Digentia belongs to the subfamily Oxyinae within the grasshopper family Acrididae. Members of the subfamily have a subconical head, short fastigium, sulcate frontal ridge, conical prosternal process, open mesosternal interspace, spined lower genicular lobe of the hind femur, tufts of short hairs on distal abdominal sternites and, in males, an epiphallus that is usually divided at the bridge. Oxyinae contains 37 recognized genera, 19 of which are assigned to the tribes Oxyini and Praxibulini, while Digentia and 17 other wet-forest genera remain outside those tribes.

The genus had four known species before this review: Digentia punctatissima, Digentia rufogeniculata, Digentia fasciata and Digentia karnyi. Digentia is confined to West Central Africa and appears morphologically close to Oxya, the type genus of Oxyini. The two genera share a pentagonal fastigium that is wider than long, complete lateral facial keels and a prosternal process with a subacute or rounded apex, whereas Oxya also occurs across the old-world tropics and warm temperate zones.

Field collections for the study were made from 27 April 2019 to 7 April 2023 at Ngoyla in Nki National Park, Haut-Nyong division, and Ngutadjap in the Vallée du Ntem division. The authors examined specimens with a stereomicroscope, prepared illustrations at magnifications of 6–50 times, and took measurements with a graticule eyepiece and a digital stage reading to 0.01 mm. Measurements covered the pronotum, overall body length, antennae, eyes, elytra, hind femora, hind tibiae and tarsal segments. Ratios normalized by pronotum length were used to compare animals of different sizes, while foot formulas and sexual-dimorphism ratios were calculated from sample averages rather than individual measurements.

The new species was represented by 23 specimens, including 14 males and nine females, from Ngoyla and Ngutadjap. Digentia viridissima has an average male body length of 19.61 mm and an average female length of 24.18 mm. Its male cerci are flat, compressed, inwardly curved and excised apically, while the phallic complex is medium-sized, with an undivided epiphallus bridge, long conical outer lophi curving upward with rounded tips, a robust endophallus, a wide ventral aedeagal sclerite with a rounded apex and a slender, pointed gonopore process. Females have conical, incurved cerci with acute apices.

Live and freshly examined material of Digentia fasciata showed a predominantly green-yellow body with black or green-black longitudinal bands extending from the vertex across the pronotum, mesothorax, metathorax and abdomen in some specimens. The authors’ redescription differs from Ramme’s 1929 account of dried museum specimens, which described the species as yellow-brown. Digentia viridissima was similarly green-yellow, with green-blue tibiae and green tarsi; its name derives from the Latin viridissima, meaning “greenest,” referring to its unusually green external appearance.

The revision supports two external-morphology subgroups within Digentia. Digentia punctatissima, Digentia fasciata and Digentia viridissima have extremely reduced tegmina, a short and medially notched metazona, hind tibiae that are not or only slightly expanded apically, and dark longitudinal body bands. Digentia rufogeniculata and Digentia karnyi instead have longer, oval, strongly reticulate tegmina, relatively massive hind tibiae expanded apically, and no corresponding black longitudinal bands. This division corresponds to the historical treatment of Digentia and Genditia as separate genera, but the authors found that the available male and female genitalia did not justify retaining both generic names.

Several material limitations constrain the comparison. The holotype of Digentia punctatissima, originally preserved in fluid before being pinned, is in poor condition, and the authors could not borrow it from Stockholm; they instead relied on published descriptions, drawings and a photograph of the specimen. Digentia karnyi remains known only from its female holotype from Tolo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with its antennae, hind femur, hind tibiae and tarsi missing. The authors also could not examine the types of Digentia fasciata. As a result, they stated that the available material was too meager for extensive comparisons and said the generic identities of Digentia and Genditia should be reconsidered after broader collections include both sexes of all species.

At Ngoyla and Ngutadjap, Digentia viridissima and Digentia fasciata occurred in humid, often swampy forest alongside Pterotiltus and several catantopine grasshoppers. At Ngutadjap, Pteridium aquilinum covered more than 75% of the referenced ground surface, Palisota hirsuta covered 25–50%, and several Marantaceae species covered 5–25%. The grasshoppers were usually collected on ferns, but the researchers did not observe either Digentia species feeding on a particular plant. They associated the lack of feeding observations with the rarity of the specimens and their rapid capture rather than with a demonstrated host-plant preference.

Subject of Research: Morphological taxonomy and distribution of the African grasshopper genus Digentia

Article Title: Review of the African genus Digentia Stål, 1878 ( Orthoptera , Acrididae , Oxyinae )

Article References: Oumarou Ngoute, C., & Rowell, C. H. F. (2025). Review of the African genus Digentia Stål, 1878 (Orthoptera, Acrididae, Oxyinae). Journal of Orthoptera Research, 34(1), 11-30. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.34.126949

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.34.126949

Keywords: Digentia, Oxyinae, Acrididae, Orthoptera, taxonomic revision, new species, Cameroon, grasshopper morphology, West Central Africa, Review, African, genus

The researchers enrolled 842 consecutive symptomatic adults referred for upper gastrointestinal endoscopy. They collected sociodemographic, behavioral, clinical and endoscopic information through a standardized questionnaire and compared enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and rapid urease testing with histopathological examination using hematoxylin and eosin staining. Histology served as the diagnostic gold standard, while logistic regression was used to identify factors independently associated with infection. Epigastric pain was the most common indication for endoscopy, reported in 59.9% of participants. Erosive lesions or ulcerations were the predominant endoscopic findings in 28.4%, and inflammatory lesions were documented in 22.3%.

ELISA showed sensitivity of 99.7%, specificity of 100.0% and diagnostic accuracy of 99.8% against histology, with almost perfect agreement (κ = 0.994). The rapid urease test had sensitivity of 88.3%, specificity of 88.5% and diagnostic accuracy of 88.4%, representing substantial agreement with histology (κ = 0.722). Infection was present in all patients with gastric tumors, 91.2% of those with active duodenal ulcers and 82.1% of those with active gastric ulcers.

Logistic regression identified several demographic, clinical and behavioral factors independently associated with infection. These included younger age, defined in the abstract as 15–32 years (adjusted odds ratio, 2.88); living in households with five members (9.83); blood group O (2.25); vomiting (12.60); investigation for anemia (16.38); and absence of medication use (4.33). These were associations in the study population and do not establish causation.

The results apply to symptomatic patients referred for endoscopy at two tertiary hospitals in Douala, not to the broader population of the city or Cameroon. Because the study was cross-sectional, it cannot determine whether the reported factors preceded infection or changes over time. The supplied evidence is an abstract from an early open-access version of the article, which states that further editorial changes may follow; confidence intervals and other detailed measures of uncertainty were not provided in the abstract.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional assessment of H. pylori prevalence and diagnostic test performance among symptomatic adults undergoing endoscopy in Douala, Cameroon

Article Title: High prevalence and endoscopic patterns of Helicobacter pylori Infection among symptomatic adults in Douala, Cameroon: sociodemographic and behavioral correlates

Article References: Eyoum, B. B. B., Eloumou, F. S. B., Medi, C. S., Ekwala, J. R. M. N., Ntonga, C. L., Malongue, A., Fotso, C., Fotsing, S., Kamdem, C., Ateba, R. G., Kouitcheu, B. L. M., & Kuiate, J.-R. (2026). High prevalence and endoscopic patterns of Helicobacter pylori Infection among symptomatic adults in Douala, Cameroon: sociodemographic and behavioral correlates. BMC Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-026-14451-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12879-026-14451-8

Keywords: Helicobacter pylori, Douala, Cameroon, cross-sectional study, endoscopy, histology, ELISA, rapid urease test, prevalence, endoscopic findings, High, endoscopic

Metastenasellus belongs to the asellote isopod family Stenasellidae, whose members are adapted to groundwater habitats. Before this study, the genus contained nine formally described species distributed across a trans-Saharan range, including one species from Algeria and eight from West and Central Africa. No species had been described from Benin, while Cameroon had two named species, Metastenasellus camerounensis and M. boutini. Earlier field observations and a small number of COI sequences had nevertheless indicated that the genus was present in both countries and might conceal additional diversity that conventional descriptions had not resolved.

The specimens came from sampling campaigns conducted between 2015 and 2019 in Benin’s Ouémé and Yéwa basin and during 2009 and 2019 in Cameroon. In Benin, researchers visited 169 stations, 98 of which contained isopods; the DNA dataset selected 57 Metastenasellus specimens from 19 of those stations to provide a geographically balanced representation of the basin. In Cameroon, approximately 150 stations were surveyed in the Wouri, Sanaga and Nyong watersheds, and Metastenasellus was found at 44 stations. The combined molecular dataset contained 57 specimens from Benin and 32 from Cameroon, together with the externally described species Stenasellus virei as an outgroup for rooting the phylogenetic tree.

Animals were collected from traditional hand-dug and modern lined wells with a modified phreatobiological net and baited traps. DNA was extracted from small pieces of appendage tissue where possible, while whole individuals were sometimes used for smaller specimens. Researchers amplified the COI marker by polymerase chain reaction, checked the products by electrophoresis and obtained bidirectional Sanger sequences. After sequence assembly and comparison with GenBank records, the analyses included newly generated sequences, two previously available Beninese sequences and four available from Cameroon, plus five sequences of the named species M. boutini.

A maximum-likelihood phylogeny was inferred with IQ-TREE under a TN+F+I+G4 nucleotide substitution model selected by the Bayesian Information Criterion. Branch support was estimated with 1,000 ultrafast bootstrap replicates. The researchers then used ASAP, a distance-based method for assembling species by automatic partitioning; GMYC, a generalized mixed Yule coalescent model applied to an ultrametric tree; and two implementations of Poisson tree processes, one allowing different rates among lineages and one using a single rate. They also calculated uncorrected pairwise distances among specimens and within and between the molecular units. This combination allowed the molecular partitions to be compared with both genetic divergence and the branching structure of the phylogeny.

ASAP consistently recovered the same 23 molecular operational taxonomic units whether it used p-distances, Jukes-Cantor distances or Kimura two-parameter distances. Eleven units were associated with Benin and 12 with Cameroon. GMYC independently identified the same 23 units, each represented by a singleton or a strongly supported clade with bootstrap values of 99–100 percent. Multi-rate Poisson tree processes returned 22 units, merging the units numbered 13 and 14, whereas the Bayesian single-rate implementation proposed 26 units. That method split MOTU 1 into two singletons and divided MOTU 12 into two singletons and a two-specimen group. The authors regarded the 26-unit result as less plausible because some proposed splits occurred between sequences separated by only 2.1–3.5 percent divergence.

Genetic distances showed a pronounced gap between variation within the 23 principal units and divergence among them. Maximum within-unit uncorrected pairwise distances ranged from 0.2 percent in MOTUs 9 and 10 to 3.5 percent in MOTUs 12 and 22. Mean distances between units ranged from 17.1 percent for MOTUs 5 and 7 to 27.5 percent for several pairs, while the largest pairwise distance among all specimens was 28.6 percent. The authors compared these values with a crustacean COI threshold of 0.16 substitutions per site derived from patristic distances, noting that the Metastenasellus values were well above that benchmark. They also cited the 24.5-percent separation between the named species M. boutini and M. camerounensis as a reference point for interspecific divergence within the genus.

Additional observations were consistent with many molecular units representing distinct species. Morphological work in progress found clearly different male second pleopods among specimens assigned to MOTUs 9, 10 and 11, whose pairwise distances ranged from 20.4 to 24.8 percent. Two units also occurred together at each of two Beninese stations, BEN072 and IBT, providing evidence of separately evolving mitochondrial lineages in sympatry. The researchers nevertheless cautioned that divergent mitochondrial genomes can coexist within one species, so neither sympatry nor a large barcode distance conclusively resolves the question. They likewise emphasized that introgression and incomplete lineage sorting can affect species delimitation based on a single locus.

The geographic distributions recorded for the molecular units were narrow. Most appeared associated with individual stations or nearby localities, and no unit detected in the upper Ouémé basin was found farther downstream, even though the river could potentially have connected portions of the basin. These patterns suggested substantial isolation among groundwater populations, although the study’s geographic coverage was too limited to map the full ranges of the organisms. The finding is especially notable because it emerged from the first substantial sampling of Metastenasellus in Benin and Cameroon. The authors compared their result with an analysis of obligate groundwater Aselloidea in Western Europe that identified about 150 species in 12 genera, while noting that African diversity remains largely uncharacterized.

Overall, the study provides a DNA-based assessment of diversity within a poorly documented stygobiont genus rather than a completed taxonomic revision. The 23 molecular units include the two named Cameroonian species and numerous lineages not formally described, including all 11 units associated with Benin. Their separation is supported by agreement among three principal delimitation approaches, large genetic distances and, for some lineages, anatomical or sympatric evidence. Yet formal recognition of species would require integration with morphological examination and additional genetic data, particularly nuclear markers. The research therefore establishes 23 candidate lineages as a concrete measure of the diversity present in the sampled wells, while leaving their status and wider distributions open for subsequent taxonomic examination.

Subject of Research: DNA-based species delimitation of the groundwater isopod genus Metastenasellus in Benin and Cameroon

Article Title: DNA taxonomy reveals high species diversity among the stygobiont genus Metastenasellus ( Crustacea , Isopoda ) in African groundwater

Article References: Lagnika, M., Kayo, R. P. T., Sonet, G., Flot, J.-F., & Martin, P. (2024). DNA taxonomy reveals high species diversity among the stygobiont genus Metastenasellus (Crustacea, Isopoda) in African groundwater. Subterranean Biology, 48, 51-71. https://doi.org/10.3897/subtbiol.48.113022

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/subtbiol.48.113022

Keywords: Metastenasellus, groundwater isopods, DNA barcoding, COI gene, species delimitation, cryptic diversity, Benin, Cameroon, stygobionts, Stenasellidae, taxonomy, reveals

The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability by Wilson Nathan Ndackssi and Modeste Kameni Nematchoua, focused on five Cameroonian cities chosen deliberately to span the country’s climatic spectrum: Bertoua, Douala, Garoua, Maroua, and Yaoundé. This geographic spread matters more than it might first appear. Douala sits on the humid Atlantic coast under persistent cloud cover, while Maroua and Garoua lie in the far north, where the Sahelian climate delivers intense, seasonally concentrated sunshine. Yaoundé and Bertoua occupy intermediate equatorial and tropical humid regimes. A model that performs well across all five sites is therefore tested against the full range of atmospheric conditions a solar engineer is likely to encounter in the region, from coastal haze to dry-season dust.

To train and evaluate their models, the researchers drew on NASA’s POWER database, a publicly accessible archive of meteorological and solar radiation variables derived from satellite observations. The dataset covered 27 years, from 1999 to 2026, giving the algorithms a long enough record to capture seasonal cycles, interannual variability, and the influence of climate phenomena on surface radiation. Eight input variables fed the models: mean air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed, wind direction, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, and the day of the year. The inclusion of cloud cover proved particularly significant, since clouds are the dominant modulator of surface solar radiation in the tropics, capable of cutting daily irradiation by more than half during peak wet seasons.

Four machine learning algorithms were put head to head: Linear Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine. Each approach embodies a different philosophy of prediction. Linear Regression assumes a straightforward weighted relationship between the meteorological inputs and irradiation, offering transparency but limited flexibility. A Decision Tree partitions the input space through a cascade of binary questions, capturing nonlinear thresholds such as the sharp radiation drop when cloud cover crosses a certain fraction. The Random Forest builds hundreds of Decision Trees on random subsets of the data and averages their outputs, a technique known as ensemble learning that suppresses the overfitting to which single trees are prone. The Support Vector Machine, meanwhile, constructs a decision boundary in a high-dimensional transformed feature space, allowing it to model complex nonlinear relationships without explicitly enumerating them.

The models were evaluated with three standard statistical indicators: the mean absolute error (MAE), which measures the average size of prediction errors in plain units; the root mean square error (RMSE), which penalizes large errors more heavily; and the coefficient of determination (R²), which quantifies the fraction of variance in observed irradiation that the model explains. Across all five cities and all four algorithms, RMSE values ranged from 0.58 to 0.77 kWh/m², MAE values from 0.40 to 0.59 kWh/m², and R² values from 0.52 to 0.69. In practical terms, the best models predicted daily irradiation to within roughly half a kilowatt-hour per square meter on average, a margin meaningful for feasibility studies though not yet tight enough for minute-by-minute grid dispatch.

The ranking of the algorithms was consistent in every city. Random Forest achieved the best predictive performance everywhere, followed by the Support Vector Machine, then the Decision Tree, with Linear Regression trailing last. This ordering tells a coherent story about the physics of the problem. Solar irradiation in the tropics is governed by nonlinear interactions among cloud dynamics, humidity, temperature, and season, and the ensemble averaging of Random Forest is well suited to capturing those interactions while remaining robust to noisy or imperfect inputs. The comparatively modest R² values also signal honest limitations: even the best model explains only about two-thirds of the day-to-day variance, reflecting the inherent chaos of tropical cloud systems and the resolution limits of satellite-derived predictors.

The authors are candid about these constraints, and the study’s title itself foregrounds evidence and limitations alongside its results. The reliance on NASA POWER data means the models inherit the biases of satellite retrieval rather than ground truth, and the researchers note that comparable studies in Cameroon remain few relative to the extensive literature from Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Their work distinguishes itself, they argue, through its complementary geographic coverage, the inclusion of the Support Vector Machine among the tested algorithms, and an in-depth treatment of predictive meteorological variables, cloud cover in particular. The findings position Random Forest as the most suitable algorithm for predicting global daily solar irradiation in Cameroon, and as a preliminary screening tool for assessing solar energy resources across Central Africa.

Why does this matter beyond the modeling community? Cameroon’s solar resources remain largely untapped, even as the country’s electricity demand grows and hydropower, its dominant generation source, becomes vulnerable to increasingly erratic rainfall. Reliable irradiation prediction underpins nearly every stage of solar deployment: it determines the expected energy yield that investors demand before financing a plant, the sizing of battery storage in off-grid systems, and the design of hybrid solar-diesel microgrids for rural communities. A validated, low-cost prediction tool that requires only freely available satellite meteorology could dramatically lower the barrier to preliminary solar resource assessment in a region where installing and maintaining pyranometers, the instruments that measure radiation directly, is often impractical.

The study also carries a broader message for the machine learning and renewable energy communities. Ensemble methods like Random Forest are computationally cheap, interpretable through feature-importance analysis, and trainable on public data, making them realistic options for national energy agencies and small research groups in developing economies, not just well-funded laboratories. At the same time, the moderate R² values are a reminder that prediction is not a substitute for measurement: as solar penetration deepens, ground-truthing campaigns and denser observation networks will be essential to refine the models and to capture local effects that satellites smooth over. The researchers suggest their framework can serve as a first-pass selection tool, with the potential to enrich the scientific literature on solar irradiation modeling in Central Africa, a region notably underrepresented in the global solar forecasting literature.

For a country straddling the equator, the sun is Cameroon’s most dependable energy asset, and the gap between that potential and its exploitation has been shaped as much by information scarcity as by infrastructure. What this study demonstrates is that the information gap is closable with tools already within reach: 27 years of open satellite data, eight meteorological variables, and a forest of decision trees. If the approach is validated further with ground measurements and extended to finer temporal and spatial scales, the same methodology could be replicated across neighboring Central African nations, turning machine learning from a laboratory curiosity into a practical instrument of energy planning for the tropics.

Subject of Research: Machine learning prediction of daily global solar irradiation in the tropical climate zones of Cameroon for renewable energy planning

Article Title: Evidence, limitations and implications for renewable energy planning of daily global solar irradiation in tropical climate zones of Cameroon, predicted by machine learning

Article References: Ndackssi, W. N., & Kameni Nematchoua, M. (2026). Evidence, limitations and implications for renewable energy planning of daily global solar irradiation in tropical climate zones of Cameroon, predicted by machine learning. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04807-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04807-0

Keywords: solar irradiation, machine learning, Random Forest, Cameroon, renewable energy, NASA POWER database, Support Vector Machine, tropical climate, solar energy planning, Discover Sustainability, cloud cover, Central Africa

The genus Pterotiltus, first established in 1893, has long been a taxonomic headache. Its twelve previously known species live exclusively in the wet forests of West and Central Africa, stretching from Ghana through Cameroon and the Congo Basin into Central Uganda. Yet museum drawers hold remarkably few specimens. The insects inhabit dense forest understory that is difficult to penetrate, and their populations are scattered across an enormous altitudinal range, from sea level up to more than 2,000 meters. As far back as 1972, the French entomologist Marc Descamps flagged Pterotiltus as an African genus urgently requiring revision, a call that has gone largely unanswered until now.

The new work, led by entomologist Oumarou Ngoute C., is based on specimens collected across six localities in Cameroon’s lowland and highland rainforests, including Campo National Park on the coast and Nki National Park in the country’s remote southeast. In the southern lowlands, the team encountered two striking new species. Pterotiltus ngoylaensis, found at around 500 meters in Nki National Park, is predominantly green with black and yellow markings and sports eyes that are conspicuously violet in life, a trait unique within the entire genus. Pterotiltus campoensis, discovered near sea level in Campo National Park, breaks the mold in a different way: it is the only known member of the genus dominated by vivid red and blue-black coloration rather than green.

Both lowland species share the hallmark adaptations that led one reviewer to describe Pterotiltus as the culmination of adaptation to forest life among its subfamily, the Oxyinae. All species in the group are flightless, their wings reduced to tiny ridges or minute flaps that never extend beyond the thorax. Their ovipositors have evolved smooth, rod-like valves, an adaptation for laying eggs in highly specialized sites, and researchers have previously documented one species gluing its eggs directly onto the leaves of its food plants. These are insects that have traded the open grasslands of their relatives for a life spent clambering through the herb layer of the forest floor.

The real surprise came from the highlands of western Cameroon. There, at elevations between roughly 1,300 and 2,400 meters, the team collected grasshoppers that outwardly resembled Pterotiltus but carried a suite of anatomical differences too substantial to ignore. The males averaged just 12 to 14 millimeters in length, notably smaller than their lowland cousins. Their forewings, though tiny, were actually present and sometimes brightly colored, rather than almost entirely lost. Most tellingly, the fine structures of the reproductive system told a different evolutionary story in both sexes.

Male grasshoppers in this group are classified largely by the architecture of the epiphallus, a sclerotized structure at the top of the phallic complex, and the valvular plate that covers the aedeagus. In lowland Pterotiltus, the outer lophi of the epiphallus are long, slender, blade-like, and curved forward, while the valvular plate is foliose, elaborately ornamented with cuticular folds that often take species-specific forms. In the highland insects, the lophi curve upward and inward instead, ending in horn-like points or bifid tips, and the valvular plate is simple and unadorned. The females clinched the case: their subgenital plates bear two robust, rearward-directed projections that are completely absent in Pterotiltus.

On the strength of these differences, the researchers erected a new genus, Parapterotiltus, with the previously enigmatic species Pterotiltus minimus, described from a single male back in 1929, as its type. The study also finally describes the female of that species for the first time, nearly a century after the male was named. Two additional new species join the genus: Parapterotiltus minimoides, so named because it is almost indistinguishable from P. minimus in outward appearance, and Parapterotiltus bamboutos, a black-bodied species known only from the slopes of Mount Bamboutos. Remarkably, the two lookalike species occur together at some of the same sites between 1,000 and 1,600 meters, separated not by geography but by anatomy that only becomes obvious under the microscope.

The taxonomic detective work involved meticulous measurement. The team quantified body proportions, tarsal segment lengths, tibial spine counts, and ratios of sexual dimorphism, normalizing measurements against pronotum length so that species of different sizes could be compared fairly. Dissections of genitalia required relaxing pinned specimens, macerating tissue in potassium hydroxide, and staining structures with acid fuchsin, a reminder that species boundaries in this group rest on anatomy invisible to anyone walking through the forest. The researchers are now preparing a full revision of Pterotiltus, with the current paper serving as its foundation.

There is an urgent conservation dimension to the discovery. Parapterotiltus bamboutos is known from a single, very small population on Mount Bamboutos, one of the most degraded mountains in Cameroon, where human activity has destroyed nearly all remaining forest pockets and replaced them with crops. The authors warn that conservation measures are needed urgently, though a 2010 photograph from nearby Mount Kupe hints the species may survive elsewhere along Cameroon’s volcanic line. The lowland species fare somewhat better, since both Nki and Campo Ma’an National Parks offer protected habitat, but deforestation across southern Cameroon continues at an accelerating pace, and these strictly forest-dependent insects have nowhere else to go.

The study also carries a broader lesson for how biodiversity is catalogued in the tropics. Because external appearance in these grasshoppers is so uniform, species have historically been defined by subtle differences in size and color, and ecologists working with incomplete identifications have faced an unenviable choice between excluding uncertain records or risking inaccuracy. The new work shows that the real diversity is written in the genitalia, structures so varied between species that they can even justify splitting a genus in two. As the authors note, the poorly surveyed highlands of western Cameroon may hold more undescribed taxa still, provided the forests they depend on last long enough for anyone to find them.

Subject of Research: Taxonomic description of new flightless grasshopper species and a new genus from Cameroon's rainforests

Article Title: New species of Pterotiltus from Cameroon, and a new genus, Parapterotiltus ( Orthoptera , Acrididae , Oxyinae )

Article References: Oumarou Ngoute, C., & Rowell, C. H. F. (2024). New species of Pterotiltus from Cameroon, and a new genus, Parapterotiltus (Orthoptera, Acrididae, Oxyinae). Journal of Orthoptera Research, 33(1), 127-146. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.33.96043

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.33.96043

Keywords: grasshoppers, Cameroon, new species, Orthoptera, taxonomy, biodiversity, rainforest, Parapterotiltus, Pterotiltus, entomology, conservation, Africa

The grasshoppers in question belong to the family Pyrgomorphidae, often called gaudy grasshoppers because of their strikingly vivid colors. That flamboyance is not decoration: many of these insects feed on toxic plants, sequester poisons such as cardiac glycosides, and advertise their unpalatability to predators through aposematic coloration. The family contains roughly 149 genera and 487 species, most of them concentrated in tropical and subtropical Africa, Asia, and Australia. Within it, the small tribe Dictyophorini includes just five genera, among them Parapetasia and Loveridgacris, both restricted to Africa south of the Sahara.

The taxonomic history of these two genera reads like a long argument. Parapetasia was established in 1884 with the species P. femorata as its type. A second species, P. rammei, was described from Cameroon in 1923. In the 1950s, the entomologist Rehn split the group into two subgenera based on pronotum shape and wing size, and one of those subgenera was later elevated to the genus Loveridgacris. Then, in the 1970s, Kevan argued that the supposedly distinct species were merely wing-length variants of a single species, effectively collapsing everything into one monotypic genus. Some later researchers accepted that view; others continued to treat the old species as valid, leaving the classification in limbo for decades.

To break the deadlock, the team led by Claudia Hemp and colleagues took an integrative approach. They examined freshly collected specimens from five localities in Cameroon, including the Ebo Forest, Mount Manengouba, the western highlands, and the Dja Biosphere Reserve, along with material from Tanzania, and combed through historical collections in Berlin, Hamburg, and Karlsruhe. They measured body proportions with digital calipers, dissected and photographed the intricate male and female genitalia under high-resolution microscopes, and mapped distributions using geographic records from labels and fieldwork.

The genital anatomy proved decisive. In these grasshoppers, the phallic complex is relatively uniform across the family, so subtle differences carry strong taxonomic weight. Parapetasia species have a triangular fastigium of the vertex, small hemispherical eyes, a raised and swollen rear edge on the pronotum, and a narrow epiphallic bridge with subparallel appendices. Loveridgacris species instead show a rounded fastigium, oval eyes, a flat hind-femur margin, strongly reticulated wings, and a broad epiphallic bridge with divergent appendices. Using these characters, the authors provide a formal identification key separating the two genera and the species within each.

The molecular work reinforced the anatomical conclusions. The researchers sequenced fragments of the mitochondrial COI and 16S genes from 47 specimens representing ten pyrgomorphid species and reconstructed a Bayesian phylogeny with Zonocerus elegans as the outgroup. The resulting tree resolved three main tribes and showed strong support for the monophyly of both Parapetasia and Loveridgacris, which emerged as sister genera. Crucially, Parapetasia rammei clustered as the sister species to P. femorata with a substantial interspecific genetic distance of 3.75 percent, contradicting Kevan’s old synonymy. The team therefore formally restored P. rammei as a valid species, leaving Parapetasia with two species: P. femorata from the lowland forests of West and Central Africa, and P. rammei confined to the highlands of Cameroon.

The two genera also turned out to be geographically complementary. Parapetasia occupies western and central Africa, with records from Cameroon, Nigeria, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, while Loveridgacris is strictly East African, known from the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania, Zanzibar, and the Shimba Hills of Kenya. The two species also differ ecologically: P. femorata lives in closed-canopy forest near marshy ground, whereas P. rammei favors open highland habitats such as farmland, fallows, and steppe, meaning the two species occupy distinct ecological niches.

The biggest surprise came from Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains. There, in disturbed lowland wet forest at the edge of the national park, the team discovered a new Loveridgacris species, which they named Loveridgacris tectiferus, the species name referring to the roof-like, or tectiform, shape of its shortened wings. It can be told apart from its closest relative, L. impotens, by striking color differences: its antennal segments alternate black and orange, its hind tibiae are black with a dull orange middle band, and its wings stand tectiform rather than lying lobe-like against the abdomen. Differences in the epiphallus, including slenderer hooks, support the distinction.

Interestingly, the genetics of the new species tell a subtler story. Although L. tectiferus is morphologically unmistakable, its COI and 16S sequences differ only minimally from those of L. impotens, with a genetic distance of just 0.33 percent, and even complete mitochondrial genomes failed to show strong divergence. The authors interpret this as evidence that L. tectiferus is a young species caught early in the speciation process, possibly isolated in its mountain habitat while its relative remains widespread across eastern Africa. This pattern echoes findings from other Orthopteran groups in the Eastern Arc Mountains, where genera are ancient but individual species are young, likely shaped by climatic fluctuations that repeatedly fragmented and reconnected habitats.

As a bonus, the team assembled the complete mitochondrial genomes of both Loveridgacris species using next-generation sequencing, the first for the genus. The genomes measure 15,592 and 15,737 base pairs and contain the standard set of 37 mitochondrial genes: 13 protein-coding genes, 22 transfer RNAs, two ribosomal RNAs, and one control region. Both are strongly A+T-biased, as is typical for insect mitogenomes. Together with the new species descriptions, the resurrected status of P. rammei, and the first molecular phylogeny of the tribe Dictyophorini, the study transforms a century of confusion into a clear framework: two well-defined genera, each with two valid species, and a roadmap for future sampling across Africa’s forests and mountains.

Subject of Research: Integrative taxonomic revision of the pyrgomorphid grasshopper genera Parapetasia and Loveridgacris, including a new species from Tanzania

Article Title: Integrative taxonomic revision of the grasshopper genera Parapetasia Bolívar, 1884, and Loveridgacris Rehn, 1954 ( Orthoptera , Pyrgomorphidae ), with description of a new species of Loveridgacris

Article References: Yetchom Fondjo, J. A., Husemann, M., Nzoko Fiemapong, A. R., Missoup, A. D., Kenne, M., Tindo, M., Hawlitschek, O., Duressa, T. F., Xu, S.-Q., Zhu, W., & Hemp, C. (2024). Integrative taxonomic revision of the grasshopper genera Parapetasia Bolívar, 1884, and Loveridgacris Rehn, 1954 (Orthoptera, Pyrgomorphidae), with description of a new species of Loveridgacris. Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift, 71(2), 265-287. https://doi.org/10.3897/dez.71.125877

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/dez.71.125877

Keywords: Pyrgomorphidae, Parapetasia, Loveridgacris, taxonomy, grasshoppers, mitochondrial genome, phylogeny, new species, Tanzania, Cameroon, Dictyophorini, integrative taxonomy

The research team set out to test whether extracts from the seeds of this hardy savanna tree could control Colletotrichum capsici, the fungus responsible for cowpea anthracnose. In Cameroon, the disease is a major driver of yield losses estimated between 45 and 85 percent, and farmers typically respond with synthetic chemical pesticides. Those products, while effective, carry well-documented drawbacks: they can be costly for smallholder farmers, and their intensive use raises concerns about environmental contamination and risks to human and animal health. Biopesticides derived from locally available plants offer a biodegradable, low-toxicity alternative, and the desert date tree has a long history of biological activity, with prior studies attributing insecticidal, fungicidal, antimicrobial, and vermicidal properties to its bark, roots, and seeds.

The trials took place in Akonolinga, in agro-ecological zone V of Cameroon, a forest zone with bimodal rainfall where the sub-equatorial climate delivers roughly 1,633 millimeters of rain per year across two rainy seasons, with average temperatures of 23 to 27 degrees Celsius and humidity around 80 percent. The site, left fallow for four years, sits on acidic, lateritic, sandy loam ferralitic soils. Researchers from the study worked with two improved cowpea varieties supplied by the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development: V1, called Tiligré, a 70-day cycle variety, and V2, Lori 24-130, which is notably resistant to insect pests. Both varieties carry strong yield potential of 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms per hectare.

The experimental design was a split-plot layout with four replicates spread over 400 square meters. The two varieties formed the main plots, while five treatments occupied randomized sub-plots: an untreated control, an aqueous seed extract, an acetone extract, a methanol extract, and a synthetic fungicide containing 80 percent maneb. Each experimental unit measured roughly 3 by 2 meters and contained three rows sown at 80 by 40 centimeter spacing. The trials ran across two growing campaigns, in 2020 and 2021, allowing the team to assess consistency under natural field conditions.

Preparing the extracts was a hands-on process. Mature desert date fruits were collected beneath the trees, stripped of their outer layers by soaking, sun-dried, and crushed to obtain the kernels. The almond-like seeds were then milled into powder. For the aqueous extract, 500 grams of powder macerated in 5 liters of water for at least 24 hours, producing a 100 gram per liter solution that was filtered through muslin cloth and loaded into a backpack sprayer with powdered soap as a wetting agent to improve adhesion to plant surfaces. The organic extracts required macerating 500 grams of powder in 2 liters of acetone or methanol at 70 degrees Celsius for 48 hours, followed by filtration and concentration in a rotary evaporator until essential oils were obtained. All extracts were diluted at a rate of 7 milliliters per liter of water before application. The pathogen itself was confirmed by culturing infected pods on potato dextrose agar and examining the fungus microscopically, where C. capsici reveals its signature gray mycelial mass, black bristles protruding from conidial masses, and unicellular, hyaline, falcate conidia.

The results were striking. By nine weeks after sowing in the 2020 campaign, disease incidence in untreated control plots climbed to 75.38 percent for Tiligré and 76.01 percent for Lori 24-130. In plots treated with the aqueous extract, incidence fell to 20.91 and 28.24 percent respectively, while acetone extract plots recorded 22.75 and 29.28 percent. The synthetic fungicide still led with 14.6 and 14.19 percent. But in the 2021 campaign, the story shifted: the aqueous, acetone, and methanol extracts all outperformed the fungicide, recording incidence as low as 19.13, 19.25, and 17.93 percent for Tiligré, compared with 25.54 percent for the maneb treatment. Control plots reached 79.06 percent. All differences were statistically significant at P less than 0.001 across varieties, treatments, and their interaction.

Severity, the degree to which leaves, stems, and pods were attacked, followed a similar trajectory. In 2021 at nine weeks after sowing, aqueous extract plots recorded severity of just 10.6 percent for Tiligré and 20.48 percent for Lori 24-130, acetone plots 12.2 and 12.3 percent, and methanol plots 11.63 and 14.39 percent. Untreated plots suffered severity of 64.14 and 59.82 percent. The fungicide plots recorded 9.78 and 9.1 percent in 2020 and 27.03 and 9.47 percent in 2021, meaning the plant extracts matched or exceeded the chemical standard in the second season. The researchers suggest the mechanism likely involves biochemical compounds in the extracts forming complexes with polysaccharides and proteins on the outer layer of fungal cells, destabilizing cell membrane function and leading to pathogen death, though the precise mode of action remains unclear.

Yields told an equally compelling story. In 2020, aqueous extract plots produced 794.05 kilograms per hectare for Tiligré and 926.63 for Lori 24-130, compared with just 518.03 and 545.055 kilograms in control plots. Acetone and methanol extracts delivered similar gains, with acetone reaching 859.15 and 860.23 kilograms per hectare. In 2021, the pattern held, with aqueous extract plots yielding 852.97 and 935.79 kilograms per hectare and acetone plots 823.69 and 961.68, against control yields of 385.37 and 760.47. The fungicide still produced the highest yields in some plots, reaching 1,050.68 kilograms per hectare for Lori 24-130 in 2021, but the plant extracts closed much of the gap. Across both campaigns, the Lori 24-130 variety proved the most productive overall.

Multivariate analyses reinforced the picture. Principal component analysis captured 86.45 percent of total variability in 2020 and 91.27 percent in 2021 on the first two axes, consistently separating untreated control plots, which clustered near high incidence and severity, from treated plots, which grouped with favorable growth parameters such as leaf number, plant height, collar diameter, and high yield. Cluster analysis produced the same dichotomy, with control treatments isolated from all extract and fungicide treatments. The data show that the desert date seed extracts reduced disease and increased yields in the same way as the chemical fungicide during both campaigns.

The findings position Balanites aegyptiaca seed extracts as a viable component of integrated pest management for cowpea anthracnose. Because the tree is locally available across the Sahel and savanna zones, its seeds can be harvested, processed, and applied by the very farmers who need them, at a fraction of the cost of imported chemicals. The extracts are biodegradable and carry low toxicity for humans and the environment, addressing the core criticisms of synthetic pesticide overuse. As cowpea continues to feed millions across Africa’s arid and semi-arid belts, where few other crops thrive, a simple water-based extract from a desert tree could prove one of the most practical tools yet for keeping anthracnose at bay and harvests secure.

Subject of Research: agricultural science

Article Title: Bio-effectiveness of Balanites aegyptiaca (L.) Del. seed extracts against Colletotrichum capsici (Syd.) Butler & Bisby causal agent of anthracnose in cowpeas ( Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walps.) under natural conditions

Article References: Tize, T., Ngatsi, P. Z., Lontsi Dida, S. L., Njome Toka, A., Songwe Atindo, T., Ndongo, E. B., Sale Essome, C., & Ndongo, B. (2024). Bio-effectiveness of Balanites aegyptiaca (L.) Del. seed extracts against Colletotrichum capsici (Syd.) Butler & Bisby causal agent of anthracnose in cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walps.) under natural conditions. Innovations in Agriculture, 7, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.3897/ia.2024.131803

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/ia.2024.131803

Keywords: cowpea, anthracnose, Balanites aegyptiaca, biopesticide, Colletotrichum capsici, Cameroon, plant extracts, integrated pest management, food security, sustainable agriculture, Bio-effectiveness, Balanites

The patient, a subsistence farmer from Edéa in Cameroon’s Littoral Region, arrived at the Regional Hospital of Bafoussam in October 2025 carrying a burden that would crush most people: bilateral knee osteoarthritis graded III on the left and II–III on the right using the Kellgren–Lawrence radiographic scale, cervical spondylosis with disc disease at C5–C6 and C6–C7, bilateral shoulder impingement, and a thoracolumbar junction dysfunction matching what French physicians call Maigne’s syndrome. His pain, measured on a 10-point visual analog scale, sat at 8 out of 10 at rest and 9 to 10 during activity. He could walk roughly 200 meters before needing to stop. His Oswestry Disability Index — a validated measure of how back pain limits daily life — registered 62 percent, firmly in the severe disability category.

What makes this case scientifically interesting is not just the severity but the anatomy. Lumbar imaging revealed something the patient had never been told: a vertebral fusion at L3–L4, with disc degeneration at L5–S1 below it. In biomechanical terms, a fused segment eliminates motion at one level, forcing the segments above and below to absorb the excess load. This creates compensatory hypermobility — a cascade of stress that radiates upward toward the thoracolumbar junction and downward toward the lumbosacral border. The author of the report, Ibrahim Npochinto Moumeni of the University of Dschang and the Regional Hospital of Bafoussam, argues that this single structural anomaly was the hidden engine driving pain across four separate body regions simultaneously.

Before reaching Bafoussam, the farmer had exhausted nearly every therapeutic option available to him. He saw two rheumatologists in Yaoundé and Douala, who prescribed analgesics and anti-inflammatory drugs and referred him onward. He completed more than 70 sessions of conventional physiotherapy — and reported that his pain actually worsened over the course of treatment. He underwent repeated therapeutic scarification, a traditional practice in which deliberate skin incisions are made over painful regions in the belief that releasing trapped pain will promote healing. Scars mapped his thighs, knees, thoracolumbar back, and both shoulders. Nothing worked. He described himself as having “given up hope,” walking with what clinicians call a rigid, robotic gait — arms stiff, trunk locked, every joint guarded.

Moumeni proposes a name for this state: Therapeutic Exhaustion Syndrome. It describes the cumulative psychological and functional collapse that follows sequential failure across multiple treatment systems — not just one disappointment, but the erosion of belief that any intervention can help. The concept draws on established psychology of learned helplessness but extends it to the specific reality of pluralistic healthcare in low-income countries, where patients cycle through specialist medicine, physiotherapy, pharmacotherapy, and traditional healing without any of these systems communicating with each other. The farmer’s own words capture it: “I tried everything… Nothing worked. The physiotherapy even made my pain worse.”

The treatment he finally received was built on the Sorbonne–Maigne method, a French school of medical osteopathy developed by Professor Robert Maigne. Its central premise is that many peripheral pains — in shoulders, knees, limbs — originate from dysfunction in specific spinal segments, transmitted along identifiable metameric pathways. Maigne’s diagnostic framework, the Painful Minor Intervertebral Dysfunction model, uses a systematic four-step segmental examination: forced rotation via spinous process pressure, slow posterior-anterior vertebral pressure, facet joint palpation, and interspinous ligament assessment. Treatment follows what Maigne called the rule of painlessness and opposite motion — manipulation is performed only in the direction that is pain-free, never forcing the restricted, painful movement. This makes it applicable even in degenerated, fragile spines.

Over six weeks, the farmer received twelve sessions, each lasting 60 to 75 minutes. Cervical mobilization targeted C4–C5 through C6–C7. The thoracolumbar junction at T11–T12 and T12–L1 was treated with rotational mobilization. His knees received traction-mobilization, patellar gliding, deep transverse friction of the medial collateral ligament, and progressive strengthening from isometric quadriceps contractions to closed-chain exercises like mini-squats and step-ups. His shoulders were mobilized with glenohumeral glides and rotator cuff work, integrating the principle of regional interdependence — the idea that the cervicothoracic spine and shoulder function as a coupled system, not isolated structures.

But the protocol had a second, equally important layer: family-mediated rehabilitation. Adapting the Cogni-Famille model, originally developed for post-stroke neurorehabilitation, the patient’s cousin and wife were trained as co-therapists. On Mondays and Wednesdays, when the farmer was in Bafoussam, his cousin supervised daily home exercises. From Wednesday evening to Sunday, back in Edéa, his wife — who had attended two training sessions at the hospital — took over. This dual-supervisor structure pushed the total therapeutic dose to roughly 8 to 10 hours per week, far beyond what biweekly hospital visits alone could deliver. The approach treats rehabilitation as a prescribable medication with a dose-response relationship, a concept Moumeni has argued for in prior work.

The results were rapid and, by standard clinical metrics, extraordinary. After just two sessions, the patient reported meaningful improvement. By week six, his resting pain had fallen from 8/10 to 2/10. Cervical rotation improved from 25 degrees to 55 degrees. Left knee flexion went from 85 to 120 degrees; right knee from 95 to 130 degrees. Walking perimeter expanded from 200 meters to 2 kilometers — a tenfold increase. His Oswestry Disability Index dropped from 62 percent to 22 percent, a 40-point improvement that exceeds the established minimal clinically important difference of 10 to 12 points by roughly fourfold. His gait normalized. He returned to full agricultural work. At 12-week telephone follow-up, the gains held.

Why did this work when 70 sessions of physiotherapy had not? Moumeni’s answer lies in the difference between site-specific and spine-centred reasoning. Previous rehabilitation had treated the knees, the shoulders, and the neck as separate problems. The Sorbonne–Maigne approach treated the spine as the organizing axis from which peripheral pain radiates. The L3–L4 fusion, once identified, explained why the thoracolumbar junction was stiff, why the cervical segments were overloaded, and why the knees — bearing the brunt of a rigid, antalgic gait — deteriorated in parallel. A unifying segmental framework transformed a confusing multi-site presentation into a coherent, treatable biomechanical story.

The case also carries a stark message about healthcare equity. To access this care, the farmer traveled 280 kilometers each way, every week, for six weeks — a cumulative therapeutic migration of roughly 3,360 kilometers. Moumeni documents this as a measurable indicator of specialist scarcity, extending his earlier work on what he calls the “unique practitioner syndrome” — the phenomenon where patients concentrate around a single rare expert, often through informal word-of-mouth referral rather than institutional pathways. In routine practice at Bafoussam, he reports patients traveling from Douala, Yaoundé, and even Ngaoundéré, over 1,000 kilometers away, for osteopathic care.

The scarification scars, too, tell a story. Moumeni describes them as a “pain cartography” — the topography of the farmer’s suffering inscribed onto his body by traditional healers. Strikingly, the thoracolumbar scarifications overlie the exact territory of Maigne’s thoracolumbar junction syndrome, and the thigh scars correspond to the referred pain territory of the knee osteoarthritis. Traditional healers, through empirical observation alone, appear to have identified the same pain territories that structured osteopathic examination would map — using an entirely different conceptual framework.

Moumeni introduces three additional concepts alongside Therapeutic Exhaustion Syndrome: Therapeutic Migration Trajectory, describing the geographic displacement patients undertake when specialized care is unavailable locally; Multi-Site Convergent Osteopathic Approach, the integrated segmental framework that treats the spine as the unifying axis; and Osteopathic Dose–Response Threshold, the observation that clinically meaningful, self-sustaining improvement emerged after just two sessions, with a plateau around session six. Together, these form a model for understanding how fragmented care, geographic inequity, and biomechanical reasoning interact in low-resource musculoskeletal medicine.

The limitations are real and acknowledged. This is a single case without a control group. Improvement could partly reflect natural history, regression to the mean, placebo effects, or the therapeutic alliance itself. No MRI or CT was available; diagnosis relied on clinical reasoning and plain radiography. Walking distance was measured with a tape and stopwatch, not instrumented gait analysis. The Oswestry Disability Index, while internationally validated, has limited cultural validation in rural sub-Saharan populations. And follow-up extended only to 12 weeks.

Yet the case’s ecological validity — its grounding in real-world conditions where advanced imaging and multidisciplinary teams are absent — is precisely what makes it valuable. It suggests that therapeutic exhaustion may not equal treatment resistance. It may instead signal a mismatch between the patient’s clinical profile and the fragmented strategies previously applied, a mismatch that a coherent, segmentally guided, context-adapted framework can reverse. The low-technology nature of the Sorbonne–Maigne method — requiring minimal equipment, relying on anatomical precision and clinical reasoning — makes it inherently scalable in settings where high-tech rehabilitation is impossible.

The broader implication is a call to action. Moumeni argues that spine-centred diagnostic skills and manual musculoskeletal medicine should be integrated into medical and rehabilitation curricula across sub-Saharan Africa, aligning with the World Health Organization’s Rehabilitation 2030 agenda. If a single practitioner in Bafoussam can restore a farmer to full capacity after 24 months of accumulated failure, the question is not whether such approaches work in principle — it is whether health systems can train enough practitioners so that no one else has to travel 3,360 kilometers to find out.

Subject of Research: Spine-centred osteopathic management of multi-site degenerative musculoskeletal pain in a low-resource setting

Article Title: Spine-centred integrated osteopathic management for multi-site degenerative musculoskeletal pain after conventional and traditional healing failure in a low-resource setting: a concept-driven case report

Article References: Npochinto Moumeni, I. (2026). Spine-centred integrated osteopathic management for multi-site degenerative musculoskeletal pain after conventional and traditional healing failure in a low-resource setting: a concept-driven case report. Frontiers in Musculoskeletal Disorders, 4, Article 1811905. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmscd.2026.1811905

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fmscd.2026.1811905

Keywords: osteopathic medicine, chronic pain, Cameroon, Sorbonne–Maigne method, low-resource healthcare, case report, rehabilitation, health equity, Spine-centred, integrated, osteopathic, management

Between September 2020 and August 2021, researchers deployed six miniature CDC light traps each month across urban, peri-urban and rural ecotopes of Kousseri County, running the traps from dusk to dawn over 30 trapping nights per month. The effort yielded 4,214 sandfly specimens, of which 51.02 percent were females, the sex responsible for transmitting Leishmania parasites to humans and animals. Rural sites accounted for the largest share of captures at 43.43 percent, followed by peri-urban areas at 33.38 percent, while the urban environment produced just 22.69 percent of the total.

Seasonality proved striking. January, in the middle of the region’s prolonged eight-month dry season, recorded the highest abundance with 679 specimens, and March followed closely with 597. The lowest numbers appeared in September and October, at the tail end of the rainy season, when flooding of the semi-arid Sahelian landscape likely suppressed adult activity. Unlike mosquitoes, sandflies have a fully terrestrial life cycle that does not require standing water, but their larvae need sufficiently moist soil, and excessive flooding appears to push populations down rather than up.

Morphological identification of the 2,150 dissected females revealed eleven species: ten belonging to the genus Sergentomyia and a single Phlebotomus species, Phlebotomus duboscqi. That latter species is significant because it is the only proven vector of leishmaniasis in the region, responsible for cutaneous disease caused by Leishmania major and suspected of playing a role in visceral transmission. Yet Ph. duboscqi represented a mere 1.07 percent of the total catch, was absent in January and July, and peaked in September at an average of just 1.67 sandflies per trap per night.

The dominant Sergentomyia species each followed distinct monthly patterns. Sergentomyia antennata, the most prevalent species overall, showed a unimodal peak in January, averaging 16.67 sandflies per trap per night. Sergentomyia squamipleuris also peaked once, in February, at 7.38 per trap per night. Sergentomyia distincta followed a bimodal trend with peaks in January and May, while Sergentomyia schwetzi, the second most abundant species, displayed a trimodal pattern with major peaks in September, March and August. Four species, including Se. antennata, Se. distincta, Se. squamipleuris and Se. schwetzi, were present in every month of the year, underscoring the year-round transmission potential in the focus.

Ecological preferences differed sharply between species and habitats. Se. distincta was most abundant in urban settings, suggesting a preference for densely populated areas where human blood meals are readily available. Se. schwetzi dominated peri-urban ecotopes, where animal shelters sit close to human dwellings amid irregular waste collection and scattered vegetation. The remaining Sergentomyia species, including Se. antennata, Se. clydei, Se. adleri, Se. africana and Se. squamipleuris, declined from rural to urban areas, pointing to an adaptation to rural environments characterised by rice paddies, agricultural fields and livestock.

The rural advantage for sandflies appears to stem from concrete housing and land-use features. Dwellings in rural and peri-urban Kousseri are typically built from unplastered mud walls whose cracks and fissures provide ideal resting, breeding and mating sites for adult sandflies. Nearby rice paddies and animal compounds offer sugar sources for energy and blood meals for egg development, bringing flies, livestock and people into close contact. By contrast, the urban sites surveyed were predominantly residential with plastered walls and modern infrastructure, conditions that previous work suggests can substantially reduce sandfly populations.

Diversity analysis reinforced the complexity of the community. Shannon-Wiener indices exceeded 1 in all ecotopes and months, indicating high evenness, and Simpson diversity values ranged from 0.56 to 0.83 across the year. Species richness varied from six to nine species per month, with the lowest recorded in October. Non-metric multidimensional scaling based on Bray-Curtis dissimilarities revealed distinct seasonal clustering, with September, December and March grouping together, October and November forming a separate pattern, and the peak rainy-season months of April, May, June and August sharing similar species abundance profiles.

Notably, the dry-season peak in Kousseri contradicts earlier findings from the Mokolo cutaneous leishmaniasis focus in Cameroon, where sandfly numbers rose during the rainy season. The pattern instead aligns with observations from arid and semi-arid regions of Iran and parts of Kenya, where optimal microclimatic conditions during dry months favour sandfly activity. Kousseri’s temperatures, which swing from 11 degrees Celsius in December to 45 degrees Celsius in the shade by April and May, fall within the 25 to 28 degree range that sandflies favour for much of the year, helping explain their continuous presence.

The findings carry direct implications for public health. Because sandflies remain active throughout the year but surge in January and March, surveillance and interventions such as insecticide application and insecticide-treated bed nets should be prioritised in those months, particularly in rural settings where abundance is highest. Plastering the cracked mud walls of homes and animal shelters could further reduce breeding and resting sites. The researchers also stress that the true vector of visceral leishmaniasis in Kousseri remains unidentified, and that Sergentomyia species, traditionally associated with reptile parasites, have been implicated elsewhere in transmitting Leishmania infantum to dogs and potentially pathogenic species to humans. Determining blood-meal sources, feeding behaviour and natural Leishmania infection rates, alongside multi-year monitoring of climatic drivers, will be essential to building an evidence-based control strategy for a region where the disease remains neglected and untreated.

Subject of Research: Monthly occurrence and ecology of phlebotomine sandfly species in a visceral leishmaniasis endemic focus of northern Cameroon

Article Title: Occurrence and monthly dynamics of female Phlebotomine sandfly species from Kousseri Visceral Leishmaniasis endemic focus in northern Cameroon

Article References: Tebo-Nzesseu, T. R., Ngouateu Tateng, A., Bebe Ngouateu, O., Foyet, J. V., Ngnindji-Youdje, Y., Payne, V. K., & Dondji, B. (2025). Occurrence and monthly dynamics of female Phlebotomine sandfly species from Kousseri Visceral Leishmaniasis endemic focus in northern Cameroon. African Invertebrates, 66(2), 229-249. https://doi.org/10.3897/afrinvertebr.66.160860

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/AfrInvertebr.66.160860

Keywords: leishmaniasis, sandflies, Phlebotomus duboscqi, Sergentomyia, Cameroon, vector ecology, public health, neglected tropical diseases, Occurrence, monthly, dynamics, female

The study, conducted in strict accordance with the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines, systematically searched PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and African Journals Online for peer-reviewed literature, legal acts, and official institutional frameworks published between January 2020 and February 2026. From this sweep, twenty-two unique sources met all predefined inclusion criteria. Rather than simply cataloguing what each country did, the researchers applied a structured SWOT analysis—examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—to distill the operational logic of each response. The result is a portrait of two systems that succeeded and failed in almost mirror-image ways.

Cameroon’s response, the authors found, drew its power from an unexpected reservoir: highly decentralized, resilient community and kinship networks. In a country where formal healthcare infrastructure is thin, extended families and neighborhood structures stepped into the breach, delivering information, food, and care to isolated elders. The government also moved quickly to provide immediate financial cushions, including a 20 percent expansion in state pensions that buffered older adults against the economic shock of lockdowns. These grassroots and fiscal measures formed the backbone of a mitigation strategy that, while modest in material terms, leveraged social capital that wealthier nations often struggle to mobilize.

Yet the same analysis laid bare the structural constraints that hobbled Cameroon’s efforts at every turn. Deep weaknesses in the healthcare system—chronic underfunding, shortages of personal protective equipment, and limited intensive care capacity—severely restricted what even the most resilient communities could achieve. Perhaps most striking was the human behavioral dimension: the review documented a 73 percent fear-driven clinical avoidance rate, meaning roughly three in four older adults who needed care stayed away from clinics and hospitals, often because they feared contracting the virus in healthcare settings or distrusted official messaging. Diagnostic capacity told a similar story of scarcity. At the height of the response, Cameroon conducted just 10.02 tests per 1,000 population—a figure so low that true infection levels remained largely invisible to policymakers trying to steer interventions.

Compounding these challenges, resource constraints were most acute precisely where vulnerability was greatest. Active conflict zones in parts of Cameroon disrupted supply chains, displaced older adults from their homes, and cut off access to even basic health services. In such settings, the pandemic was not a single crisis but a crisis layered atop existing humanitarian emergencies, and the review makes clear that no amount of community resilience could fully compensate for the absence of material supplies, testing infrastructure, and secure corridors for care delivery.

The United States presented a starkly different picture. Armed with massive technological capital, the country deployed real-time molecular surveillance networks that tracked viral variants and transmission patterns with a granularity unimaginable in most of the world. The rapid rollout of mRNA vaccines—developed at unprecedented speed using novel genetic-platform technology—produced what the review identifies as the single most consequential intervention of the entire pandemic for older adults: an estimated 92 percent of potential deaths among seniors were averted after vaccine implementation. Alongside vaccination, the United States massively expanded telehealth, with remote medical services ultimately serving 59 percent of isolated seniors, allowing continuity of chronic disease management, mental health support, and prescription renewals without exposing vulnerable patients to infection risk in waiting rooms.

But American technological prowess could not compensate for institutional failures closer to the ground. The review documents profound, catastrophic infection control breakdowns within long-term care facilities—nursing homes and assisted living centers that became epicenters of mortality, particularly in the pandemic’s early waves. Understaffing, inadequate personal protective equipment, and delayed isolation protocols allowed the virus to move through these congregate settings with devastating efficiency. The authors also highlight intense socio-political policy polarization, in which public health measures such as masking and vaccination became entangled in partisan identity, undermining consistent implementation across states. Deep-seated, institutionalized racial health inequities further meant that older adults from marginalized communities faced systematically worse access to testing, vaccination, and quality care despite living in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

The comparative lesson the authors draw is deliberately uncomfortable for both rich and poor countries. High-income countries, they argue, can fail due to decentralization and polarization despite high GDP—technological capacity and money do not automatically translate into coherent protection for the most vulnerable. Lower-middle-income countries, meanwhile, can innovate remarkable forms of social resilience but remain strictly bottlenecked by material supply chains, diagnostic infrastructure, and pharmaceutical access. In other words, neither wealth nor community solidarity alone was sufficient; each system’s blind spots were the direct inverse of the other’s strengths.

This finding carries direct implications for how the world prepares for the next pandemic. The authors conclude that future global preparedness frameworks must systematically integrate targeted

Subject of Research: Comparative evaluation of COVID-19 public health interventions and management strategies for older adults in Cameroon and the United States using scoping review and SWOT analysis

Article Title: Comparative evaluation of COVID-19 public health interventions and management in older populations: a scoping review and swot analysis of Cameroon and the United States

Article References: Kwemu Njakoi, C., Njwengba Owajege, C., & Sevidzem Wirsiy, F. (2026). Comparative evaluation of COVID-19 public health interventions and management in older populations: a scoping review and swot analysis of Cameroon and the United States. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08467-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08467-7

Keywords: COVID-19, older adults, Cameroon, United States, public health policy, SWOT analysis, health equity, pandemic preparedness, scoping review, geriatrics, global health, vaccine rollout