Somalia sees ‘massive’ rise in FGM during the lockdown and Ramadan

Summer unlikely to curb the virus

LONDON: Somalia’s coronavirus lockdown has led to a huge increase in female genital mutilation (FGM), with circumcisers going door to door offering to cut girls stuck at home during the pandemic, a charity said on Monday. Plan International said the crisis was undermining efforts to eradicate the practice in Somalia, which has the world’s highest FGM rate, with about 98% of women having been cut.

“We’ve seen a massive increase in recent weeks,” said Sadia Allin, Plan International’s head of mission in Somalia. “We want the government to ensure FGM is included in all COVID responses.” She told the Thomson Reuters Foundation nurses across the country had also reported a surge in requests from parents wanting them to carry out FGM on their daughters while they were off school because of the lockdown. FGM, which affects 200 million girls and women globally, involves the partial or total removal of the external genitalia. In Somalia the opening is also often sewn up - a practice called infibulation.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned that the pandemic could lead to an extra two million girls worldwide being cut in the next decade as the crisis stymies global efforts to end the practice. Allin said families in Somalia were taking advantage of school closures to carry out FGM so that the girls had time to recover from the ritual, which can take weeks. The economic downturn caused by coronavirus has also spurred cutters to tout for more business, she said. “The cutters have been knocking on doors, including mine, asking if there are young girls they can cut. I was so shocked,” said Allin, who has two daughters aged five and nine.

She said restrictions on movement during the lockdown were making it harder to raise awareness of the dangers of FGM in communities. “FGM is one of the most extreme manifestations of violence against girls and women,” said Allin, who has been cut herself. “It’s a lifetime torture for girls. The pain continues ... until the girl goes to the grave. It impacts her education, ambition ... everything. The UNFPA, which estimates 290,000 girls will be cut in Somalia in 2020, said the spike was also linked to Ramadan, which is a traditional time for girls to be cut.

UNFPA Somalia representative Anders Thomsen said the pandemic was shifting world attention and funding away from combatting FGM. But he said there were also grounds for optimism, pointing to the recent criminalization of FGM in neighboring Sudan. “There are glimmers of hope and we do hope and believe that may rub off on Somalia, which I would call ground zero for FGM,” he said. New data also shows families are beginning to switch to less severe forms of FGM with 46% of 15 to 19-year-olds having been infibulated compared to more than 80% of their mothers.—- Reuters

WASHINGTON: The higher summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are unlikely to significantly limit the growth of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Princeton University study published Monday in the journal Science. Several statistical studies conducted over the past few months have shown a slight correlation between climate and the novel coronavirus — the hotter and more humid it is, the less likely the virus is to spread. But the findings remain preliminary, and much remains unknown about the exact relationship between climate and COVID-19.

The Princeton study does not rule out the correlation entirely but concludes that the impact of climate on the spread of the virus is “modest.” “Our findings suggest, without effective control measures, strong outbreaks are likely in more humid climates and summer weather will not substantially limit pandemic growth,” the study said. “We project that warmer or more humid climates will not slow the virus at the early stage of the pandemic,” said Rachel Baker, a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI).

While climate, particularly humidity, plays a role in the spread of other coronaviruses and the flu, the study said a more important factor is the absence of widespread immunity to COVID-19. “We do see some influence of climate on the size and timing of the pandemic, but, in general, because there’s so much susceptibility in the population, the virus will spread quickly no matter the climate conditions,” Baker said. Baker said the spread of the virus seen in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador and Australia indicates that warmer conditions do little to halt the pandemic. “It doesn’t seem that climate is regulating spread right now,” Baker said.

Without strong containment measures or a vaccine, the coronavirus may continue to infect a large proportion of the world’s population, the researchers said, and only become seasonal later, “after the supply of unexposed hosts is reduced.”

“Previously circulating human coronaviruses such as the common cold depend strongly on seasonal factors, peaking in the winter outside of the tropics,” said co-author Bryan Grenfell, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at PEI. “If, as seems likely, the novel coronavirus is similarly seasonal, we might expect it to settle down to become a winter virus as it becomes endemic in the population,” Grenfell said.

For the study, the researchers conducted simulations on how the pandemic would respond to various climates. They ran scenarios based on what is known about the effect seasonal variations have on similar viruses. In all three scenarios, climate only became a mitigating factor when large portions of the human population were immune or resistant to the virus. “The more that immunity builds up in the population, the more we expect the sensitivity to climate to increase,” Baker said. “If you run the model long enough, you have a big pandemic and the outbreak settles into seasonal infection.” — AFP