Museveni reneges on sanitary pads for girls promise
New jab to help men plan their parenthood
AMALE contraceptive jab has been found to prevent pregnancy for up to two years. The one-time injection, which has been described as a “reversible vasectomy”, is more effective than the female Pill, and comes as a new breakthrough in the search for a male equivalent.
A previous jab, using hormones to disrupt sperm production in the brain, was found to cause side effects including depression and muscle pain, leading 20 men to drop out of a year-long trial.
But the new non-hormonal injection, which had a 100% success rate in a study on monkeys, did not appear to cause any side effects. It could provide another option for the thousands of men who have vasectomies each year.
The Vasalgel jab works by injecting a gel into the vas deference – the tube which transports sperm from the testicles to the urethra – to block
As well as being less painful than “the snip”, a previous study on rabbits found it to be reversible. Surgery to reverse a vasectomy costs thousands of pounds, and has a success rate as low as 30%.
It could be trialled on humans as early as next year after working in male rhesus monkeys, which failed to impregnate female monkeys over a period of up to two years.
Professor Adam Balen, chairperson of the British Fertility Society, said: “This is an interesting technique that achieves a reversible vasectomy by blocking the passage of sperm with a substance that later can be flushed out. If free of side effects, then this novel approach has the potential for great promise as a male contraceptive.”
The study, by the California National Primate Research Centre, monitored a group of 16 monkeys given Vasalgel for at least one breeding season. Typically, 80% of the females housed with them during such a period would become pregnant.
But they found that over an average of almost 1.2 years – and up to two years for some monkeys – there were no pregnancies, reported the journal Basic and Clinical Andrology.
This is more successful than the Pill, which is around 99% effective.
Achieves a reversible vasectomy
THE UGANDAN government has reneged on an earlier election campaign promise to provide sanitary pads to schoolgirls “so that they did not run out of school when their menstrual periods start”.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni made the promise while campaigning in Uganda’s Lango region in 2015. The promise was supposed to be effected in the 2017/2018 financial year budget of $780 million (about R10 billion), the Ugandan Daily Monitor reported.
Instead the large chunk of money will go towards the wages of teachers and staff across the country.
Museveni’s wife Janet, who serves as education minister, appeared before the parliamentary education committee explaining that the funds were simply not available to finance her husband’s 2015 pledge.
“I want you all to understand that we have not got the funding for this in our budget yet,” she told the MPs, before adding that if more funds became available, the government would consider partially funding the earlier pledge.
The legislators, however, expressed displeasure during the four-hour meeting on what they called the government’s tendency to under-fund the education sector. They also raised concerns over a hike in educational fees, alleging this would lead to competing social classes, where one class goes to the best schools and the other class can’t afford education at all.
In response, Alex Kakooza, the ministry’s permanent secretary, said they would not encourage an increase in fees and were planning to reissue those guidelines. – ANA