A Bomb exploded according to the Eritrean State Media in the Capital of Eritrea (Asmara) last Wednesday in a Restaurant. This seems to be one of the first incidents of such kind involving bombings. The capital of Asmara has been regarded as safe place in the past. read more: Reuters

It is hoped that delegates at the forum will be able to identify future cooperation, trade and investment initiatives and form partnerships to act on the potential. The forum will also look at strengthening political and security partnerships.

”In Africa, farmers are faced with the obstacle of underdeveloped infrastructure,” Shakeel Meer, divisional executive in charge of industrial sectors at South Africa’s statutory Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), told IPS.

One of the problems is a lack of road infrastructure, preventing farmers from accessing larger markets. They end up being subsistence farmers. According to Meer, Gulf countries can invest in training farmers, supplying farm inputs and developing infrastructure.

A case in point is Ethiopia where only 14,8 percent of the arable land is cultivated. Talks about exploiting the potential of this country are in progress, according to Marie Bos, a researcher at the GRC.

Both the African continent and the Gulf countries face food security issues. In the Gulf, population growth is expected to increase from 30 million in 2000 to 60 million by 2030. This will place severe stress on an arid region with limited food producing capabilities.

The Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf, also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council states (GCC), will import 60 percent of their food by 2010, according to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The GCC is a reginal organisation consisting of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Meer cautioned against aid with strings attached but also emphasised that investors had to ensure that good human rights practices are followed and that all development and trade agreements are transparent.

He added that South Africa’s main trading partners are the European Union (38,5 percent of trade), the U.S. (18,4 percent) and other African countries (14,9 percent).

However, the European Union and the U.S. are experiencing major financial crisis which has already seen a decline in different trade sectors.

A number of delegates emphasised the need to diversify markets and service delivery while expressing concern about the strain of the global economic meltdown and the plunge of oil prices.

Dubai, where oil revenue has boosted development for over a decade, saw its property market plunge when the global oil price plummeted to about 37 dollars a barrel at the end of last year, leaving the country with a huge deficit. Dubai’s neighbour, Abu Dhabi, has stepped in with a 10 billion dollar bailout plan.

”As the world economy is hit hard by a global phenomenon, emerging markets such as the Gulf and Africa, which have relatively speaking been less affected, must work on a strong recovery,” Abdulaziz Sager, chairperson of the GRC, wrote in the memorandum spelling out the aims of the Gulf-Africa Strategy Forum.

”This move cannot be deemed sustainable without a better understanding of the other and a strong political commitment.”

Dr Tomaz Augusto Salomão, the executive secretary of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), told delegates that by forging strategic partnerships between Gulf and Africa regions, new investment opportunities can be opened up for the emerging economies of the Gulf to invest in Africa.

The continent is especially attractive because a number of countries have sustained economic growth of five percent and more over the last five years.

According to Salomão, foreign investment into the SADC region is more attractive than it has been for decades.

This is because some countries have established investment agencies which act as one-stop investment centres; SADC countries have relaxed barriers to foreign investment; and they have introduced a mix of investment incentives.

There has also been substantial liberalisation of exchange regulations.

With its population of 230 million people, SADC’s gross domestic product (GDP) was about 250 billion dollars in 2007. This is more than the GDP of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and more than half of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa’s aggregate GDP.

SADC’s total exports were worth more than 65 billion dollars.

”The investment and trade opportunities for the GCC in the SADC region are diverse and range from sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, energy, tourism, forestry and mining.

”Our responsibility is to promote dialogue between our regions, engage the private sectors and take advantage of the healthy business environments which our two regions offer,” Salomão said. (END/2009)

A combination of two FDA-approved drugs, already approved for fighting other bacterial infections, shows potential for treating extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), the most deadly form of the infection. This finding is reported by scientists from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the February 27 issue of Science.
TB is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). An estimated one-third of the world’s population is infected with TB. Active disease develops in approximately 10 percent of infected people over a lifetime ? particularly those with weak immune systems such as infants, the elderly, and people infected with HIV. Globally, cases of active TB have increased significantly since the 1980s due to the AIDS pandemic and the emergence of Mtb strains resistant to standard antibiotic treatment.

In the Science paper, Einstein researchers and collaborators at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, describe a two-drug combination that inhibited both the growth of susceptible laboratory strains and 13 XDR-TB strains isolated from TB patients in laboratory culture medium. The drugs truly work in tandem: one of them (clavulanate) inhibits a bacterial enzyme, ?-lactamase, which normally shields TB bacteria from the other antibiotic (meropenem, a member of the ?-lactam class of antibiotics).

The idea of inhibiting ?-lactamase to make ?-lactam antibiotics effective isn’t new ? which is why ?-lactamase inhibitors, such as clavulanate, already exist. The strategy finally proved effective against XDR-TB because Einstein researchers conducted a detailed, methodical investigation of the ?-lactamase enzyme to find the ideal combination of ?-lactamase inhibitor and ?-lactam antibiotic. ?-lactam antibiotics include penicillin, the first antibiotic discovered and one of the safest.

Amoxicillin/clavulanic acid and meropenem have excellent safety profiles and are FDA-approved for adult and pediatric use.

“This is a great example of how, in a collaborative environment, basic, old-fashioned, hypothesis-driven science can lead to timely clinical applications,” said John S. Blanchard, Ph.D., Dan Danciger Professor of Biochemistry at Einstein and senior author of the Science paper, whose research was funded by NIAID.

In parts of Asia, 70 percent of new TB cases are multi-drug resistant, meaning they don’t respond to the two antibiotics most commonly used against TB. Recently, an even greater health threat has emerged: extensively drug-resistant (XDR) bacteria that resist at least four of the drugs used to treat TB and can prove deadly. The cure rate for patients infected with XDR-TB ranges from 12 percent to 60 percent.

XDR-TB is still rare in the United States ? 83 cases were documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1993 and 2007. However, worldwide, the figures are much larger and on the rise. In 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a half-million people were infected with multi-drug resistant TB, and in some countries the percentage of XDR-TB cases is growing. In the only global TB study to date, the WHO reported in 2008 that 15 percent of multi-drug resistant TB cases in Ukraine, for example, were XDR-TB.

Current TB therapy requires four antibiotics that must be taken for at least six months. “If proven in human subjects, the ability to simplify treatment to just two drugs that work against drug-susceptible, multi-drug resistant and XDR-TB could help patients better adhere to therapy,” said Dr. Blanchard, whose laboratory has conducted pioneering studies of fundamental aspects of antibiotic resistance.

“This discovery could be one of the most promising developments in TB research since the discovery of isoniazid – it is very exciting,” said William Jacobs, Ph.D., referring to the first effective antituberculosis medication discovered in the 1950s. Dr. Jacobs is a Howard Hughes Investigator and professor of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and associate director of the Einstein-Montefiore Center for AIDS Research.

Currently, clavulanate is not commercially available, except in combination with ?-lactam antibiotics, such as amoxicillin. This combination of clavulanate and amoxicillin has been used against other types of bacteria to inhibit ?-lactamase activity and make ?-lactams more effective. But it has rarely been used against TB, which is why the ?-lactamase inhibitor/?-lactam approach had not been comprehensively analyzed until now.

NIAID researcher Clifton E. Barry, III, Ph.D., a co-author of the new paper, is leading plans to launch a phase two clinical study of the clavulanate potassium-meropenem drug combination in South Korea by the end of 2009 involving approximately 100 TB patients. NIAID investigators are currently working with manufacturers to provide the drugs needed for the trial.

Additionally, as part of a joint collaboration between Montefiore Medical Center, The University Hospital and Academic Medical Center for Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, South Africa, a separate trial slated for 2009 will test the potency of the drug combination in a smaller number of TB patients. If the results are successful and funding is available, a trial involving a larger number of XDR-TB patients will be conducted. Montefiore researchers chose South Africa for the clinical studies because of its disproportionately high number of XDR-TB cases. In some areas of South Africa, one in four TB cases is extensively drug resistant.

“We see tremendous potential for treating not only XDR-TB cases, but also routine TB cases,” said Brian Currie, M.D., M.P.H., assistant dean for clinical research, and professor of medicine and of clinical epidemiology and population health at Einstein. Dr. Currie is also vice president and medical director for research at Montefiore. He will serve as U.S. leader for the planned clinical studies in Durban.

With the hope that the meropenem/clavulanate combination proves highly effective in the planned clinical trials, Einstein has filed a patent application on this novel TB treatment method as an incentive for commercial drug manufacturers to support expanded clinical trials and to develop with Einstein an improved combination clavulanate-?-lactam drug formulation that may be optimized for routine use in TB treatment.

The research and clinical components of these studies will help fulfill the mission of a $22 million Clinical and Translational Science Award given to Einstein and Montefiore by the National Center for Research Resources of the NIH in 2008. The grant supports the new Einstein-Montefiore Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) whose goal is to collaboratively expedite the transfer of research discoveries to patient care.