Sierra Leone

Pupils and staff of the Modern High along Jomo Kenyatta Road were yesterday in a jubilant and fulfilled mood after learning of a gesture from a Sierra Leonean John Musa who made a donation of computers and other electronic materials to the school.

The donation, John Musa said, is part of several programmes to take Information Communication Technology (ICT), to schools and universities and this is a means of giving back to the people and communities that helped him get to where he is today.

The Sierra Leonean who finished his studies and later worked in an engineering company in the United States of America, said he intends to give computers to students in the school and for other pupils in other schools. He has set up the Musa Foundation with the objective so that with these tools they [pupils] will create a structure for them to follow to become the next future leaders of the world.

As the Freetown City Council together with the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone on Tuesday 17th May engaged stakeholders on the problem of drugs peddling, the Mayor of the Municipality of Freetown has declared that the council will no longer collect dues from drug peddlers.
He made this declaration while he was responding to a presentation by Wilshire Johnson, Registrar of the

Pharmacy Board on the current state of drug peddling. The presentation was done at the council’s conference hall in the presence of representatives from the traders union, police, National Revenue Authority, the FCC, Minister of Health and Sanitation, the board, among others.

Non-invasive contact with Ebola survivors 6 weeks after the virus has been cleared poses little risk for healthcare workers, though contact with semen, ocular humor, and cerebrospinal fluid requires Ebola-appropriate precautions, according to a study yesterday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

A cross-sectional cohort study evaluated 555 specimens from 112 Ebola survivors without fever seeking follow-up care at a clinic in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from Apr 2 to Jun 16, 2015. Almost one third of survivors (34, or 30%) were under the age of 16, and 50 (40%) were male.

Samples were obtained from the armpit (103 specimens), blood (93), conjunctiva (92), forehead (54), mouth (105), rectum (17), semen (1), urine (69), and vagina (21). The median time from Ebola treatment unit discharge to specimen collection was 142 days.

As Plan International turns 40 years in dedicated service to Children in Sierra Leone, Youth Empowerment becomes critical. Plan is currently implementing the Post Ebola Early Recovery Strategic Framework 2015. In this plan, there is a strong focus on Livelihood support focusing on Women and Youth engagement to strengthen their income base to build their resilience against the effects of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD).

On Friday 13th May 2016 The Minister of Youth Affairs Mr. Bai Mahmoud Bangura teamed up with Plan International Sierra Leone on a two- day working visit to the National Youth Farm at Masiaka.

The purpose of the visit by the newly appointed Minister of Youth Affairs was to conduct a tour to update himself on project achievements and challenges and to develop a revised road map to respond to the immediate next steps of the ongoing projects.