam, the young Christian woman held in Khartoum after being condemned to death for apostasy, should be arriving in Italy on a government flight," the official said in a text message, without specifying when the flight had left.

In late June, Ibrahim was arrested as she tried to board a plane for the United States. Sudanese police accused her of traveling with a forged passport.

Three days after that arrest, she was released and immediately sought refuge in the U.S. embassy with her husband - a South Sudanese-born U.S. citizen - and their two children. The family had stayed there nearly a month.

Ibrahim's mother was a Christian and her father a Muslim. Under Sudanese law, she is a Muslim even though she was brought up as a Christian after her father abandoned the family.

Sudan 'apostasy' woman Meriam Yahia Ibrahim meets Pope

A Sudanese woman who fled to Italy after being spared a death sentence for renouncing Islam has met the Pope.

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag flew to Rome with her family after more than a month in the US embassy in Khartoum.

There was global condemnation when she was sentenced to hang for apostasy by a Sudanese court.

Mrs Ibrahim's father is Muslim so according to Sudan's version of Islamic law she is also Muslim and cannot convert.

She was raised by her Christian mother and says she has never been Muslim.

Welcoming her at the airport, Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said: "Today is a day of celebration."

Mrs Ibrahim met Pope Francis at his Santa Marta residence at the Vatican soon after her arrival.

"The Pope thanked her for her witness to faith," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi was quoted as saying.

The meeting, which lasted around half an hour, was intended to show "closeness and solidarity for all those who suffer for their faith," he added.

'Mission accomplished'

The BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome says there was no prior indication of Italy's involvement in the case.

Lapo Pistelli, Italy's vice-minister for foreign affairs, accompanied her on the flight from Khartoum and posted a photo of himself with Mrs Ibrahim and her children on his Facebook account as they were about to land in Rome.

"Mission accomplished," he wrote.

A senior Sudanese official told Reuters news agency that the government in Khartoum had approved her departure in advance.

Mrs Ibrahim's lawyer Mohamed Mostafa Nour told BBC Focus on Africa that she travelled on a Sudanese passport she received at the last minute.

"She is unhappy to leave Sudan. She loves Sudan very much. It's the country she was born and grew up in," he said.

Mrs Ibrahim travelled with her husband Daniel Wani

"But her life is in danger so she feels she has to leave. Just two days ago a group called Hamza made a statement that they would kill her and everyone who helps her," he added.

Mrs Ibrahim's husband, Daniel Wani, also a Christian, is from South Sudan and has US nationality.

Their daughter Maya was born in prison in May, shortly after Mrs Ibrahim was sentenced to hang for apostasy - renouncing one's faith.

Under intense international pressure, her conviction was quashed and she was freed in June.

She was given South Sudanese travel documents but was arrested at Khartoum airport, with Sudanese officials saying the travel documents were fake.

These new charges meant she was not allowed to leave the country but she was released into the custody of the US embassy in Khartoum.

Last week, her father's family filed a lawsuit trying to have her marriage annulled, on the basis that a Muslim woman is not allowed to marry a non-Muslim.

EFF Members Storm Gauteng Legislature

Economic Freedom Fighters' members stormed into the Gauteng legislature during their march in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

The party members had marched to the legislature to protest against the removal of their MPLs during a sitting on July 1.

On arrival at the legislature, they pushed through a human chain of police officers in front of the building and stormed inside.

Other members who were prevented from getting in when the door was shut and locked continued to sing struggle songs in front of the legislature where police struggled to maintain order.

Those who got in were removed, except for the party's provincial leaders and its leader Julius Malema. They were in a meeting in the building around noon on Tuesday.