💊 Africa CDC seeks young blood; A professor wants Japanese elderly to die; Cancer on your breath

#275 | Indian pharma gets a new rap; Stopping the flu from stealing the cap; In Uganda, wildlife repairs the gap

Hello, and welcome back to a brand new week with The Kable. A lot was shaking this past weekend, not the least of which was a renewed interest in unidentified flying objects, with the US shooting down four of those over North America. China got in the act too, by identifying one such object, ready to shoot it down themselves. As an aside, how many languages can you say hello in?

More news from China where "healthy young men" are in demand with authorities asking for their sperm for infertile couples.

China's Sinopharm has also signed an expanded agreement with Morocco’s Laprophan, to manufacture pharma formulations, APIs, and also consumables, devices, and equipment in Morocco.

In bad news for Novavax, Japan has cancelled its 140 million dose order for the company's Covid vaccine, citing suppressed demand.

We don't ask for much. All we seek is not to have to report for one week, just one, on quality issues in Indian pharma manufacturing. But this week won't be that week. Sun Pharma is recalling a large batch of generic medicine for high blood pressure due to quality issues at its manufacturing facility.

Elsewhere, local drug regulators in Maharashtra have detected incorrect labelling of ingredients in a popular anti-bacterial cream.

Also, in India, drugs regulator DCGI has come down hard on e-pharmacies for stocking and selling drugs without a license. The list of e-pharmacies struck down includes Flipkart, Amazon, and 1mg.

Eswatini is looking to Bangladesh to set up local pharma manufacturing plants in the country, while in Namibia, after more than a year of investigating, the country has concluded that it has two local pharmaceutical manufacturers.

A mystery outbreak of an unknown hemorrhagic fever has led to a quarantine in Equatorial Guinea, and Cameroon is also monitoring the land border between the two countries.

In good news that we hope becomes a long-lasting trend, the first month of a new presidency in Brazil has seen deforestation go down in the Amazon.

And finally, in a movie-inspired idea for dealing with Japan's ageing population, an economics professor from Yale has a proposal: mass suicide of the elderly.