700 dead as malaria 'epidemic' hits Burundi
NAIROBI: About 700 people have died from malaria in Burundi so far this year, the health minister said, with the authorities having registered 1.8 million infections in a rising epidemic.
“Burundi faces a malaria epidemic,” Josiane Nijimbere said on Monday, commenting on a World Health Organisation (WHO) report.
From January 1 to March 10 this year, 1.8 million infections were registered in Burundi, according to the WHO. According to Nijimbere, the latest figures constitute a 17 per cent increase from the same period last year. “Some 700 deaths” have been registered since January, the minister added.
In 2016, an estimated 8.2 million people were infected and 3,000 people died in mountainous Burundi, which is home to around 11 million people. UN officials and medical sources say Burundi's stock of anti-malaria medication is nearly empty. Nijimbere put the cost of fighting malaria at $31 million (29 million euros), as she appealed for donations to help fight the disease.
She attributed the rise in infections to climate change, increased marshland for ricegrowing and the population's misuse of mosquito nets.
Burundi has been plunged into chaos since President Pierre Nkurunziza's controversial decision in April 2015 to run for a third term.
Hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of others have fled the country. The crisis also led to a 54 per cent cut to the government's health budget in 2016 from the previous year.
“This crisis is even more dramatic because it is striking an impoverished, hungry population that has no resources and for whom even the slightest shock can have life-or-death consequences,” a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. RIYADH: Saudi Arabia is aiming for a major boost in female employment in the conservative Islamic kingdom but women need not go to an office, the labour ministry said.
"Telework" and work from home will generate up to 141,000 jobs by 2020, providing "decent and proper" employment particularly for women and the disabled, the ministry said in a statement dated on Monday. The term "telework" applies to a variety of jobs done remotely outside of a company's office.
As part of a wideranging social and economic reform drive to cope with lower oil revenues, Saudi Arabia is trying to get more women working.
But the ministry statement acknowledged "a lot of social obstacles including transportation and family responsibilities" that hinder female labour market participation. Saudi Arabia is the only country where women are not allowed to drive. Public transport is also limited, restricting mobility for those unable to afford a private driver.
The ministry said telework would also benefit those in remote parts of the kingdom where employment is even harder to find, but it gave no details of who exactly is going to create the 141,000 jobs.
Under its Vision 2030 reform plan the kingdom wants to boost the role of small and medium enterprises as well as broaden its industrial and investment base.
In the third quarter of 2016 the unemployment rate for Saudi women was 34.5 per cent, compared with 5.7 per cent for Saudi men.
By 2020 the kingdom wants to boost the proportion of women in the workforce to 28 per cent from 23 per cent last year. According to official data, at the end of 2015, the Saudi public sector employed 469,000 women while another 500,000 worked in the private sector. TEHRAN: Iran has sentenced the son of an opposition leader to six months in prison for propaganda against the regime, Iranian media has reported.
Hossein Karroubi, eldest son of Mehdi Karroubi, was detained by officials for publishing a letter his father sent last year to President Hassan Rouhani, according to Ebtekar daily and ILNA news agency.
“Karroubi wrote a letter in (April 2016) to the president and demanded... a trial from an authorised court to examine his charges,” said Hossein's lawyer, Mohammad Jalilian.
Mehdi Karroubi has been under house arrest along with fellow opposition figure Mir Hossein Mousavi since 2011, following the violent protests that erupted against the re-election of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.
Mousavi and Karroubi alleged that the vote was rigged and encouraged people to take part in public protests. They were eventually put under house arrest in 2011 but have never been officially charged by a court.