Senegal

Swiss confections, food and nutritional products giant launches Nestlé Cerevita Instant Sour Porridge as affordable nutrition for consumers in Southeast Africa. With micronutrients often lacking in consumers’ diets there, it was developed in about one year by scientists at Nestlé's R&D center in Côte d'Ivoire.

Fresenius Medical Care has agreed to pay $231m to resolve reports of overseas bribery. The US Department of Justice says the dialysis giant paid bribes to health and government officials in Angola and Saudi Arabia, and failed to keep accurate financial records in Angola, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Spain, Turkey, and several countries in West Africa.

This week, more than 150 regulatory experts and health officials were expected to attend the fourth African Regulatory Conference in Dakar, Senegal, to look at ways of strengthening and aligning regulatory systems in Africa and speeding up drug approvals across the continent.

China has been fighting tuberculosis (TB) for decades and is increasingly burdened by the multidrug-resistant form of the mycobacterial infection, which causes nearly 120,000 cases each year or about 25% of the world's total. If no effective treatment is developed, the country will need to spend CNY99 billion ($15.6 billion) to treat 710,000 multidrug-resistant TB patients in the period to 2020, estimates the Beijing-based Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC).

The new MenAfriVac vaccine has dramatically reduced meningitis A rates in Africa. Data presented at the World Vaccines Congress (11-12 April 2012) by the Meningitis Vaccine Project revealed both a dramatic reduction in the overall number of meningitis cases, and an even more dramatic reduction in the incidence of disease caused by meningococcal A strain.

Malaria continues to be one of the biggest killers in the world, particularly among African children, but it is a sad fact that there is still no vaccine available that can effectively prevent the disease. Efforts to develop a vaccine go back over half a century, and the need is now becoming urgent because of the growing problem of resistance to the older, cheaper antimalarial drugs.

The two main producers of branded insulin products, Lilly and Novo Nordisk, had the highest average patient prices for the traditional human insulin 10ml vial in the private pharmacy sector in 60 countries, a one-day survey has revealed.

Takeda has launched a new endowment scheme through which it will contribute a total of around $11 million to various Global Fund projects in Africa.

The world is still in a state of a H1N1 pandemic, the World Health Organization has confirmed.

The Agence de Médecine Préventive, a not-for-profit organisation with headquarters at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and offices in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal, has appointed Dr Kamel Senouci programme director for the SIVAC (Supporting Independent Immunization and Vaccine Advisory Committees) initiative. The programme aims to contribute to the development of national immunisation technical advisory groups in 12 countries – six in Africa and six in Asia. The project, funded by a $10 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be conducted in partnership with the International Vaccine Institute and in co-operation with the World Health Organization.