Chad replaced Bangladesh as the country with the most polluted air in 2022.With the only real-time, publicly available source of air quality data for the entire country of Chad being provided by a single air quality monitor in the city of N’Djamena, the spotlight on global air quality data coverage disparities shines bright on the continent of Africa, according to the 2022 World Air Quality Report.N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, ranked number one as the most polluted regional city with an annual average PM2.5 concentration of 89.7 µg/m3, a 12 percent increase from 2021, the report said.In 2022, Bangladesh ranked fifth in the overall rankings with 65.8 points. Read More: River pollution: Artists take to unique protest in Habiganj In some of the capital cities in the region (Dhaka, Bangladesh; Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Islamabad, Pakistan; Colombo, Sri Lanka) the percentage of low-cost sensor stations is more than 80 percent.Iraq, Pakistan and Bahrain held the second, third, and fourth positions in the AQI ranking for 2022 respectively with 80.1, 70.9 and 66.6 points.The top five most polluted cities in the world in 2022 were: N’Djamena, Chad (89.7); New Delhi, India (89.1); Baghdad, Iraq (86.7); Manama, Bahrain (66.6); and Dhaka, Bangladesh (65.8).The 2022 World Air Quality Report reviewed the state of global air quality in the year. The study contains statistics on PM2.5 air quality from 7,323 cities in 131 nations, regions, and territories. Read More: Govt committed to doing all it can to defeat pollution: Environment MinisterThis report's data was compiled from over 30,000 regulatory air quality monitoring stations and low-cost air quality sensors, the report said. Governing authorities, research institutes, non-profit non-governmental groups, universities and educational facilities, commercial corporations, and citizen scientists run these monitoring stations and sensors all around the world, said the report.The PM2.5 data in this report is measured in micrograms per cubic meter (g/m3) and uses the World Health Organization (WHO) air quality recommendations and interim objectives from 2021 as a basis for data visualization and risk communication. Read More: 6 vehicles, 5 institutions fined in anti-pollution drive in Dhaka

Sudan has accused neighboring Chad of a cross-border attack earlier this week that a top commander says killed at least 18 nomads in Sudan's western Darfur region. According to Sudan’s ruling sovereign council, armed Chadian assailants crossed into West Darfur province and attacked a group of nomads staying in an open area near the border towns of Beir Saliba and Ardeiba last Thursday. Apart from those killed, several nomads were also wounded in the attack and their livestock was looted and taken to Chad, the council said Friday. There was no immediate comment from Chad on the accusations. A Sudanese outlet, Darfur 24 news, reported a minor clash Friday between Chadian and Sudanese forces in the area, saying three Sudanese troops were wounded. Senior Sudanese Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of the sovereign council, had travelled to Chad before the attack for a previously scheduled meeting Thursday with Chad’s acting president and head of the country’s ruling transitional military council, Mahamat Idriss Deby. Read: Sudan says 31 killed in tribal clashes in Blue Nile province He then returned to Darfur where he has resided for weeks to help defuse tribal tensions and violence that has rocked the troubled region in recent months. Dagalo attended the funerals of the slain nomads on Friday and urged tribal leaders and residents in West Darfur for restraint. On Saturday, he met with a Sudanese-Chadian joint committee and held talks with local officials and tribal leaders to prevent a further escalation.   Sudan has called on Chad to find the attackers and return the looted livestock.

At the small hospital where Dr. Oumaima Djarma works in Chad’s capital, there are no debates over which coronavirus vaccine is the best. There are simply no vaccines at all. Not even for the doctors and nurses like her, who care for COVID-19 patients in Chad, one of the least-developed nations in the world where about one third of the country is engulfed by the Sahara desert. Also read:New Covid strains won’t impact efficiency of Russian vaccines, expert claims “I find it unfair and unjust, and it is something that saddens me,” the 33-year-old infectious diseases doctor says. “I don’t even have that choice. The first vaccine that comes along that has authorization, I will take it.” While wealthier nations have stockpiled vaccines for their citizens, many poorer countries are still scrambling to secure doses. A few, like Chad, have yet to receive any. The World Health Organization says nearly a dozen countries — many of them in Africa — are still waiting to get vaccines. Those last in line on the continent along with Chad are Burkina Faso, Burundi, Eritrea and Tanzania. “Delays and shortages of vaccine supplies are driving African countries to slip further behind the rest of the world in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and the continent now accounts for only 1% of the vaccines administered worldwide,” WHO warned Thursday. And in places where there are no vaccines, there’s also the chance that new and concerning variants could emerge, said Gian Gandhi, UNICEF’s COVAX coordinator for Supply Division. “So we should all be concerned about any lack of coverage anywhere in the world,” Gandhi said, urging higher-income countries to donate doses to the nations that are still waiting. While the total of confirmed COVID-19 cases among them is relatively low compared with the world’s hot spots, health officials say that figure is likely a vast undercount: The countries in Africa still waiting for vaccines are among those least equipped to track infections because of their fragile health care systems. Chad has confirmed only 170 deaths since the pandemic began, but efforts to stop the virus entirely here have been elusive. Although the capital’s international airport was closed briefly last year, its first case came via someone who crossed one of Chad’s porous land borders illegally. Regular flights from Paris and elsewhere have resumed, heightening the chance of increasing the 4,835 already confirmed cases. The Farcha provincial hospital in N’Djamena is a gleaming new campus in an outlying neighborhood, where camels nibble from acacia trees nearby. Doctors Without Borders has helped supply oxygen for COVID-19 patients, and the hospital has 13 ventilators. The physicians also have plenty of Chinese-made KN95 masks and hand sanitizer. Still, not a single employee has been vaccinated and none has been told when that might be possible. That was easier to accept at the beginning of the pandemic, Djarma said, because doctors all around the world lacked vaccines. That has changed dramatically after the development of shots in the West and by China and Russia that have gone to other poor African countries. Also Read:Doctors in Nepal warn of major crisis as virus cases surge “When I hear, for example, in some countries that they’ve finished with medical staff and the elderly and are now moving on to other categories, honestly, it saddens me,” Djarma said. “I ask them if they can provide us with these vaccines to at least protect the health workers. “Everyone dies from this disease, rich or poor,” she says. “Everyone must have the opportunity, the chance to be vaccinated, especially those who are most exposed.” COVAX, the U.N.-backed program to ship COVID-19 vaccines worldwide, is aimed at helping low- and middle-income countries get access. A few of the countries, though, including Chad, have expressed concerns about receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine through COVAX for fear it might not protect as well against a variant first seen in South Africa. Chad is expected to get some Pfizer doses next month if it can put in place the cold storage facilities needed to keep that vaccine safe in a country where temperatures soar each day to 43.5 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit). Some of the last countries also took more time to meet the requirements for receiving doses, including signing indemnity waivers with manufacturers and having distribution plans in place. Those delays, though, now mean an even longer wait for places like Burkina Faso, since a key vaccine manufacturer in India scaled back its global supply because of the catastrophic virus surge there. “Now with global vaccine supply shortages, stemming in particular from the surge of cases in India and subsequently the Indian government’s sequestration of doses from manufacturers there, Burkina Faso risks even longer delays in receiving the doses it was slated to get,” said Donald Brooks, CEO of a U.S. aid group engaged in the COVID-19 response there known as Initiative: Eau. Front-line health workers in Burkina Faso say they’re not sure why the government hasn’t secured vaccines. “We would have liked to have had it like other colleagues around the world,” says Chivanot Afavi, a supervising nurse who worked on the front lines of the response until recently. “No one really knows what this disease will do to us in the future.” In Haiti, not a single vaccine has been administered to the more than 11 million people who live in the most impoverished country of the Western hemisphere. Haiti was slated to receive 756,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine via COVAX, but government officials said they didn’t have the infrastructure needed to conserve them and worried about having to throw them away. Haitian officials also expressed concerns over potential side effects and said they preferred a single-dose vaccine. Also Read:India's disaster hangs over countries facing COVID-19 surges Several small island nations in the Pacific also have yet to receive any vaccine, although the lack of outbreaks in some of those places has meant there is less urgency with inoculation campaigns. Vanuatu, with a population of 300,000, is waiting to receive its first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine later this month, but it has recorded only three cases of coronavirus, all of them in quarantine. At the Farcha hospital in Chad, nine health care workers have gotten the virus, including Dr. Mahamat Yaya Kichine, a cardiologist. The hospital now has set up pods of health care worker teams to minimize the risk of exposure for the entire staff. “It took almost 14 days for me to be cured,” Kichine says. “There were a lot of caregivers that were infected, so I think that if there is a possibility to make a vaccine available, it will really ease us in our work.”

Chad’s longtime leader has died of wounds suffered during a visit to front-line troops battling a little-known rebel group, the military announced Tuesday, just hours after he was declared the winner of an election that would have given him another six years in power. The military quickly announced President Idriss Deby Itno’s son as the central African nation’s interim leader, succeeding his 68-year-old father who ruled for more than three decades. Some observers immediately questioned the chain of events leading up to Tuesday’s stunning announcement on national radio and television. Ayo Sogunro, a Nigerian lawyer and fellow at the South Africa-based Center for Human Rights, said that under Chadian law the term of an incumbent president who dies is completed not by family members but by the National Assembly. “The army seizing power and conferring it on the son of the president ... is a coup and unconstitutional,” Sogunro tweeted Tuesday, calling for the African Union to condemn the transfer of power. Deby’s 37-year-old son, Mahamat, is best known as a top commander of the Chadian forces aiding a U.N. peacekeeping mission in northern Mali. The military said Tuesday he now will head an 18-month transitional council following his father’s death. The military called for calm, instituting a 6 p.m. curfew and closing the country’s land and air borders as panic kept many inside their homes in the capital, N’Djamena. “In the face of this worrying situation, the people of Chad must show their commitment to peace, to stability, and to national cohesion,” Gen. Azem Bermandoa Agouma said. The circumstances of Deby’s death could not immediately be independently confirmed due to the remote location of the fighting. The government has released few details of its efforts to put down the rebellion in northern Chad, though it did announce Saturday that it had “totally decimated” one rebel column of fighters. The rebel group, known as the Front for Change and Concord in Chad, later put out a statement saying fierce battles had erupted Sunday and Monday. It released a list of five high-ranking military officials who it said were killed, and 10 others it said were wounded, including Chad’s president. The army only said Tuesday that Deby had fought heroically but was wounded in a battle. He was then taken to the capital where he died of unspecified wounds. Some residents of the capital, though, said they feared there was more to the story of Deby’s demise. “The rumors that are going around about the transitional council give me the impression that some information is false,” Thierry Djikoloum said. “They are already talking about dissolving parliament ... So for me, I’d say it was a coup d’etat. He was killed.” Some foreign observers also questioned how a head of state could have been killed, saying it cast doubt on his protective guard. The Chadian military has only acknowledged five deaths in weekend fighting in which it said it killed 300 rebels. “We still don’t have the whole story,” Laith Alkhouri, a global intelligence adviser, told The Associated Press. “It raises concerns regarding the security forces’ assessment of the clashes and their intelligence regarding the severity of the situation.” Other analysts pointed to Deby’s long history of visiting the battlefield as a former army commander-in-chief himself. “There’s no evidence to suggest this was a coup committed by his troops. Anyone who follows Deby knows he used to say ‘to lead troops you have to smell the gunpowder,’” tweeted Cameron Hudson with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Deby was a major French ally in the fight against Islamic extremism in Africa, hosting the base for the French military’s Operation Barkhane and supplying critical troops to the peacekeeping effort in northern Mali. French Defense Minister Florence Parly expressed her condolences to the Chadian people, in a news conference with her German counterpart in Paris. “What’s central to us now is that a process of democratic transition can be implemented and the stability of Chad preserved,” she said. “For the rest, she added, French authorities need “a bit more time” to analyze the situation. Earlier, the French presidency called Deby “a courageous friend.” Chad is losing “a great soldier and a president who worked non-stop for the security of the country and the stability of the region for three decades,” it said in a statement. Deby first came to power in 1990 when his rebel forces overthrew then-President Hissene Habre, who was later convicted of human rights abuses at an international tribunal in Senegal. Over the years Deby had survived numerous armed rebellions and managed to stay in power until this latest insurgency led by the Front for Change and Concord in Chad. The rebels are believed to have armed and trained in neighboring Libya before crossing into northern Chad on April 11. Their arrival came on the same day that Chad’s president sought a sixth term in an election several top opposition candidates boycotted.