French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in South Africa today for talks with President Cyril Ramaphosa on a range of issues including possible technological assistance to aid South Africa’s response to the COVID pandemic.
On the agenda of the visit is the economic, health, research and manufacturing responses to the COVID pandemic.
Arriving from Rwanda, where he acknowledged France’s role in the 1994 genocide, Macron held talks in Pretoria with President Ramaphosa, whom he met last week in Paris at a summit on African economies.
The pair were also due to attend an event to support vaccine production on the continent, sponsored by the European Union, the United States and the World Bank.
So far South Africa is the country worst hit by COVID on the continent as far available monitoring can determine, and has vaccinated just 1 percent of its population of 59 million people.
South Africa’s immunisation efforts have been hampered by delayed procurement, and then selling off its AstraZeneca vaccines obtained via Covax to other African countries after trial results showed drastically reduced effectiveness against the local B.1.351 variant. Rollout of the replacement Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused for two weeks in April due to blood clot fears.
Now, along with India, South Africa is campaigning for a waiver of intellectual property rights on COVID vaccines, so that each country may produce its own doses. This effort has met with stiff resistance so far.
Macron has voiced support for a technology transfer to enable vaccine production sites to be set up in poorer countries.
Visit long delayed
Macron’s visit to South Africa has been long delayed due to the COVID pandemic. The initial purpose for the trip had been to discuss multilateral cooperation with South Africa, an important G20 partner which is also a regular guest at G7 summits.
According to Foreign Policy, the French leader will also seek to establish greater influence in a region that is experiencing greater instability, marked by recent insurgencies in Mozambique.
Jihadist attacks forced French energy giant Total to suspend work on a multi-billion euro gas project in Cabo Delgado province after a nearby town was targeted.
Before he returns to France, he will pay a visit to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, whose main missions are the fight against AIDS and education in rural areas.
Depending on coffee to get through the day after a night of poor sleep isn’t always the answer, suggests a new study from Michigan State University.
Researchers from MSU’s Sleep and Learning Lab, led by psychology associate professor Kimberly Fenn, assessed the effectiveness of caffeine in counteracting the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. It turned out that caffeine only helps up to a point.
The study assessed the impact of caffeine following a night of sleep deprivation. The study recruited over 275 participants who were asked to complete a simple attention task as well as a more challenging ‘placekeeping’ task where tasks had to be completed in a specific order without skipping or repeating steps.
Asst Prof Fenn’s study is the first to investigate the effect of caffeine on placekeeping after a period of sleep deprivation.
“We found that sleep deprivation impaired performance on both types of tasks and that having caffeine helped people successfully achieve the easier task,” said Asst Prof Fenn. “However, it had little effect on performance on the placekeeping task for most participants.”
She added: “Caffeine may improve the ability to stay awake and attend to a task, but it doesn’t do much to prevent the sort of procedural errors that can cause things like medical mistakes and car accidents.”
The US population has a pervasive lack of sleep, a problem that has intensified during the pandemic, Asst Prof Fenn said. Having inadequated sleep impacts not only cognition and mood, but can eventually weaken immunity.
“Caffeine increases energy, reduces sleepiness and can even improve mood, but it absolutely does not replace a full night of sleep, Fenn said. “Although people may feel as if they can combat sleep deprivation with caffeine, their performance on higher-level tasks will likely still be impaired. This is one of the reasons why sleep deprivation can be so dangerous.”
Asst Prof Fenn said that the study has theoretical and practical implications.
“If we had found that caffeine significantly reduced procedural errors under conditions of sleep deprivation, this would have broad implications for individuals who must perform high stakes procedures with insufficient sleep, like surgeons, pilots and police officers,” she concluded. “Instead, our findings underscore the importance of prioritising sleep.”
Quickly and efficiently screening incoming travellers for COVID is currently beyond present technology, but dogs — with their keen sense of smell that has aided humans for thousands of years — may be a solution.
An Ekurhuleni-based company is in the final stages of training dogs to be deployed as COVID sniffers at South African points of entry, just in time for the expected third wave, eNCA reports.
Currently, the most widespread test is the rapid antigen (lateral flow) test, which has been shown to produce more false positives for COVID than real detections in low prevalence situations — such as travellers arriving in a country.
Alternatively, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test has the greatest sensitivity but is time-consuming and expensive. And most currently available tests involve nasopharyngeal swabs — an unpleasant experience for most people.
Dogs, with their keen sense of smell have long been used to sniff out drugs and explosives. In recent years they have also been trained to sniff out certain cancers and malaria, although they are not regularly used for this. Using medical sniffer dogs has the advantage of being extremely quick and could be used in resource-constrained settings.
In the first months of the pandemic, many wondered whether dogs could in fact smell the disease, and began training dogs to see if it was possible. Past studies had already established that the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released in body odour change during respiratory infections. VOCs associated with COVID infection showed a clear distinction between infected and uninfected individuals, suggestive of a strong, distinctive smell.
Initial trials with trained sniffer dogs at airports in France, Lebanon and FInland found that the dogs were even capable of detecting infection before it could be picked up with clinical tests.
A recent study led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimated that a plane with 300 passengers could be screened in 30 minutes with two sniffer dogs, and only those passengers identified by the dogs would be required to take a PCR test.
The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed and which is currently available as a pre-print, found that dogs could be trained to detect COVID in 94.3% (test sensitivity) — comparable to the gold standard of PCR tests with 97.2% sensitivity. They also have a specificity of 92%, meaning that they have a low rate of false positives.
Dr Claire Guest, Chief Scientific Officer at Medical Detection Dogs, which assisted in the study, said: “These fantastic results are further evidence that dogs are one of the most reliable biosensors for detecting the odour of human disease. Our robust study shows the huge potential for dogs to help in the fight against COVID.
“Knowing that we can harness the amazing power of a dog’s nose to detect COVID quickly and non-invasively gives us hope for a return to a more normal way of life through safer travel and access to public places, so that we can again socialise with family and friends.”
Besides simple detection, the dogs could also serve as a visible deterrent to people wanting to travel with fake COVID passports, the authors said. The findings of their study also provided valuable knowledge which could be applied to future pandemics. The authors acknowledged the limitation that the dogs were conducting the tests in a controlled environment as opposed to the real world.
Doctors in India have hit out against yoga guru Baba Ramdev over his controversial statements against modern medicine and mocking of COVID patients.
Recently, the controversial guru said that tens of thousands died of COVID after taking modern medicines, and also mocked patients for trying to get oxygen cylinders.
The guru subsequently withdrew his statement after being criticised by the country’s health minister. But on Monday he again took a swipe at modern medicine for not having a cure for some diseases.
Despite India’s modern allopathic healthcare system, alternative therapies like ayurveda and homoeopathy are hugely popular in India. This has helped many gurus to launch successful businesses with sales of herbal medicines and products. India also has a Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (Ayush) that promotes traditional medicine systems.
The Indian Medical Association (IMA), which represents allopathy doctors in India, has criticised the guru for his “insensitive” remarks in the middle of the pandemic. Such statements from a guru with millions of followers were “irresponsible and demoralising”, said doctors spoken to by the BBC. The country has been grappling with a surge of infections caused by a ‘double mutant’ SARS-CoV-2 variant as well as prematurely relaxed social distancing rules.
The controversy A video of Baba Ramdev mocking patients for trying to find oxygen went viral earlier this month, making references to oxygen shortages in several cities in April and May.
“God has given us free oxygen, why don’t we breathe that? How can there be a shortage when God has filled the atmosphere with oxygen? Fools are looking for oxygen cylinders. Just breathe the free oxygen. Why are you complaining about shortage of oxygen and beds and crematoriums?” he said.
The statement drew sharp criticism from doctors and families of COVID patients who demanded an apology.
Just two weeks later, another video surfaced in which he criticises doctors, blaming COVID deaths on them. Many doctors expressed their anger over Twitter, some went so far as to demand his arrest. In the face of mounting pressures, India’s Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan issued a statement asking the guru to withdraw his remarks.
“Allopathy and the doctors attached to it have given new lives to millions of people. It’s very unfortunate for you to say that people died from consuming allopathic medicines.
“We should not forget that this battle can only be won through united efforts. In this war, our doctors, nurses and other health workers are risking their lives to save people’s lives. Their dedication towards serving mankind in this crisis is unparalleled and exemplary,” Dr Vardhan said.
Baba Ramdev withdrew his controversial statement in a Sunday tweet — only to issue a letter the next day asking the IMA why modern medicine had no cure for 25 diseases, including diabetes and hypertension.
This has again infuriated doctors. Prominent pulmonologist Dr A Fathahudeen, who has treated thousands of COVID patients, told the BBC that such statements cause lasting damage.
“For more than a year, healthcare workers like me have been in a war-like situation. We have saved tens of thousand of lives. It’s really unfortunate, insulting and hurtful to read such statements,” he said.
Dr Fathahudeen added that modern medicine had evolved over the years with constant research and studies. “We follow evidence-based practice. At any given time, thousands of researchers are working to come up with cures. Look at the progress we have made in cancer treatment. We have to constantly evolve and learn. It’s hard to trust any branch of medicine that offers absolute cure for every disease.”
Dr Fathahudeen also said that such statements manifest doubts in the minds of people when trust in medicines and vaccines is most needed in the middle of a raging pandemic.
Baba Ramdev’s rise to fame Televised yoga classes were Baba Ramdev’s ticket to fame; he had a following of millions and he received worldwide praise for promoting yoga and healthy living.
He successfully leveraged his fame to create a business empire. In 2006, he helped launch a company called Patanjali Ayurveda to sell herbal medicines and a few years later, the business expanded to sell almost any product. Since last year, the company has been selling a product called Coronil that it has made a number of false claims over, including that it was a WHO-approved COVID treatment.
In the largest study of its kind to date, a systematic review and meta-analysis of people’s perceptions of their screen time compares to their actual usage, estimates of usage were found to be accurate only in about five per cent of studies.
Multiple studies have linked increasing amounts of ‘screen time’, looking at and using devices such as computers, tablets and smartphones, to a wide range of negative health outcomes such as depression and inactivity.
The international team say their results cast doubt on the validity of research on the impact of screen time on mental health, and its influences on government policy, as the vast majority rely on participants’ self-reported estimates on the amount of time spent on digital devices, rather than logs of actual usage, or tracked time. This research was published in Nature Human Behaviour.
For lead researcher Dr Doug Parry at Stellenbosch University, the studies highlight how much our current perceptions of technology are built up on long-lasting, unchallenged assumptions.
“For decades, researchers have relied on estimates of how we use various technologies to study how people use digital media and the potential outcomes this behaviour can lead to. Our findings suggest that much of this work may be on unstable footing.”
“The screen time discrepancies highlight that we simply do not know enough yet about the actual effects (both positive and negative) of our media use. Researchers, journalists, members of the public, and crucially policy makers need to question the quality of evidence when they consider research on media uses and effects. We can no longer simply take claims of harmful effects at face value.”
The researchers also investigated whether questionnaires and scales addressing ‘problematic’ media use, such as excessive or so-called ‘addictive’ media use, were suitable substitutes for logged usage. There was even less of an association with usage logs to these measures.
Exhaustive literature survey
The research identified every existing study that compares logged or tracked media use measures with equivalent self-reports. Screening more than 12 000 articles for inclusion, they found 47 studies that included both types of measures. From here they were able to identify and extract 106 comparisons, based on 50 000 individuals, to address the question of how closely self-report estimates relate to logs of actual usage.
“These highly flawed studies are over-inflating the relationships between digital media use and typically negative outcomes, such as mental health symptoms and cognitive impairments, which of course explains the pervading view that smartphones among other technologies are bad for us,” commented Dr Brit Davidson from the University of Bath’s School of Management.
“Media and technology use takes the blame for everything from increases in teenage depression and suicide to higher incidence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and violence. If we want to properly investigate harms, we must first tackle assumptions about screen time and disentangle how people are actually using their phones or other technologies of interest.
“Importantly, these questionable studies are also being used to influence policy. The UK and Canada both have forms of screen time guidelines based on poorly conducted research, which is clearly worrying and hard to reverse.”
The researchers hope that the findings will prompt a change in how technology use is measured, as well as how society regards technology use, leading to a better understanding of our relationship with technology.
Journal information: Parry, D. A., et al. (2021) A systematic review and meta-analysis of discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use. Nature Human Behaviour. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01117-5.
One South African man, who, like many South Africans, suffered from COVID-related anxiety, is looking to set a running world record as he runs along the South African coastline in order raise funds for a mental health charity.
The lockdown was hard on millions of South African, including restauranteur Henry Cock. It forced the closure of his restaurants, leaving his employees without income. But even before the stresses of lockdown, he had been suffering from severe anxiety, and in 2019 had started seeing a therapist.
As with so many people faced with the unexpected hardships of lockdown, he came up with a way to help his employees. He aimed to raise R80 000 for them through a innovative campaign, which involved Cock ‘running the Comrades Marathon’ — consisting of some 6000 laps up and down his own passageway to make up the 90km.
Though no less a gruelling undertaking than doing it outdoors, this turned out to be more successful than anticipated.
“In the end, we managed to raise R120 000,” he related. “It took eleven hours. Eleven hours of running back and forth across a 15-metre passage with just a few short breaks to eat and rest my legs,” he said.
With only his walls to look at during his hours of running, the 34-year-old had time to think about helping out others in light of the mental health challenges he himself had experienced.
Cock has started the ‘Mentally Aweh’ campaign to raise funds for South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), an organisation that provides free counselling to thousands of South Africans on a daily basis. His inspiration was the Terry Fox Initative, started by Canadian Terry Fox, who attempted to run across that vast country to raise funds for cancer research, though he passed away before he could complete it.
“I will be running the length of the South African coastline, from Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal to Vioolsdrift near the Namibia border, to raise awareness for mental health and raise R6 million for the South African Depression and Anxiety Group,” Cock told Health-e News.
And the unmet need is vast. As he explained on his fundraising page, only a shocking 0.89% of the uninsured South African population has access to free mental health care.
Call volumes doubled since lockdown
SADAG senior counsellor Fatima Seedat said that call volumes had doubled since the start of lockdown.
“We used to receive 600 calls a day. When we entered the pandemic, with lockdown, we were getting over 1200 calls a day. That’s excluding the emails we receive, the SMSes received, and the WhatsApp messages that we receive on a daily basis. We have had around 500,000 calls since lockdown until now.”
Because it is toll free, SADAG’s phone bill runs up to R120 000 each month, so Cock’s mission to raise R6 million will help greatly.
“It is an absolutely amazing initiative,” said Seedat. “Henry is an inspiration for standing up for mental health, because that alone breaks a lot of barriers and boundaries.”
Mental health in South Africa
A third of South Africans will experience a mental health issue during their lifetime, according to SADAG. Depression and anxiety are also considered as mental illnesses, and are much more common than believed.
Cock endured his own mental strain during the lockdown; financial uncertainty, the ending of a long-term relationship, and the illness of a family member all set off his battle with anxiety.
“I was in a very bad space last year, like a very bad space. I was struggling. You get to a point when you’re an anxiety sufferer that you just think this is normal. You just think that this state of being is normal, but it’s not normal,” he said.
This is a pattern that Alexa Scher, a clinical psychologist in private practice, often sees.
“I think there is a lot under the surface that blocks people from actually saying, you know what, I’m not okay. We are usually scared to acknowledge and admit that and notice that in ourselves, so it can creep in invisibly, and then all of a sudden, you’re crying all the time, and then you think, ‘Oh, yeah, maybe this isn’t actually normal.’”
She advised that one should seek help when their state of mind begins to impact their ability to function.
Free help is available
While Cock was able to seek help, the majority of South Africans cannot access mental health treatment, which is why he is trying to help SADAG.
The organisation operates the only suicide crisis line in the country, and also has a 24-hour toll-free telephonic, SMS, and WhatsApp lines.
“We reach people not only in your urban areas, but deep rural areas. People are really in need of help in rural areas because there are not many resources available. So we try to help as many people as we can, by reaching out to everyone,” Seedat explained.
SADAG has about 200 volunteers working in shifts, and all go through a screening process.
While Cock will hit the road solo, and does feel a certain pressure to succeed within the 133 days, he said he is using his emotions to motivate himself.
“I channel all of that energy into days when I’m feeling down or feeling bad. I remind myself that I’m not doing it just for me — I’m doing it to raise awareness for these people that really struggle and don’t have access to the same resources that I do,” he said.
“No matter how dark it is, it’s important to remember that you’re not alone. Reach out. You’ll be surprised how much help you actually receive if you just ask.”
Henry Cock’s journey can be followed on Instagram at @cock.henry.
A UK man who started a project coming up with gut-healthy-recipes said that it was “shaped” by his having had bulimia in his teenage years.
Clinician and scientist Dr Sunni Patel, 35, said as a teen he thought he was “chubby” and experienced the eating disorder when he was aged 15 to 18.
Binge eating was his “solace” he said, and he used religious fasting “as a cover”.
Dr Patel started a website sharing recipes, and he urged people not to underestimate how gut health affects mental health.
“I’d find comfort and my escapism via food.” Dr Sunni Patel
He said he would fast for four days a week, eating fruit at the end of the day.
Being from a traditional Asian background, the way “one looks and acts tends to be judged a lot more”, he said.
“Because I’d got bulimia as a get out, I’d binge eat. I might eat six or seven crisp packets at one sitting. I’d find comfort and my escapism via food.”
Suffering bullying at school, Dr Patel said that there was “pressure as a teenager to look cool”. He said that “the thinner I got, the more attractive I felt”. Bulimia became the “solution”, he added.
As he lost weight, he began receiving compliments which would “feed the beast”.
At least 1.5 million people in the UK have an eating disorder, experts estimate, with 25% being male. Bulimia nervosa is a condition that occurs most commonly in adolescent females, though it can appear in just about any patient. It is characterised by indulgence in binge-eating, and inappropriate compensatory behaviours to prevent weight gain.
Dr Patel said after he went to university he stopped, “I wasn’t able to find the safe space to have the… episodes, I didn’t want the truth to come out.”
From around the age of 24, he received cognitive behavioural therapy and in recent years has had psychotherapy.
“I was diagnosed with gut issues in 2014 and that’s when I started exploring the link between gut health and depression. As my diet became healthier so did my mind.”
A business director as well as a clinician, he now comes up with gut-healthy-recipes that are shared on his Dish Dash Deets website, set up during the COVID pandemic, where he also keeps a blog.
Included in his recipes are his top foods to combat depression and low mood, such as bananas, berries, beans and lentils.
He said to anyone that is in a similar position to his, “find a safe person to talk to”, who would not judge, adding: “Don’t feel any shame. You’re human.”
“The more that you rely on it, you use it as your way of escaping, the more it becomes your norm,” he said.
He also currently does live cook-alongs on Instagram with invited celebrities and chefs.
“Food is still my escapism. Now I enjoy being in the kitchen and making things that will serve my needs, not make things worse.”
A South African perfume expert has developed a treatment to help people who have lost their sense of smell due to COVID.
Loss of smell and taste is one of the most prominent symptoms and after-effects of COVID infection. A meta-analysis of 27 studies showed that 48.47% of COVID patients reported loss of sense of smell, and loss of taste was reported in 20 studies with a prevalence of 41.47%.
While some people only experience a minimal loss of smell, others, especially those who have experienced prolonged COVID infection, may wait months for their sense of smell to return, if it all.
For those patients who battle with their sense of smell after recovering from COVID-19, it is a disheartening experience. Luckily Scenterprises Inc founder, Sue Phillips, has found an amazing way to help these patients smell all the wonderful things in life again.
Phillips is a renowned South African fragrance expert and a self-proclaimed ‘scentrepreneur’, with over 40 years’ experience in the fragrance industry. She is a vocal advocate for the amazing qualities of fragrances and is the author of a book, titled The Power of Perfume.
In an interview with Cape Talk, Phillips described her breakthrough discovery – the role perfume can play in helping those who have had COVID regain their sense of smell.
A perfume is made up of a complex blend of notes – the top, middle and base notes, explained Phillips. She said that she met with a woman who had lost her sense of smell for over a year due to COVID. The woman was unable to identify the lighter, or top notes of the perfume. However, the woman was able to pick up on the stronger notes.
“Suddenly we had a breakthrough and she was quite emotional. She finally said, and she was crying, ‘Oh my goodness, I can finally smell something beautiful’,” Phillips told Cape Talk.
Phillips observed that as they continue with the process, more and more fragrances can be identified by patients.
The perfume expert is now offering Zoom sessions educating people about this process and is producing ‘scent kits’ to help patients battling with their sense of smell.
One of the first doctors to warn of COVID’s disproportionate effect on ethnic minorities has been named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Dr Daniel Pan in Leicester, UK, was part of a group to treat the first cases in the city and noticed some of the sickest patients were minority ethnic.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list celebrates young innovators in their respective fields, such as science and healthcare.
Dr Pan, who is a clinical fellow at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) at the University of Leicester, said: “It’s a great honour and I think the best thing about it is it helps advertise the research we’ve been doing, because it’s important work.”
He was one of the first to treat COVID patients in Leicester, and noticed the differences among the patients.
Dr Pan said: “Leicester has a very multi-ethnic diverse population so when the pandemic first hit the UK, I was working on the clinical wards.
“It became immediately clear to myself and my colleagues that a lot of these patients were from ethnic minority backgrounds – especially the ones who were very sick.
“We probably noticed that slightly earlier than a lot of other places, for example Italy, and we felt a need to get that out there.”
As part of a group of researchers led by Dr Manish Pareek, he contributed to work that demonstrated that COVID’s disproportionate impact on UK ethnic minority groups was largely a result of a greater risk of being infected, due to societal and health inequalities.
NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre director Professor Melanie Davies remarked that Dr Pan had made a “significant contribution to research efforts”, adding he had “a bright future in clinical research ahead of him”.
He is now working alongside his colleagues on a face mask that could determine whether the wearer has COVID, and possibly how infectious they are.
Dr Pan said: “We can probably find out when a person is most infectious, because we can find the time of day and the period of their illness where they breathe out the most virus.
“If it’s effective it can be rolled out, for example, everyone in A&E could wear a mask while they’re waiting to see a doctor and those who are mask positive can then go into isolation bays.”
‘Vaccine shedding’ is the new disinformation being circulated among anti-vaxxers.
When a school in Florida, US announced that it wouldn’t allow vaccinated teachers in its classrooms, its founder said “vaccine shedding” was her main concern.
Paediatrician Nicole Baldwin, MD, said the anti-vaxx community is buzzing with this latest bit of disinformation.
“It’s amazing, and sad, what people will believe,” Dr Baldwin told MedPage Today.
This piece of disinformation follows that vaccinated people can somehow shed the spike protein, supposedly causing menstrual cycle irregularities, miscarriages, and sterility in women, merely by being in proximity.
“This is a new low, from the delusional wing of the anti-vaxx cult,” said Zubin Damania, MD, aka ZDoggMD, in a video he recently posted to bust vaccine shedding myths.
Damania explained that the misinformation arises from a previous claim that syncytin, a protein involved in placental formation, has some structural similarity SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, and so vaccination would interfere with women’s reproductive systems. Numerous fact checks have shown that vaccines don’t target the protein.
On injection, mRNA and viral vector vaccines prompt cells to make the spike protein, but it’s usually cleared in 24 to 48 hours, leaving little opportunity for “shedding,” even if it was possible, which it isn’t, underscored Dr Damania.
He pointed out another logical fallacy: “Why, then, wouldn’t natural spike protein do the same thing? Wouldn’t you be more scared of natural coronavirus infection? Oh, but it’s ‘natural.'”
There are legitimate questions about and research on whether the coronavirus itself and vaccines affect women’s menstrual cycles, he added. Since the beginning of the pandemic, women who’ve had COVID reported changes to their menstrual cycle, and Dr Damania said that researchers are examining reports of menstrual cycle changes after vaccination.
Regarding the potential relationship to vaccination, “we don’t understand, first, if it’s true, and if it were true, what is the mechanism?” he said. “Anything that causes stress, inflammation, and an immune response may have an effect on the menstrual cycle. […] Could it be that the vaccine causes a temporary change in menses? Sure, it’s possible, and it’s being looked at.”
