The talk is all about swine flu. Center for Disease Control is stressing about the shortage of vaccine. Some are not convinced about the effectiveness of the new vaccine. On the other hand the Obama administration has declared swine flu a national emergency.
Swine influenza is a flu virus usually found in pigs. This time it has mutated to infect humans. Symptoms include fever, cough, muscle ache, headache, diarrhea and vomiting among others. Despite the heightened hysteria most people are likely to recover without needing medical care. The swine flu scare started in the spring of 2009. Barely six months and scientists have already isolated the virus and come up with a vaccine.
On the other hand Woyanne virus has been around twenty years. Woyanne virus started in the western low lands of Tigrai, northern Ethiopia. Within a few years it has mutated and managed to infect most of Ethiopia. Woyanne flu is highly contagious and can spread from human to human. Woyanne flu is what you would call a hybrid. It means that it has been produced from two or more other viruses.
The closet viruses related to Woyanne flu are Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Apartheid. Woyane scientists call the new virus the Meles/Sebhat strain. The founders have not bothered to patent their new finding. They have opted for ‘open source’ approach so other dedicated dictators can build on their work for the good of humanity.
Methods of infection:
Woyane flu is a truly fascinating virus that is capable of change and adaptation. The initial preferred method was use of brute force. Villagers were isolated and their elders and leaders eliminated. Forced indoctrination was carried out 24/7. As the areas under control increased the newly infected villagers were dispersed among the population. Method of infection underwent change too. Blackmail and corruption became the new tools. Promise of power and personal riches became the new weapons of choice. The Woyane virus adapted to infecting the victims brain. Instead of killing the virus renders the victim useless and incapable of making simple decisions. The virus is capable of rewiring the thought process of the host.
Test and diagnosis:
Doctors are able to tell those exposed to the virus by a simple test. Victims are abnormally chatty and show a heightened sense of love for today’s Ethiopia. They are quick in their condemnation of our ancient history and carry a wide brush to paint the past in negative terms. Victims have a tendency to place themselves and others in tribal boxes for easy classification. Woyanne virus infected individuals are very disruptive in-group settings. They saw mistrust and enhance negative ill feelings between people. The virus is capable of working on human weakness and using that to disrupt good will among the population.
Woyane flu exposed views themselves as individuals first. They have a tendency to think what is good for them is good for country. The virus is good at magnifying the ego. For example what they see is my beautiful building not my displaced neighbor, my extravagant reception not my starving kin my beautiful commodity exchange not my imprisoned merchants.
Prognosis:
The highly exposed to the virus number a few hundreds. The mildly infected probably number in few thousands. The vast majority has managed to produce immunity. The likelihood of further infection is deemed very unlikely. The Woyanne virus has run its course and at the moment it is vainly trying to reinvent itself. Scientists view it as a wana be strain that was able to incubate due to favorable circumstances at its place of birth. It was a weak opportunist virus. The Woyane virus is in the process of disintegration.
Prevention:
The US center for disease control advice regarding swine flu states “People who work with pigs who might be infected should use protective clothing and special breathing masks.” There is no protective cloth to avoid infection by Woyanne virus. The best protection is to avoid Woyanne. In order to avoid re-occurrences it is highly advisable to isolate the carriers and disinfect where possible or eliminate when appropriate.
ASMARA — Members of the Woyanne regime’s armed forces in Ethiopia continue to abandon their units in droves, according to 3 soldiers who recently defected to Eritrea.
One of the many complaints the soldiers are expressing is that the top leadership of the armed forces are completely dominated by one ethnic group and that the army is being used to preserve the ruling party’s grip on power, not to defend the national interest of Ethiopia.
As health ministers from around the world meet in the Ethiopian capital to tackle maternal mortality, women suffering birth-related injuries are given a new lease of life through a simple operation.
Hailemariam Workneh is trying to amuse his son outside the Hamlin Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa.
They have one toy – a small rubber crocodile which two-year-old Awel squeals and runs away from, before edging back towards it and squealing again.
Hailemariam says it’s not easy to keep his son distracted while his mother gets treated for fistula. But he is glad to be here. Finally.
It took him five years to save up the money to bring his wife here from their village in the north.
He is the only husband we see at the clinic.
Fifty per cent of women who have fistula are abandoned by their husbands because they leak urine or faeces, or both.
The staff at the Hamlin Hospital are full of admiration for Hailemariam for sticking by his wife.
They keep telling me how unusual it is.
When his wife Zeinat wakes from her surgery she says the same thing.
Needless shame
“I was too ashamed to leave the house because of the smell, I couldn’t see my friends,” she says. “It was so hard being alone. But my husband is a good man, he didn’t neglect me while I was leaking.”
Most women, she says, will “cry every day”, because they have no-one to help them.
Zeinat’s surgery is successful and afterwards, she cannot stop smiling.
“I am excited at participating in life again,” she says.
The last five years have involved needless pain and shame.
The causes are in part a lack of resources, in part gender inequality, according to the United Nation’s Population Fund.
Like 94% of women in Ethiopia, Zeinat had to give birth without the help of a properly trained health worker.
As is often the case for small-framed Ethiopian women, the baby was too big for her to deliver normally.
Midwife shortage
Prof Gordon Williams, medical director at the Hamlin Hospital, says women in rural areas are often stopped from eating much during their pregnancy, and are worked extra hard in the belief it will stop the baby from growing too big in the womb.
It does not. Instead, by the time she comes to give birth the woman will be weak and malnourished.
When she realises there is a complication with the birth it is usually too late.
The nearest health clinic can be more than 100km (62 miles) away – a distance women often walk, while in labour.
But even at the health clinic it is unlikely there will be the equipment to perform a caesarean section, which routinely saves the lives of mother and baby in the West.
It is unlikely there will even be a midwife.
It is said there are more Ethiopian midwives working in Chicago than Addis Ababa.
What is left after the brain drain is one midwife to every 20,000 women of childbearing age.
And they are not in the rural areas, where 85% of Ethiopians live.
Social stigma
So like Zeinat, the woman will have to give birth alone.
And like Zeinat she may lose the baby, and be left suffering with obstetric fistula – a tear between the vagina and the bladder or the rectum, making her continually incontinent.
In the five years since her first child died during labour, Zeinat conceived several times.
Having sex and giving birth again must have been excruciatingly painful.
Awel is the only one of her children to have survived birth.
But it is the social stigma that the women with fistula talk about.
Baysade Shoke is waiting to be operated on.
She has lived with fistula for 43 years.
“I have lived in darkness,” she says.
“I hardly considered myself a human being because of the smell.”
Prevention
She says she is hopeful that the surgery will bring her “out into the light”.
When it is over and she feels ready, the hospital will give her money to get back to her village and a new dress to go back in.
But Abarash Muskun preferred not to make that journey.
Her surgery was not successful and the stigma of living with the smell of leaking urine is too much so she has stayed on at the hospital, working as a nurse aide.
Abarash is one of the patients the Hamlin Hospital treats each year, but is unable to cure.
What she and the doctors would like to see is prevention; health professionals in well-equipped health centres throughout the country so women do not lose their babies, and do not develop fistula in the process.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following report by the BBC is one more evidence that the IMF and World Bank are corrupted organizations that are causing havoc in 3rd world countries such as Ethiopia by fueling brutal dictatorships with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Senegal admits IMF ‘money gift’
(BBC) — Senegal has confirmed it gave money to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) official earlier this month, after previously denying the allegations.
Alex Segura was given almost $200,000 (£122,000) at the end of his three-year posting – money which the IMF says was paid back as quickly as it could be.
Prime Minister Souleymane Ndene Ndiaye said it was a goodbye present — part of an African tradition.
But opposition activists have condemned what they regard as a corrupt payment.
The fund said in a statement Mr Segura was given the present after a dinner with President Abdoulaye Wade, but did not realise the gift was money until he was about to leave the country for Barcelona.
“With Mr Segura worried about missing his flight, and concerned that there was no place to leave the money safely in Senegal, he decided to take the money aboard the plane,” Reuters quoted the IMF as saying.
The cash was handed over to Senegal’s ambassador in Spain.
Government ‘exposed’
The BBC’s Hamadou Tidiane Sy, in Dakar, says the affair has sparked anger and outrage in Senegal.
He says Senegalese want to know why an IMF official was allowed to leave the country with so much money, and they also want to see whether anyone will be punished.
Anti-corruption campaigner Mamadou Mbodj said the case should be referred to the country’s High Court of Justice.
“It is unacceptable in a poor country like ours to use the taxpayers’ money to reward international civil servants who are already highly paid for their jobs”, he told the BBC.
Aissata Tall Sall, spokeswoman for the Socialist Party, said the government had “exposed its true nature to the rest of the world”.
She called for international sanctions and said it was unacceptable for the IMF and government to consider the issue closed.
The president has not commented on the affair, but Mr Ndiaye admitted the gift was given, while denying corruption.
“We in Africa have a tradition – when someone visits you, you give him a gift at departure,” he told local media.
SANA’A, YEMEN (Saba) – Yemeni security services in Abyan Province have arrested 112 Ethiopian refugees, including 19 women, who illegally entered Yemeni territories by sea, Interior Ministry has reported.
According to the security services, the Ethiopians have been arrested at the coast of Ahwar District.
The security forces also said that 90 Somali refugees, including 25 women and 7 children have arrived in Abyan and Taiz provinces, 22 of them landed on Ahwar coast in Abyan province, while the remaining 68 refugees disembarked on Thubab cost in Taiz province.
The police detained all the refugees from both coasts and transported them to the refugee camp in Lahj province.
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND — Sentencing for a Silver Spring man involved in the December kidnapping of a Clinton bank manager and her family has been postponed until Dec. 4.
Yosef Tadele, 23, a native of Ethiopia, who pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact in the kidnapping, was scheduled to face sentencing Friday in Prince George’s County Circuit Judge Sheila R. Tillerson Adams’ courtroom. However, he was in Montgomery County at the time regarding a traffic matter, according to his attorney, Brian K. McDaniel, of Washington, D.C.
Tadele was implicated in the kidnapping of LaChrista Hamilton, a manager with SunTrust Bank, and her husband and their two sons. Two other men, Yohannes T. Surafel, 25, of Washington, D.C., and Beruk Ayalneh, 24, whose last known address is in Arlington, Va., according to court records, are also facing charges for their involvement in the kidnapping.
According to testimony at a January 2009 hearing, Surafel and Ayalneh allegedly held the family at gunpoint in their Briarcliff Drive home the evening of Dec. 26. The men allegedly planned to take the family the next day to the Silver Spring branch where Hamilton worked to assist with an armed robbery.
Surafel drove with the family to the bank Dec. 27, during which time the car was stopped and he was seized by police.
Tadele has been accused of driving Surafel and Ayalneh to Hamilton’s home on Dec. 26 and picking up Ayalneh the following the day with the intention of meeting up with Surafel later.
Surafel is facing charges of kidnapping, assault, false imprisonment, conspiracy to commit a robbery and several other charges associated with his possession of a handgun. His attorney, Richard Finci of Greenbelt, testified at an earlier hearing that Surafel suffered emotional trauma as a Virginia Tech student on campus during the April 2007 massacre in which 32 people died.
Surafel’s trial is scheduled for Oct. 27. Ayalneh’s whereabouts are unknown.
Assistant State’s Attorney Carol Coderre, who is prosecuting the case, declined to comment Friday.
