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’Isioma Williams ANNUAL TRADITIONAL DRUMS CLINIC’’

‘’Isioma Williams ANNUAL TRADITIONAL DRUMS CLINIC’’

This is a humanitarian project; an Artistic yearly teaching conference in which experts in the field of the art of traditional drums and drumming are invited, to give both theory and practical lectures to amateur and professional drummers.

The clinic is aimed at strengthening and sustaining originality and quality through the generations of drummers.

Majority of the drummers in this era just want to hit the membrane for the sake of it. Although, this may be blamed on the nation’s negligence on issues concerning our Art and Culture, but on the other hand, the blame goes too to the artist and also the elders in the art, because, if the artist had diligently searched for the real thing and have learnt original rhythm and technique, it would have given him/her a “Pedestal of survival”. Though, it would only have required lots of sacrifice which the new generation of drum artistes is not willing to make. And likewise, the blame goes to the experts, elders who have gone before this present generation of drum artistes because they failed to pass on the originality, quality and experience they had.

There is a few or no training centre or an avenue for drum artistes to be really trained the actual things, rather they assume a counterfeit of the original thereby loosing authenticity. Furthermore, drummers are now forming theatre groups, teaching and grooming younger ones in their groups and most of our public/private schools. So they keep passing on the false that they know and if these acts should continue to the subsequent generation, originality and quality would have gone down the drain or filtered off as generations pass by. 

In order to avoid the inferior act of drumming languages to be passed down to the pupils and as well loosing the authenticity of our Culture, it is necessary to empower, educate and support the current generation of drummers through workshops and seminars of this nature.

In a way to restore originality, quality and the real and total essence of the drum and drum language, this edition of “Isioma Williams Annual Traditional Drums Clinic” tagged ‘’CORRECTIONS’’ which holds on the 29^th and 30^th of March at the House of Dance studios, Artiste Village (N.C.A.C.) National Theatre Iganmu Lagos Nigeria from 12pm prompt will feature Competent and experienced personnel who have extensive knowledge of the act of drumming;

1.      Chief Yemi adeyemi, the BEMBA of Zambia, aka ‘baba Suara’ of the super story fame (Story series: Oh Father Oh Daughter!). He is an acclaimed musicologist, who is always particular about the diction and accent of the traditional drum language.

2.      Mr. Eliel Otote popularly known in Nollywood as an Actor, Director and Writer. He is an ethnomusicologist and dance anthropologist. He is a scholar of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and the Royal Schools of Music, London. Editor of ARTS & CULTURE Magazine. He is the Director of Studies, ARTS WORKSHOP-a training facility for Nollywood practitioners.

RESOURCE PERSON: Isioma Williams

TITLE: Initiator/Visionary

MOBILE: 08023535184, 08062677191

MAIL: isiomawilliams@hotmail.com

ADDRESS: Gongbeat studio, (artiste’ village) National Council for Arts and Culture, National Theatre Annex, Iganmu Lagos, Nigeria.

ISIOMA WILLIAMS is a total theatre artist who can be consulted on all aspects of the art. He is the Nigerian Consultant for Badejoarts based in United Kingdom, Coordinator of Gongbeat Productions, former Chairman of the Dance Guild of Nigeria Lagos Chapter (EkoGOND) and Founder/Director of Drumsview Concept.

ISIOMA Williams is into artistic productions and believes in the philosophical theory of humanitarianism which he tends to achieve through the company he founded.

                                       

                                 

(instructor) Chief Yemi Adeyemi                         (instructor) Eliel Otote

 

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FIRST HIV CURE IN THE WORLD

Scientists believe a little girl born with HIV has been cured of the infection.
She's the first child and only the second person in the world known to have been cured since the virus touched off a global pandemic nearly 32 years ago.
Doctors aren't releasing the child's name, but we know she was born in Mississippi and is now 2 1/2 years old — and healthy. Scientists presented details of the case Sunday at a scientific conference in Atlanta.
The case has big implications. While fewer than 130 such children are born each year in the U.S., an estimated 330,000 children around the world get infected with HIV at or around birth every year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
And while many countries are striving to prevent these mother-to-child infections, many thousands of children will certainly get infected in coming years.
Until now, such children have been considered permanently infected. Specialists thought they needed lifelong antiviral drugs to prevent HIV from destroying their immune system and killing them via AIDS.
The Mississippi child's surprising cure came about from happenstance — and the quick thinking of a University of Mississippi pediatric infectious disease specialist, Hannah Gay.
"The child came to our attention as a high-risk exposure to maternal HIV," Gay tells Shots. Her mother hadn't had any prenatal care, she says, so didn't get antiviral drugs during pregnancy.
The fact that the newborn tested positive for HIV within 30 hours of birth is a sign she was probably infected in utero, HIV specialists say.
Gay decided to begin treating the child immediately, with the first dose of antivirals given within 31 hours of birth. That's faster than most infants born with HIV get treated, and specialists think it's one important factor in the child's cure.
In addition, Gay gave higher-than-usual, "therapeutic" doses of three powerful HIV drugs rather than the "prophylactic" doses usually given in these circumstances.
Over the months, the baby thrived, and standard tests could detect no virus in her blood, which is the normal result from antiviral treatment.

Enlarge image

HIV particles, yellow, infect an immune cell, blue.

NIAID_Flickr

Then, her mother stopped bringing the child in for checkups.
"The baby's mom was having some life changes, that's about all I can say," Gay reports. "I saw her at 18 months, and then after that did not see her for several months. And we were unable to locate her for a while."
Gay enlisted the help of Mississippi state health authorities to track down the child. When they found her, the mother said she had stopped giving the child antiviral drugs six or seven months earlier.
At that point, Gay expected to find that the child's blood was teeming with HIV. But to her astonishment, tests couldn't find any virus.
"My first thought was, 'Oh, my goodness, I've been treating a child who's not actually infected,' " Gay says. But a look at the earlier blood work confirmed the child had been infected with HIV at birth. So Gay then thought the lab must have made a mistake with the new blood samples. So she ran those tests again.
"When all those came back negative, I knew something odd was afoot," Gay says. She contacted an old friend, Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga at the University of Massachusetts, who has been studying pediatric HIV/AIDS for two decades.
That was last August. Since then, Luzuriaga's lab and labs in San Diego, Baltimore and Bethesda, Md., have run ultra-sensitive tests on the baby's blood.
A couple of tests have intermittently found pieces of HIV DNA and RNA, but no evidence that the virus is actively replicating in the child's cells.
Luzuriaga tells Shots this amounts to what's called a "functional cure."
She says that "means control of viral replication and lack of rebound once they come off antiretroviral medications."
The only other such case known to AIDS researchers is the so-called Berlin patient — Timothy Brown of San Francisco. But his treatment involved a bone marrow transplant in Germany — essentially, he was given the immune system of a donor who's genetically resistant to HIV. That's not something that can be easily duplicated.
By contrast, the Mississippi child's cure involved readily available medications.
Luzuriaga says researchers believe they have ruled out other possible reasons for the unexpected cure. For instance, the mother did not have a less virulent strain of HIV. And the child does not have known mutations in her immunity genes that confer protection against HIV.
"We think it was that very early and aggressive treatment," she says, "that curtailed the formation of viral reservoirs" — that is, hideouts for the virus within the child's immune cells.
Previous research indicates that once these hideouts are established, it can take 70 years or more of steady, three-drug antiviral treatment to eliminate them.
Luzuriaga says the toddler's cure has electrified researchers searching for an HIV cure.
"It's exciting to us," she says. "Because if we were able to replicate this, I think it would be very good news."
Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University Medical School, who presented the case at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, calls the Mississippi cure "definitely a game-changer."
"This case is sort of the inspiration and provides the rationale to really move forward," Persaud tells Shots.
Kevin Robert Frost of the Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR, agrees that the finding will stimulate a lot of further work. The group helped fund studies to determine if the Mississippi toddler is really cured.
"If this approach is proven effective, we could dramatically change the way children born with HIV are treated," he tells Shots.
Plans are under way to mount studies to see if early, aggressive treatment can cure other children of HIV. But Persaud says it will be awhile before researchers can figure out when it might be safe to stop antiviral drugs deliberately.
This research will undboubtedly be high-priority, given the birth of nearly 1,000 HIV-infected newborns a day in the developing world.
AIDS researchers foresee a day when the same treatment could give many of these children a lifetime free of toxic and costly antiviral drugs.

CHATING WITH BILL GATES

Bill Gates interview: I have no use for money. This is God’s work

Having already given away $28bn, Bill Gates intends to eradicate polio, with the same drive he brought to Microsoft . He speaks to Neil Tweedie.

 

Gates

 

 

William Henry “Bill” Gates is a rich man. His estimated wealth, some 65  billion measured in US dollars, equals the annual GDP of Ecuador, and maybe a bit more than that of Croatia. By this rather crude criterion, the founder of Microsoft is worth two Kenyas, three Trinidads and a dozen or so Montenegros. Not bad for a university dropout.

Gates is also mortal, although some of his admirers may find that hard to believe, and as they say, there are no pockets in shrouds. So he is now engaged in the process of ridding himself of all that money in the hope of extending the lives of others less fortunate than himself.

“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organisation and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.”

That “certain point” is set a little higher than for the rest of us – Gates owns a lakeside estate in Washington State worth about $150 million (£94  million) and boasting a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system – but one gets the point. Being rich, even on the cosmic scale attained by Bill Gates, is no guarantee of an enduring place in history. The projection of the personal computer into daily life should do the trick for him, but even at the age of 57 he is a restless man and wants something more. The “more” is the eradication of a disease that has blighted untold numbers of lives: polio.

Later this month, Gates will deliver the BBC’s Dimbleby Lecture, taking as his theme the value of the young human being. Every child, he will say, has the right to a healthy and productive life, and he will explain how technology and innovation can help towards the attainment of that still-distant goal. Gates has put his money where his mouth is. He and his wife Melinda have so far given away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8  billion of it to improve global health.

“My wife and I had a long dialogue about how we were going to take the wealth that we’re lucky enough to have and give it back in a way that’s most impactful to the world,” he says. “Both of us worked at Microsoft and saw that if you take innovation and smart people, the ability to measure what’s working, that you can pull together some pretty dramatic things.
“We’re focused on the help of the poorest in the world, which really drives you into vaccination. You can actually take a disease and get rid of it altogether, like we are doing with polio.”
This has been done only once before in humans, with the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s.
“Polio’s pretty special because once you get an eradication you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just there as a gift for the rest of time.”
One can see why that appeals to Gates. He has always sought neat, definitive solutions to things, but as he knows from Microsoft, bugs are resilient things. The disease is still endemic in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and killing it off altogether has been likened to squeezing jelly to death. There is another, sinister obstacle: the propagation by Islamist groups of the belief that polio vaccination is a front for covert sterilisation and other western evils. Health workers in Pakistan have paid with their lives for involvement in the programme.
“It’s not going to stop us succeeding,” says Gates. “It does force us to sit down with the Pakistan government to renew their commitments, see what they’re going to do in security and make changes to protect the women who are doing God’s work and getting out to these children and delivering the vaccine.”
Gates does not usually speak in religious terms, and has traditionally danced around the issue of God. His wife, a Roman Catholic, is less defensive on that topic but ploughs her own furrow, encouraging contraception when necessary, in contradiction to teaching from Rome.
“Melinda and I had been talking about this even before we were married,” he says. “When I was in my 40s Microsoft was my primary activity. The big switch for me was when I decided to make the foundation my primary purpose. It was a big change, although there are more in common with the two things than you might think – meeting with scientists, taking on tough challenges, people being sceptical that you can get things done.”
Gates is still chairman of Microsoft but without his day-to-day attention it has taken on the appearance of a weary giant, trailing Apple and Google in innovation. Some have called for Gates’s return to the company full-time to inject some verve but he isn’t coming back.
“My full-time work for the rest of my life will be at the foundation,” he says. “I still work part-time for Microsoft. I’ve had two careers and I’m lucky that both of them have been quite amazing.
“I loved my Microsoft: it prepared me for what I’m doing now. In the same way that I got to see the PC and internet revolutions, now I see child death rates coming down. I work very long hours and try to learn as much as I can about these things, but that’s because I enjoy it.”
He emphasises that the foundation’s effort is part of a global campaign in which governments must play the lead role.
“The scale of the (foundation’s) wealth compared to government budgets is actually not that large, and compared to the scale of some of these problems. But I do feel lucky that substantial resources are going back to make the world a more habitable place.”
In 1990 some 12 million children under the age of five died. The figure today is about seven million, or 19,000 per day. According to the United Nations, the leading causes of death are pneumonia (18 per cent), pre-birth complications (14 per cent), diarrhoea (11 per cent), complications during birth (nine per cent) and malaria (seven per cent). For Gates, though, polio is a totem. The abolition of the disease will be a headline-grabber, spurring countries on to greater efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend $1.8 billion in the next six years to accomplish that goal, almost a third of the global effort.
“All you need is over 90 per cent of children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops spreading. The number of cases eventually goes to zero. When we started, we had over 400,000 children a year being paralysed and we are now down to under 1,000 cases a year. The great thing about finishing polio is that we’ll have resources to get going on malaria and measles.”
Gates is no saint. He could be an intimidating boss at Microsoft and his company became notorious for using its clout to reinforce its dominance in the market place, at the expense of smaller rivals. Still, he and his wife are showing generosity on a staggering scale, a counterblast to the endemic greed of the Nineties and early Noughties, and they have convinced others that mega-philanthropy is the way of the future. That wily investor, Warren Buffett, has so far given away $17.5 billion via the Gates Foundation.
The children of Bill and Melinda Gates will never know poverty. They may not become multibillionaires but even the loss to charity of the vast bulk of their parents’ fortune should leave them with a billion or so each.
Gates explains: “The vast majority of the wealth, over 95 per cent, goes to the foundation, which will spend all that money within 20 years after neither of us are around any more.”
So, is it about some new-found faith, all this giving?
“It doesn’t relate to any particular religion; it’s about human dignity and equality,” he says. “The golden rule that all lives have equal value and we should treat people as we would like to be treated.”