 I give the floor to Madame Juliette Toakley, who is President of the General of the Medical Child Accra Group, President of the United Worldwide Administration Council. You have the floor, Madame Toakley. Sorry, I was thanking Monsieur Dossoud and Madame Aminata for taking us into the more cultural and legacy aspects of the continent that tend to get overlooked so easily. We cannot hear you. We cannot hear you. Thank you. We cannot hear you. I thought it was on. Let me move it a little closer. Can you hear me now? Yeah. I beg your pardon. May I miss you? I'm going to come back to the COVID issue from a slightly different direction, I think, than some of you might expect. I did say this morning during our presentation how, at the onset of COVID, it struck me how in Africa we seem to have terrific strategy, but in enormous lack of capacity, and in the West there seemed to be quite the opposite. And it did make one stop and think about other differences, similarities that were existing in how the pandemic was evolving. And it was very clear, as Madame de la Parme had expressed, that at the outset there was certainly a very different pattern developing of the pandemic between Africa, Europe, and the US. And even now, even though we have more of the variant, the Delta variant, as well as the other variants in South Africa, the morbidity levels are low. The mortality levels are even lower. So it is still presenting in a somewhat different manner. And as a public health physician, as well as a physician, I really began to wonder what was going on here. We had several roundtables and conferences where people talked about the youth of the continent, the fact that we live outdoors, the fact that everybody is bitten by malaria and has had at least one dose of chloroquine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, that in some parts, especially those areas where you had high levels of smokers, they seemed to suffer more. And even that was argued that they actually seemed to do better if they were smokers with COVID. So I let that one go. And that interest was also borne by the fact that because of the work that I do in West Africa, I have realized we have a quiet pandemic creeping up in our youth. And that quiet pandemic is a heart-related one of high blood pressure. Because by chance, we discovered that our youth between the ages of 20 and 35 were having extremely high levels of blood pressure, unbeknownst to them because they don't have routine health checks, and serum cholesterol, a deadly combination. Having studied nutrition as my public health major and having a lot of relationships with nutritionists, I was fortunate to happen upon an encyclopedia of local foods and their nutritional attributes. And as I began to look at how people were coping with COVID infection in Ghana, especially, I began to realize people were eating certain foods more. People were engaging in some older, you might say, antique practices that they used to participate in when villages, when people lived in villages. And one used to do them as groups, but now we're doing them within households. I began to look at how consistent there were certain foods, certain vegetables, particularly popping up as being part of the diet that people were consuming. And of even greater interest was when my family, who stayed in the U.S., I left the U.S. I decided to sit COVID out in Ghana. But some family members who decided to stay on in the U.S. started sending me photographs of some of these plants of local materials, local plants, being sold for horrendous amounts in the U.S., because clearly, some people had discovered their nutritional strengths and possible impacts in the whole COVID. I'm not a quack. I'm not one that believes in using all sorts of whatever that's the latest person. But these are plants that I grew up on a farm, by the way. And I do remember on the farm, whenever there were certain illnesses, there were certain plants that were used. And I think this is also the thing that grabbed my attention. I realized that these were still the same plants that I grew up seeing being used for various illnesses. And in Ghana, certainly, many families were using them routinely. Routinely, they were eating their normal meals, but adding these particular additives. And I had a very exciting, albeit brief, conversation this morning with one of my co-panelists about the importance of nutrition in COVID and keeping COVID at bay, using the theory of microbiomes, which I've also been very interested in for many years. And I jokingly said to him, the more things change, the more they stay the same, the old saying. Because it seemed to me that we were going back, even in the Western world, looking at diet and the protective role of diet, to some very basic home truths about what one eats or what one should eat to create the right intestinal microbes within one's body to protect oneself and to facilitate and enhance one's immune system against various illnesses, various parasitosis. And so it just seemed that we were engaging in a rather circular conversation. So coming back to the high blood pressure issue, when one looks at why this is becoming a silent epidemic, it's because most of these youths are engaged in office jobs. Office jobs that not only are sedentary, but have them eating from canteens rather than eating at home, number one, eating Western foods rather than local foods, the occasional local food thrown in to customize it, if you will. And a total ignorance, if you will, of the potential health doom awaiting them. To me, this is a silent epidemic that we really need to work at locally. And because I chair the world's largest private NGO, I have been an enormous advocate for food gardens around the continent of Africa that we support. But as Madam Toei expressed, gardening, or not she didn't use the term gardening, but micro farms, you know backyard farms where people have grown their foods is something we've all grown up with. Every African child grows up doing some degree of local food production. But teaching, especially women and youth, how to grow in their private little garden lots, healthy foods that they then consume, avoiding pesticidal use, trying to use as much as possible organic fertilization techniques, using the natural sun solar energy that we have on the continent, water sometimes in supply, sometimes not, but that's one of the few challenges that need to be addressed. We have found has not only been an income generator for women, market women, particularly in South Africa, but their children have grown up a lot healthier for it. Madam Dupam talked about death registries existing in only four of Africa's 55 countries. Also the same goes for birth registries. We really have no idea how many people are born, let alone how many are dying. Maybe it should be seen in context. But generally speaking, we do have the traditional way of announcing death and often describing what happened to the person at the time of death, if you will, from which one can elucidate sometimes what the cause of death was. So deaths don't go entirely unnoticed, and certainly in a country like Ghana where death is celebrated, they rarely, rarely, rarely go unnoticed, even if it's a modest celebration. So I feel that when we're looking at developing our strategic workforce as a result of COVID, we need to be looking not just at MDs, we need to be looking at cadres of nutritionists, I think, to start really looking at what we can salvage from our traditional food products that relate to health. I really do. I think this is an area that should be researched and data should be produced, and we need to be looking at this. This is not something the West is going to provide us. This is something we have to do for ourselves. And so I've always felt, I think in the past, at least for the past six months, that COVID gives us a chance to reset some of our bad habits that we've adopted or adapted from other countries, but that is not meant for us. I believe youth do remain our strength, and I think we need to continue to work with them. They are our strength, as well as potentially our problem. And I think their health, i.e. their nutrition, must be supported and protected. And I think labour and health policies need to create recreational spaces in those large office buildings that are going up so that there can be an emphasis on physical exercise for these poor fellows and poor women who are trapped in these buildings. So as I said, this is going to be a slightly different take on COVID-19 because that's who and what I am. But I would like to say, as my last word, the issue of security is a major problem because you can't grow gardens in your backyard when you've got people marauding through and stealing them in the name of terrorism. But then even at the UN, we don't have anyone permanently on the Security Council after all these years of our independence. And yet, what do we talk about at the UN, if not Africa's problem with security? And we have enough countries, as Madame Thore had indicated. We have Nigeria. Yes, I'm Nigerian, but that's not the reason I say that, but we could do it. South Africa is there. Egypt is there. There are people who can fill that position, and we need to think seriously about this. Thank you. Thank you. Merci, Madame Thoreclay.