25 years of Universal Primary Education -Menstrual hygiene still a sticky issue

This year marks 25 years since the Uganda government introduced Universal Primary Education or UPE, a program that has received criticism and praise in equal measures over the years.  When the government introduced UPE in 1997, school enrollments increased by more than four times, and currently, according to the Ministry of Education, there are 8.6…

DR Congo and Burundi report polio cases linked to new oral vaccine

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) has received notification of the detection of circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (cVDPV2) in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) linked with the novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2). Through ongoing surveillance, the viruses were isolated from the stool samples of seven children with acute…

Elite football players are more likely to develop dementia, suggests Swedish study

Elite male footballers were 1.5 times more likely to develop neurodegenerative disease compared to population controls, according to an observational study published in The Lancet Public Health journal.  Among male footballers playing in the Swedish top division, 9% (537 out of 6,007) were diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease, compared to 6% (3,485 out of 56,168) population controls.…

Uganda: Negative Perceptions Prevent uptake of 13 million COVID-19 Vaccines

The Ministry of Health still has 13.4 million unutilized COVID-19 vaccines, the Public Accounts Committee – PAC Central Government has learned. The Health Ministry Permanent Secretary, Dr. Diana Atwine, says that the country risks losing huge sums of money that was used to procure the vaccines if they expire without being utilized. Some of the vaccines are scheduled…