NEWS FROM THE UAE
SOURCE : THE NATIONAL
UAE to house Irena headquarters
SHARM EL SHEIKH - JUNE 30: Abu Dhabi triumphed yesterday in its hard-fought bid to host the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena).
At a summit of the body’s 136 members, Germany and Austria, the UAE’s rivals to host the headquarters, agreed to withdraw their bids just moments before a vote was due to take place. Bonn and Vienna will instead each house a satellite centre for the agency.
The headquarters, which will be housed in rent-free offices in Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, will make Irena the first international organisation to be based in a developing country.
After the victory, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, pledged the Government’s full support to the agency.
“I would start by thanking Germany and Austria for their support for the UAE today, it certainly shows a lot of interest in our bid,” he said.
“Because of the very fair, frank competition, we had very strong bids from all three countries.”
The Government had aggressively pursued its bid, believing success would raise the country’s global profile. It has also said that the agency would help the development of Masdar, which is planned to be the world’s first carbon-neutral city.
As delegates gathered yesterday for an afternoon vote in this Egyptian resort town, Irena officials announced that the three rivals had reached a compromise.
Austria will host a liaison office to help Irena co-ordinate policy with other international organisations in Europe, while Germany will host an “innovation centre” to help the body’s work in developing countries.
The German government pledged €4 million (Dh21m) to set up the centre, and €2m-€3 million annually to cover its operating costs.
Roy Lee, a professor of environmental law at Yale University in the US, said the win represented an important moment. “That is a very big victory for the UAE and that’s very important particularly for the developing countries,” he said.
“It’s the first time I have observed that developing countries were able to defeat the Western European countries.”
Michael Schrören, a spokesman for the German environment ministry, said his country had first proposed the compromise on Sunday night to avoid a contentious vote.
“Irena doesn’t need friction, it needs common sense and common efforts,” he said.
“We knew that the south/north split would be like a sword over everyone, which we wanted to avoid.”
As the decision was announced, the 55 UAE delegates leapt to their feet with cheers and embraces. The win followed a long diplomatic campaign by senior ministers.
Sheikh Abdullah said that in the past two months he and other ministers had visited 90 countries to garner support. He said that as the vote approached, Austria and Germany had recognised that the UAE bid would have the support of between 92 and 101 member countries.
“The UAE’s hosting of Irena is an indicator and a clear evidence of [our] continuing investment in renewable energy,” he said.
He said that in the past two months he and other government ministers have visited 90 countries for the purpose of garnering support for the UAE’s bid.
“This will boost this network of countries to enhance our relationship with them in other levels.”
Sultan al Jaber, the chief executive of Masdar, said: “This is a historic agreement, we’re very proud.”
He said the decision was made in the few hours before the announcement was made.
“There was pressure by all of the participant countries that there was no need for voting, because it is very clear the UAE deserves it.
“There was a consensus and agreement among them that the UAE is most qualified.”
The next step would be executing the project, he said.
The agency will be housed in temporary buildings in the capital for two and a half years until the Masdar City HQ is completed.
Officials have said it will be the first “energy positive” office building, with rooftop solar panels that produce more electricity than it consumes.
The new director general of Irena was expected to be named late last night.
Abu Dhabi buses still packed after a year
ABU DHABI - JUNE 30: Viswambharan Baby remembers driving his tourquoise bus behind Carrefour on Airport Road and being surprised by the number of waiting passengers.
He had not been expecting too many people when, a year ago today, the Department of Transport’s free new city bus service was launched on four routes.
The 48-year-old driver from Kerala was on Route 32 between Marina Mall and the hypermarket. He thought there might be 20 people waiting for the air-conditioned bus that first morning.
Instead, about 50 jammed its 30 seats and stood in its aisles.
“I thought not much people are coming, but everybody got the news from the newspaper so everybody was waiting there,”
One year on, the buses are still full, though the service is no longer free. Passengers now pay a Dh1 fare for a single ride, Dh3 for a day pass or Dh40 to ride all month.
The service is attracting new converts but passengers hope for more routes and shorter waiting times.
Help is on the way, with the department expecting to run well over 1,000 buses around the emirate by the end of 2010, linking Al Gharbia and Al Ain with Abu Dhabi as well as improving the networks within each of those areas.
The department had intended to have improved its suburban services by now, but has faced setbacks in bringing on the road the first of 500 German-manufactured buses ordered from MAN and Mercedes- Benz.
The 12-metre vehicles can seat 34 passengers and carry about 65 in total. They will take over on existing city routes, freeing the original, Chinese-built buses to supplement the services to the airport, Musaffah and other suburbs.
While it remains unclear when those buses will start work, preparations are going ahead.
At least 10 air-conditioned bus shelters are being constructed on the island, and there will be 80 shelters available in various locations by October and 550 by the end of next year.
The department is preparing to put out a tender for another 860 buses.
Meanwhile, the existing buses have helped many people save money. About 65,000 people use the nine bus routes every day.
Michael Querrar is one of them. The 25-year-old Filipino used to pay Dh150 a month for a private shuttle service provided by his company to his sales associate job at Marina Mall before the bus service started.
“It was good for us because we save a lot of money on the car lift,” he said.
Riding the buses is not always the most comfortable way to travel. Mr Querrar hesitated at first because they looked “really loaded”.
There were reports in the early days of the service of shoving matches between disgruntled passengers. During rush hours, men stand shoulder to shoulder and women complain that at the front, where prominent signs announce “priority seating for ladies”, seats are sometimes occupied by men.
Still, Mr Querrar says he has made friends on the bus, after riding the same route with familiar faces for about 10 months.
And new converts, such as Ronelle Peters, continue to join the haphazard queues.
A charge nurse at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Ms Peters, 42, started riding the bus soon after arriving from South Africa six weeks ago, when a Department of Transport staff member introduced her to the monthly fare pass.
“I depend on the bus to get everywhere,” she said.
Too much desk work can damage your health
UAE - JUNE 30: Hi-tech living and working in the hot summers of the UAE can literally be a pain in the neck – not to mention the shoulders, back and wrists.
Physiotherapists blame demanding office hours, prolonged time spent sitting in traffic and the region’s extreme heat for exacerbating body pains and dysfunctions, especially at this time of year.
Tim Fletcher, a musculoskeletal physiotherapist at the Dubai Physio Clinic, said that most of his patients were business people who spent too much time at their desks or behind the wheel of a car.
His average patient might be in the office for 12 or 14 hours a day and spend “at least 75 per cent of that time slumped at the desk”.
Such inactivity could lead to muscle and joint stiffness, poor posture, muscle asymmetry and aches or pains in the shoulders, neck and back.
“We’re seeing a lot of clients who are either sitting at their desk, or if they’re not, then they’re sitting in the car driving home,” Mr Fletcher said.
“Then when they’re home they don’t want to do anything but sit again.
“So it’s from sitting, to sitting, to sitting most of the day.”
Commuters who wake up as early as 5.30am to drive between emirates are often too tired even to exercise at the gym by the time the work day ended, he said.
Furthermore, the scorching summers discourage people from taking breaks that would entail leaving air-conditioned rooms.
“It’s hard for people around this time to go and say, ‘OK, I’ll go and sit outdoors or go for a walk,’” Mr Fletcher said. “So people take their lunch at their desk or somewhere inside the office.”
Pauline Toland, 36, is typical of the people Mr Fletcher describes. An account manager for a branding company in Dubai, she regularly spends more than 10 hours a day in front of a computer terminal.
“I was hunched over my desk, hunched over the mouse, I wasn’t taking regular breaks,” she said. “Everyone sits for as long as they possibly can. Even with walking to the bathroom, it was like everybody puts that off to the last moment.”
Ms Toland, who spends an hour commuting between home and work each day, was no longer exercising as regularly as before she left Ireland in 2007.
“I found I wasn’t walking anywhere here. I can’t walk home, I can’t walk to the mall. The minute you get out of work, you’re going from a sitting position at work to sitting in a taxi or your car.”
In April, she began experiencing excruciating back, neck and shoulder pain that would last for hours, and was forced to seek medical help. She was told to correct her sitting posture so her shoulders and neck were no longer lurching forward.
Ms Toland tucked a lumbar roll between her lower back and the back of the chair.
She also started swimming at home. She took regular work breaks and “rolled” her shoulders every hour. The pains receded within two months.
Therese Stjernberg, a physiotherapist at the Physio Centre in Dubai Healthcare City, said human bodies were simply not built for so much sitting.
“Our bodies are made for going out and hunting in the woods,” she said.
“We need activity.”
She stressed that pains and disorders of this sort were common in many other countries. Both Ms Stjernberg and Mr Fletcher agreed that larger companies in the UAE needed to pay more attention to workplace ergonomics. “I know in Sweden, for example, a lot of big companies have an ergonomic physiotherapist who specialises in helping people adjust their seating and which table would be best for them,” Ms Stjernberg said.
A 2008 study polling more than 1,000 office workers in the Middle East suggested that Dh2 billion worth of working hours could be lost globally each year due to poor sitting posture.
The same study by the Dauphin ergonomics design company found that 68 per cent of staff suffered from some degree of so-called repetitive strain injury, or RSI, a general term for various painful conditions associated with overuse of a tool such as a computer keyboard or mouse.
Ms Stjernberg advised office workers to get lumbar rolls for their chairs or create their own by rolling up a small towel and taping it to the seat.
“If you have a fax machine or a printer you use a lot, keep it farther away so you can’t just roll your chair over, but you have to get up. Or stand up when you’re talking on the phone.”
Forearms should also rest on the desk and the chair should be at an angle of about 110 degrees, with the top of the computer monitor at eye level.
The employee’s stomach should be near the edge of the desk.
“These are small things you can do,” she said. “It’s good to think ahead before the problem develops so you can avoid pain and bad posture.”
Brain surgeons cleared of negligence in operation
DUBAI - JUNE 30: An investigation into a complaint that doctors wrongly removed part of a woman’s skull during a brain operation last year has found no evidence of negligence or malpractice.
Instead, the Dubai Health Authority (DHA), which investigated the incident at the Neuro Spinal Hospital, yesterday reported the procedure had been required because of an “unfortunate complication”.
The family of Maitha Obaid al Baloushi, 24, made a public complaint on a Dubai-based Arabic radio station in March about a procedure done last year, and later filed an official complaint. During the operation – a minimally invasive procedure known as an endovascular coiling technique – complications arose that caused swelling and pressure on the brain.
The hospital defended itself at the time, telling a press conference in March how the swelling had induced a stroke, making it necessary to perform a craniotomy – remove the section of skull – to save the patient’s life.
When the piece was replaced, it left Ms al Baloushi’s head slightly mis-shapen. In January her family moved her to the International Neuroscience Institute in Hanover, Germany, where she was fitted with an acrylic substitute and given rehabilitation.
A statement from the DHA yesterday said there had been “neither negligence nor malpractice” and the treatment given was not “below standard”. Ms al Baloushi originally suffered a haemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm. This causes bleeding that can lead to brain damage or even death. She was treated at Tawam Hospital in Al Ain and Sheikh Khalifa Medical City in Abu Dhabi before being moved to the Neuro Spinal Hospital in Dubai.
The hospital’s medical director Dr Abdul Karim Msaddi, who is also a neurosurgeon, said he was pleased with the report’s conclusion but warned that such public complaints could make doctors reluctant to do this type of surgery.
“These are high-risk cases and there are often complications. The worry is that public cases like this one may put doctors off doing these types of high risk surgery. If we don’t do them, who will?”
The investigating committee consisted of DHA neurosurgeons and neurologists, as well as members of the legal department, the DHA statement said.
It had reviewed all of the patient’s medical records, including those from Germany, and had interviewed the treating doctors and director of the Dubai hospital as well as Ms al Baloushi’s brother.