This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.
350,000 face famine in Ethiopia’s Tigray, warn UN humanitarians
Alarming aid assessments from Ethiopia’s Tigray region have confirmed a massive hunger crisis, the UN World Food Programme, WFP, said on Thursday.
In a joint alert with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN Children’s Fund, WFP said that at least four million people face severe hunger and 350,000 are facing famine in the region after months of fighting between central Government forces and regional forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
WFP has deployed more than 180 staff and increased food distributions to reach 1.4 million people, but this is far from sufficient, it said.
The UN agency explained that for every family it reached with life-saving food, there were countless more that it could not reach, especially in rural areas.
Humanitarian access must be extended “well beyond” major cities to reach people in desperate need without delay, it insisted.
Here’s WFP spokesperson Tomson Phiri:
“The brutal reality for our staff in Tigray is that for every family we reach with life-saving food, there are countless more especially in rural areas whom we cannot reach. We have appealed for humanitarian access but are still being blocked by armed groups. The ability of people in Tigray to access vital services and for the WFP to reach them with food assistance is essential now to avoid a complete catastrophe.”
Nine in 10 African nations set to miss urgent COVID vaccination goal
Nine in 10 African nations look set to miss the September target of vaccinating 10 per cent of their people against COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO), said on Thursday.
At 32 million doses, Africa has received less than one per cent of the 2.1 billion doses administered globally.
Just two per cent of the continent’s nearly 1.3 billion people have received one dose and only 9.4 million Africans are fully vaccinated.
“It’s do or die on dose-sharing for Africa”, said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa.
The WHO’s reminder that 225 million doses of vaccine are needed urgently on the continent comes as coronavirus infections there have increased for the third consecutive week.
Africa’s 54 countries have registered nearly five million COVID-19 infections to date, and numbers increased by nearly 20 per cent - to more than 88,000 - in the week ending 6 June.
European coronavirus numbers fall for two consecutive months
In a related development, WHO announced that for the first time in Europe since last August, deaths from COVID-19 had fallen below 10,000 in a week.
The UN health agency noted that cases, hospitalizations and deaths have decreased in the region for two consecutive months.
A total of 368,000 new cases were reported in the last seven days, which is a fifth of the weekly cases reported during Europe’s recent peak in April, said Dr Hans Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe.
He noted that the European Region had seen 55 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1.2 million deaths, which is around a third of the global caseload.
More than 400 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in Europe in the last six months, meaning that 30 per cent of Europeans have received at least one vaccine dose and 17 per cent have been fully immunised – a level of coverage that is “far from sufficient to protect the region”, Dr Kluge said.
Daniel Johnson, UN News.
