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This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precarities" best captures the temporalities at stake; that these precarities include the effects of epidemic control measures; and that people do not just accept but actively negotiate these intersections as they seek to sustain their lives and livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Witchcraft has been documented across the globe. The widespread occurrence of such beliefs in modern Africa affects politics, economic development, and poverty alleviation. Anthropologists have analysed the semiotics of African witchcraft, but there is less information on distributional issues. An important question is which communities are most affected, and why? Using data from a survey of 182 villages and 2,443 household heads in the Gola Forest region of eastern Sierra Leone, we examine three manifestations of witchcraft – concerns, conflicts, and detection. We find that where patrimonial relations of agrarian production remain strong, and in settings where market forces are now well established, witchcraft is less of a concern. By contrast, witchcraft manifestations are higher in communities experiencing the competing pull of patrimonial and market norms. Witchcraft, we conclude, is a product of normative ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Postwar countries in Africa are among the poorest. In the countries of the Mano River region (Liberia, Sierra Leone) agrarian injustice emerges as a major cause of both poverty and conflict. Serious efforts are needed to improve the labour, land and property rights of rural women and young people if the long-term causes of these conflicts are to be mitigated and agricultural development opportunities enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the current media coverage of the spread of Zika virus from Africa and Asia to Central and South America and its possible relationship with fetal abnormalities, UIAA Medcom has produced an advice sheet for mountaineers visiting risk areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global debates about vaccines as a key element of pandemic response and future preparedness in the era of Covid-19 currently focus on questions of supply, with attention to global injustice in vaccine distribution and African countries as rightful beneficiaries of international de-regulation and financing initiatives such as COVAX. At the same time, vaccine demand and uptake are seen to be threatened by hesitancy, often attributed to an increasingly globalised anti-vaxx movement and its propagation of misinformation and conspiracy, now reaching African populations through a social media 'infodemic'. Underplayed in these debates are the socio-political contexts through which vaccine technologies enter and are interpreted within African settings, and the crucial intersections between supply and demand. We explore these through a 'vaccine anxieties' framework attending to both desires for and worries about vaccines, as shaped by bodily, societal and wider political understandings and experiences. This provides an analytical lens to organise and interpret ethnographic and narrative accounts in local and national settings in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and their (dis)connections with global debates and geopolitics. In considering the socially-embedded reasons why people want or do not want Covid-19 vaccines, and how this intersects with the dynamics of vaccine supply, access and distribution in rapidly-unfolding epidemic situations, we bring new, expanded insights into debates about vaccine confidence and vaccine preparedness. • Discourses of vaccine hesitancy misrepresent African publics as ignorant or confused. • Covid-19 vaccine anxieties make sense given disease, social and political experiences. • Vaccine supply inequities interplay with uptake in dynamics across scales. • Growing familiarity with Covid-19 vaccines has eroded worries, but not linearly. • Vaccine preparedness must address health system structures and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In West Africa two rice species (Oryza glaberrima Steud. and Oryza sativa L.) co-exist. Although originally it was thought that interspecific hybridization is impossible without biotechnological methods, progenies of hybridization appear to occur in farmer fields. AFLP analysis was used to assess genetic diversity in West Africa (including the countries The Gambia, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Togo) using 315 rice samples morphologically classified prior to analysis. We show evidence for farmer interspecific hybrids of African and Asian rice, resulting in a group of novel genotypes, and identify possible mechanisms for in-field hybridization. Spontaneous back-crossing events play a crucial role, resulting in different groups of genetic diversity in different regions developed by natural and cultural selection, often under adverse conditions. These new groups of genotypes may have potential relevance for exploitation by plant breeders. Future advances in crop development could be achieved through co-operation between scientists and marginalized farmer groups in order to address challenges of rapid adaptation in a world of increasing socio-political and climatic uncertainty.