• ‘How women in health, care sector earn 24% less than men’
Africa is facing a growing risk of outbreaks caused by zoonotic pathogens, such as monkeypox virus, which originated in animals and then switched species and infected humans.
World Health Organisation (WHO), at a virtual press conference, yesterday, said there has been a 63 per cent increase in the number of zoonotic outbreaks from 2012 to 2022 compared to 2001 to 2011.
Director of Public Health (Ghana Health Service), Dr. Franklin Asiedu Bekoe, and Regional Representative for Africa, World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), Dr. Karim Tounkara, joined WHO Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, and others at the conference.
Analysis released during the press conference by WHO showed that between 2001 and 2022, there were 1,843 substantiated public health events recorded in the WHO African region.
Thirty per cent of these events were zoonotic disease outbreaks. While these numbers have increased over the past two decades, there was a particular spike in 2019 and 2020, when zoonotic pathogens represented around 50 per cent of public health events.
Ebola Virus Disease and other viral hemorrhagic fevers constitute nearly 70 per cent of these outbreaks, with dengue fever, anthrax, plague, monkeypox and a range of other diseases making up the remaining 30 per cent.
The latest data on monkeypox finds a significant increase in cases since April 2022, compared to the same period in 2021. The increase is mainly observed in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, and could partly be attributed to enhanced monkeypox surveillance and laboratory testing capacity in the countries, though detailed investigations are underway.
However, this upward trend is still lower than in 2020 when the region reported its highest monthly cases of monkeypox.
Overall, cases of monkeypox have been rising since 2017, except in 2021 where there was a sudden drop.
From January 1 to July 8, 2022, there have been 2,087 cumulative monkeypox cases, of which only 203 were confirmed.
The overall case fatality rate for the 203 confirmed cases is 2.4 per cent. Of the 175 confirmed cases for which there is case specific data, 53 per cent were male and the median age was 17 years.
The increase in zoonotic cases may be due to several reasons. Africa has the world’s fastest growing population and there is a growing demand for food derived from animals including meat, poultry, eggs, and milk.
The population growth is also leading to rising urbanisation and encroachment on the habitats of wildlife. Road, rail, boat and air links are also improving across Africa, increasing the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks spreading from remote areas where there are few inhabitants to large urban areas.
MEANWHILE, a new joint report by International Labour Organisation (ILO) and WHO, published yesterday, suggests that women in the health and care sector face a larger gender pay gap than in other economic sectors, earning on average of 24 per cent less than peers who are men.
The report, the world’s most comprehensive analysis on gender pay inequities in health, finds a raw gender pay gap of approximately 20 percentage points, which jumps to 24 percentage points when accounting for factors, such as age, education and working time.
This highlights that women are underpaid for their labour market attributes when compared to men. Much of the wage gap is unexplained, perhaps due to discrimination towards women, who account for 67 per cent of health and care workers worldwide.
The report also finds that wages in the health and care sector tend to be lower overall, when compared with other economic sectors. This is consistent with the finding that wages often are lower in economic sectors where women are predominant.
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