Jumbo task: 400 pills a day for elephants with TB in Pakistan
Sameer MANDHRO A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants suffering from tuberculosis that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day.
The jumbo effort by staff at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets -- the same as those used to treat TB in humans -- hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets
The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000-kilogram (8,800-pound) elephants.
But it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they tasted of the bitter medicine, and crankily charging their keepers.
"Giving treatment for TB to elephants is always challenging. Each day we use different methods," said Buddhika Bandara, a veterinary surgeon from Sri Lanka who flew in to oversee the treatment.
"The animals showed some stress in the beginning, but gradually they adapted to the procedure," said Bandara, who has helped more than a dozen elephants recover from the illness in Sri Lanka.
Mahout Ali Baloch wakes early daily to stew rice and lentils, mixed with plenty of sugar cane molasses, and rolls the concoction into dozens of balls pierced with the tablets.
"I know the pills are bitter," the 22-year-old said, watching the elephants splashing under a hose to keep cool.
From humans to elephants
Four African elephants -- captured very young in the wild in Tanzania -- arrived in Karachi in 2009.
Noor Jehan died in 2023 at the age of 17, and another, Sonia, followed at the end of 2024. An autopsy showed she had contracted tuberculosis, which is endemic in Pakistan.
Tests carried out on Madhubala and Malika also came back positive, and the city council -- which owns the safari park -- assembled a team to care for the pachyderms.
Bandara said it is not uncommon for elephants to contract the contagious illness from humans, but that Sonia -- and now Madhubala and Malika -- had shown no symptoms.
"It was surprising for me that elephants have TB," said Naseem Salahuddin, head of the Infectious Disease Department at the Indus Hospital and Health Network, who was enrolled to monitor staff.
"This is an interesting case for me and my students -- everyone wants to know about the procedure and its progress," she told AFP.
The team of four mahouts wear face masks and scrubs when feeding the elephants to avoid contracting a disease that infects more than 500,000 humans a year.
Karachi Safari Park has long been criticised for the mistreatment of captive animals -- including an elephant evacuated after a campaign by American singer Cher -- but is hopeful its last two elephants will overcome the illness with a year-long treatment plan.
Agence France-Presse
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gulf Today
2 days ago
- Gulf Today
Oncology nurse from Ghana wins global nursing award
A Ghanaian wife-and-mother, 24 years as a healthcare professional in her home country, and whose curiosity into why 70 per cent of the cases of the preventable cancer – most of the time – are diagnosed at their precarious stage – let her get into community engagements for the much-needed solutions, has been chosen as the fourth recipient of a UAE-borne international award. From over 105,000 applications across 199 countries, Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital-National Radiotherapy Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Centre-Nursing Department head Naomi Oyoe Ohene Oti, is the fourth woman and the second African to win the three-year-old 'Aster Guardians Global Nursing Award.' The ceremonies were held in Dubai on Monday with chief guest the UAE Minister of Tolerance and Co-Existence Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan. Guests included Diplomatic Community officials, 2024 winner Philippine Army consultant Maria Victoria Juan NC (Reserve), and Miss Universe 1994 Sushmita Sen. From the press conference, jury members Asia Healthcare Holdings executive chairman Vishal Bali, International Diabetes Foundation president elect Dr Niti Pall, Officer of the Order of the British Empire awardee Dr Peter Carter, University of Technology (Sydney, Australia) adjunct professor Dr. James Buchan, and Botswana former health minister Professor Sheila Tlou, called for global support to all nurses worldwide. The five who bestowed the 2022 award to Kenyan nurse-epidemiologist Anna Qabale Duba - whose advocacies include the fight against cultural practices namely early marriages and female genitalia - verdicted that Oti is the most qualified to receive the prestigious award that goes with a $250,000.00 (Dhs 918,231.25/2,612,807.18 Ghanaian Cedi) because her cancer community projects, encompassing care, compassion, and continuing learning education and training are replicable in any country. They implied that fence-sitting leads to the perilous downfall of local to international quality healthcare. From the 'State of the World's Nursing 2025" of the World Health Organisation (WHO): 'Consolidating information from the WHO's 194 Member States, the evidence indicates global progress in reducing the nursing workforce shortage from 6.2 million in 2020 to 5.8 million in 2023, with a projection to decline to 4.1 million by 2030. Approximately 78 per cent of the world's nurses are concentrated in countries just 49 per cent of the global population.' In his awarding ceremonies online message, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, underscored the 'urgency' to long-lasting 'massive investments in nursing education, job security, leadership development and working conditions through informed data, training by equity and inspired by the courage and compassion of nurses.' He stated: 'The global nursing workforce has grown, they are unequally distributed. Countries that make up less than half of the world's population are almost 80 per cent of the world's nurses like in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean Region. These inequalities affect communities on a daily basis.' Bali expressed gratitude for Oti's commitment to solutions addressing cancer that he said, has remained to be a global menace: 'We are still four million nurses short worldwide. There are only a few countries which are actually training nurses for the entire world. A lot more work has to be done in terms of creating more nurses workforce.' Buchan said: 'No nurses. No healthcare. Insufficient nurses. Insufficient healthcare. We are short of nurses worldwide. We need to be doing collectively all that we can to support more people coming into the profession and keep those who are already in the profession as long as they want to.' Pall who has worked in universal healthcare worldwide, said: 'There is a 60 million healthcare shortage by 2030 including nurses. The development of nurses, particularly in the low to medium income countries is the strongest single force. This award encourages that.' Carter stressed that all countries face challenges in their respective healthcare systems with every 'discipline' with a 'shortage of staff,' thereby '40 million people do not have access to healthcare.' Referencing to the distinguished professional qualifications of the Top 10 candidates who have evolved into nurses with up-scaled credentials with individualised community-driven purposes, Carter added: 'This award has shown that there are different ways of managing healthcare irrespective of race, religion, country and nationality. Health is a global issue.' Tlou was happy that Oti would be able to carry on her advocacies.
Gulf Today
2 days ago
- Gulf Today
Trump's team cited safety in limiting COVID shots
Larry Saltzman has blood cancer. He's also a retired doctor, so he knows getting COVID-19 could be dangerous for him — his underlying illness puts him at high risk of serious complications and death. To avoid getting sick, he stays away from large gatherings, and he's comforted knowing healthy people who get boosters protect him by reducing his exposure to the virus. Until now, that is. Vaccine opponents and skeptics in charge of federal health agencies — starting at the top with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — are restricting access to COVID shots that were a signature accomplishment of President Donald Trump's first term and cost taxpayers about $13 billion to develop, produce, and distribute. The agencies are narrowing vaccination recommendations, pushing drugmakers to perform costly clinical studies, and taking other steps that will result in fewer people getting protection from a virus that still kills hundreds each week in the US. 'There are hundreds of thousands of people who rely on these vaccines,' said Saltzman, 71, of Sacramento, California. 'For people who are immunocompromised, if there aren't enough people vaccinated, we lose the ring that's protecting us. We're totally vulnerable.' The Trump administration on May 20 rolled out tougher approval requirements for COVID shots, described as a COVID-19 'vaccination regulatory framework,' that could leave millions of Americans who want boosters unable to get them. The FDA will encourage new clinical trials on the widely used vaccines before approving them for children and healthy adults. The requirements could cost drugmakers tens of millions of dollars and are likely to leave boosters largely out of reach for hundreds of millions of Americans this fall. Under the new guidance, vaccines will be available for high-risk individuals and seniors. But the FDA will encourage drugmakers to commit to conducting post-marketing clinical trials in healthy adults when the agency approves COVID vaccines for those populations. For the past five years, the shots have been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for everyone 6 months and older. They have been available each fall after being updated to reflect circulating strains of the virus, and the vaccines have been shown to be safe and effective in clinical trials. Vinay Prasad, who leads the FDA's division overseeing vaccines, cited 'distrust of the American public' as he announced the new guidelines at a May 20 briefing. 'We have launched down this multiyear campaign of booster after booster after booster,' he said, adding that 'we do not have gold-standard science to support this for average-risk, low-risk Americans.' The details were outlined in a May 20 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, written by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. He and Prasad later followed up with the briefing, which appeared the same day on YouTube. The added limits on access aren't the result of any recent data showing there are new health risks from the COVID vaccines. Instead, they reflect a different regulatory stance from Kennedy, who has a history of anti-vaccine activism, and Makary, who has questioned the safety data on COVID mRNA shots. Announcing a major regulatory change in a medical journal and YouTube video is a highly unusual approach that still leaves many questions about implementation unanswered. It remains unclear when the changes will go into effect or whether there will be any public comment period. The changes were announced by the administration before an FDA advisory committee meeting on May 22 to consider the 2026 COVID vaccine formula. It's a sharp reversal from the first Trump administration, which launched Operation Warp Speed — the effort that led to the development of the COVID shots. Trump called the vaccines the 'gold standard' and a 'monumental national achievement.' The announcement is rattling some patient advocacy groups, doctors, nursing home leaders, and researchers who worry about the ramifications. They say higher-risk individuals will be more likely to get COVID if people who aren't at risk don't get boosters that can help reduce transmission. And they say the FDA's restrictions go too far, because they don't provide exceptions for healthy individuals who work in high-risk settings, such as hospitals, who may want a COVID booster for protection. The limits will also make it harder to get insurance coverage for the vaccines. And the FDA's new stance could also increase vaccine hesitancy by undermining confidence in COVID vaccines that have already been subject to rigorous safety review, said Kate Broderick, chief innovation officer at Maravai Life Sciences, which makes mRNA products for use in vaccine development. 'For the public, it raises questions,' she said. 'If someone has concerns, I'd like them to know that of all the vaccines, the ones with the most understood safety profile are probably COVID-19 vaccines. There is an incredible body of data and over 10 billion doses given.' Some doctors and epidemiologists say it could leave healthy people especially vulnerable if more virulent strains of COVID emerge and they can't access COVID shots. 'It's not based on science,' said Rob Davidson, an emergency room doctor in Michigan and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, which works to expand health care access. 'It's what we were all worried would happen. It risks peoples' lives.' Current federal regulators say there is no high-quality evidence showing that vaccinating healthy people, including health workers who are near or around immunocompromised people, provides an additional benefit. 'It is possible, actually, that such approvals and strategies provide false reassurance and lead to increased harms,' Prasad said. The COVID vaccines underwent clinical trials to assess safety, and they have been subject to ongoing surveillance and monitoring since they obtained emergency use authorization from the FDA amid the pandemic. Heart issues and allergic reactions can occur but are rare, according to the CDC. On a separate track, the FDA on May 21 posted letters sent in April to makers of the mRNA COVID vaccines to add information about possible heart injury on warning labels, a move that one former agency official described as overkill. The action came after the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, held a hearing on alleged adverse events associated with COVID vaccines. Limiting boosters to healthy people goes against guidance from some medical groups. 'The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and the best way to protect children,' Sean O'Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in an email. 'Young children under 5 continue to be at the highest risk, with that risk decreasing as they get older.' The COVID booster clampdown is supported by many adherents of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement, which casts suspicion on traditional medicine. Some opponents of COVID mRNA vaccines say without evidence that the shots cause 'turbo' cancer, are genetic bioweapons, and cause more heart damage than the COVID virus. There is no evidence the shots lead to rapid and aggressive cancers. Cancer rates decreased an average of 1.7% per year for men and 1.3% for women from 2018 to 2022, according to the National Institutes of Health. The COVID vaccines debuted in 2021. Federal regulators say narrowing who can get the boosters will align the U.S. with policies of European nations. But other countries have vastly different economic structures for health care and approaches to preventive care. Many European countries, for example, don't recommend flu shots for the entire population. The US does in part because of the financial drain attributed to lost productivity when people are sick. They also want more information. 'I think there's a void of data,' Makary told CBS News on April 29. 'And I think rather than allow that void to be filled with opinions, I'd like to see some good data.' A massive five-year study on COVID vaccine safety by the Global Vaccine Data Network, involving millions of people, was underway, with about a year left before completion. The Trump administration terminated funding for the project as part of cuts directed by the president's Department of Government Efficiency, and work on the study has stopped for now. There are a multitude of studies, however, on the vaccines' effectiveness in preventing severe illness, hospitalisation, and death.
Gulf Today
3 days ago
- Gulf Today
Jawaher donates Dhs7m to fund 3 humane projects in Zanzibar, benefit over 82,000
Under the directives of Her Highness Sheikha Jawaher bint Mohammed Al Qasimi, Wife of the Ruler of Sharjah and Chairperson of The Big Heart Foundation (TBHF), the Foundation has announced the implementation of three critical humanitarian and developmental projects in Zanzibar with a total funding of Dhs7 million. These projects reflect TBHF's strategic expansion across the African continent and aim to address pressing challenges in education, health services, and socio-economic empowerment. The announcement follows Her Highness's official visit to Zanzibar in the United Republic of Tanzania last year, during which she assessed the developmental needs of local communities. Sheikha Jawaher interacts with a child. TBHF will implement the projects in collaboration with Zanzibar Maisha Bora Foundation and Save the Children, aiming to impact more than 82,440 direct and indirect beneficiaries through a comprehensive plan to foster long-term social and economic development. A vision of sustainable humanitarianism Her Highness Sheikha Jawaher Al Qasimi's leadership continues to shape TBHF's humanitarian approach and its initiatives in Zanzibar. During her September 2024 visit, Her Highness met with Maryam Mwinyi, First Lady of Zanzibar and President of Zanzibar Maisha Bora Foundation, who later visited Sharjah in February 2025 to engage with key institutions led by Her Highness and to explore Sharjah's pioneering model of inclusive social development. The two leaders discussed opportunities for collaboration to empower women and youth, recognising Sharjah's global reputation as a developmental model rooted in human capital, skills development, and community-based institutions. The newly announced projects directly support this vision by contributing to Zanzibar's national development agenda and the long-term sustainability of its social infrastructure. Alya Obaid Al Musaeibi, Director of TBHF, stated: 'At The Big Heart Foundation, we believe that humanitarian action should extend beyond emergency aid to create sustainable impact. These projects – in education, sanitation, and economic empowerment – reflect our commitment to long-term solutions, particularly those that uplift women and youth. By working with trusted local partners, we are ensuring that our support translates into meaningful, measurable change for individuals and communities.' Economic empowerment of women and youth through seaweed farming Over a one-year implementation period, TBHF will partner with the Zanzibar 'Maisha Bora Foundation', chaired by the First Lady of Zanzibar, to launch a social and economic empowerment programme benefiting 200 women and youth involved in seaweed farming. Sheikha Jawaher listens to a briefing during her visit. The initiative includes training in sustainable farming techniques, marketing strategies, and contract farming models to enhance productivity and secure income stability. It also aims to raise product quality standards and integrate small-scale producers into local and international markets. By boosting the value-added seaweed industry and linking it to the broader blue economy, the programme enhances the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises and contributes to Zanzibar's sustainable economic development. Clean and inclusive school environments for Zanzibar students To strengthen school infrastructure, TBHF has previously announced its collaboration with Save the Children to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities across four districts: Unguja, Kaskazini A & Kati, Pemba, Micheweni, and Mkoani. Over 18 months, this initiative will directly benefit 21,173 students and indirectly impact over 42,346 community members. The project includes the construction of 20 sanitation blocks (comprising 128 toilets) across 12 of 28 primary schools, designed to be age-appropriate, gender-segregated, and accessible for students with disabilities. It also provides hygiene kits and delivers health education sessions focused on menstrual hygiene management for girls, helping to reduce absenteeism and support uninterrupted education. Upgrading schools into modern learning hubs In a parallel 18-month programme with Save the Children, TBHF will rehabilitate Ghana Primary School and Shwaka Primary School to transform them into model institutions that provide equitable access to high-quality education. The project will benefit 1,114 students at Ghana School and 957 at Shwaka, with additional outreach to 16,848 students from neighbouring schools. The schools will be upgraded with modern classrooms, libraries, science and ICT labs, and sports facilities. The initiative will also promote digital learning and skill-building to prepare students for future challenges. TBHF's ongoing commitment to Africa Over the past decade, TBHF has launched 179 humanitarian projects across Africa, benefiting more than 1.4 million people in Tanzania, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Previous projects in Zanzibar include the Big Heart Mobile Medical Clinic, launched in 2024 to serve 20,000 patients annually, and a sanitation improvement initiative across 12 schools. The new initiatives deepen TBHF's role as a key catalyst of sustainable development in Africa, aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — particularly Goal 4 (Quality Education), Goal 5 (Gender Equality), Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). With these expanded efforts, TBHF continues to drive forward a people-centred model of change — one that empowers communities and builds a future of opportunity for generations to come.
