The Silver Ink

Thursday, June 24, 2021
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Africa’s Got A Huge Cancer Problem

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Few people know that Africa’s got a huge cancer problem.

Few people know that Africa’s got a huge cancer problem. Ugandans only have one treatment machine to rely on for cancer cases, and it broke down in April of this year. This led to panic and criticism with 30,000 cancer patients left without treatment.

About three-quarters of Africa’s one billion population has no access to radiotherapy, even though half of patients with cancer need it.

The lack of medical care in Africa is not unique. The world needs over 5,000 more radiotherapy machines to cope with the current cancer cases.

Even though HIV AIDS and the Ebola diseases have been widely publicized by the Western media, cancer has not received the same amount of media attention.

Cancer diagnoses are on the rise across the world, because of several factors: longer life-spans, population growth, increased urbanization and smoking.

Cancer kills every eighth citizen, worldwide. It’s about to become a global epidemic with uncountable economic costs. Right now, treating cancer costs about 1 trillion dollars per year.

However, poorer countries don’t have the resources to cover the expected rise in the number of cases. These resources include machines and trained professionals. Around fifteen African countries do not have radio-therapy at all.

The five-year survival rate, once you get breast cancer is 90 percent in the US and just 50 percent in Uganda. Developing countries receive just 5 percent of the resources, despite having eighty percent of the burden.

Investing in medical equipment and care for cancer could save money and lives in the long term, as it would enable the entire workforce to contribute economy wise.

There are steps forward being made, however. A partnership between the Pennsylvania University and Botswana allowed for doctors to examine photos of the cervix to screen for cancer, remotely.

Such initiatives are useful, but there aren’t enough of them for the time being. And a lot of cancer patients do not have too much time.

For now, cancer patients have limited options: they either die from cancer or use all of their savings to try and the little medical care that is available in their region.

Developing countries also have to use older generations of cancer treating machines, which use a very dangerous radioactive compound, cobalt 60 and are not very effective in treating cancer.

Image Source – Wikipedia

The Bond Between Humans And Wild Birds

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The bond between humans and wild birds in Africa is a strong and special one. Honeyguides are a species of bird which allow humans to follow them

The bond between humans and wild birds in Africa is a strong and special one. Honeyguides are a species of bird which allow humans to follow them in order to locate honey in bees’ nests. Now, research shows that humans use special calls to enroll the help of honeyguides, and these birds choose their human partner.

This kind of relationship shows an example of rare collaboration between humans and free birds. However, in the past, humans have trained species of animals to help them locate food. Some examples are cormorants, dogs, and falcons, which were domesticated in time, by their owners.

But human-animal co-op in the wild is not that frequent. It has been known for a long time that in parts of Africa, people and a species of birds which feed on was work in teams to find wild bees’ nests which contain wax and honey, valuable resources to both members of the team.

Honeyguides have a special call to catch people’s attention. After finding a partner, they fly from tree to tree towards the bees’ nest. Humans are useful to these birds because we can temporarily control bees with smoke and open the nest. This way, the bird gets the wax, and the people get the honey.

Recent research conducted in the Mozambique bush shows this unique human-animal tie has something extra: it’s not just the honeyguides which use calls to seek human help. Humans, too have specialized calls to catch the birds’ attention. Experiments in the Niassa National Reserve have shown that these special calls are the basis of the bond which forms between humans and birds. They increase their chances of finding vital, highly nutritious food.

In a paper which was published in Science today, biologist Dr. Claire Spottswoode and her team of scientists have shown that honeyguides have adapted to respond to specialized sounds made by people who want their co-operation, and this results in two-way communication between wild birds and humans.

This relationship grows naturally, without conventional “training” or coercion. This bond evolved through natural selection, probably over thousands of years.

The partnership has been documented as early as 1588, when a Portuguese colonizer on the territory of what is now Mozambique noticed a bird feeding on his wax candles, in a missionary church.

This is now known as inter-species mutualism.

Image Source – Wikipedia

Egypt was the major gateway out of Africa for early human migration

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early-human-migrationResearchers are positive about human origination in Africa, but are not sure about what route they took to spread across the world.

This mystery can be solved by a new genome analysis of modern people in Ethiopia and Egypt.

The findings of the genome analysis suggest that Egypt was the major gateway out of Africa, and migrants took a northern route out of their homeland.

The findings also reveal that the migratory path of Europeans and Asians or Eurasians was traveled some 60,000 years ago.

For the analysis, researchers have studied the genetic information of six modern Northeast African populations consisting of 100 Egyptians and five Ethiopian populations represented by 25 individuals each.

Luca Pagani, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge said, “Two geographically plausible routes have been proposed: an exit through the current Egypt and Sinai, which is the northern route, or one through Ethiopia, the Bab el Mandeb strait, and the Arabian Peninsula, which is the southern route. In our research, we generated the first comprehensive set of unbiased genomic data from Northeast Africans and observed, after controlling for recent migrations, a higher genetic similarity between Egyptians and Eurasians than between Ethiopians and Eurasians.”

The study also suggested that Egypt was the final stop on the journey out of Africa.

The findings also created a public catalog of Ethiopian and Egyptian genomic diversity.

Toomas Kivisild of Cambridge’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology said, “While our results do not address controversies about the timing and possible complexities of the expansion out of Africa, they paint a clear picture in which the main migration out of Africa followed a northern, rather than a southern route.”

Pagani said, “This information will be of great value as a freely available reference panel for future medical and anthropological studies in these areas.”

The findings of the study are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics or AJHG.

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