More than 6,000 of these children are talented persons at different levels of cultural, scientific, and sports fields, IRIB quoted Habibollah Asoudeh as saying on Saturday.

Also, 3,000 philanthropists living abroad are cooperating with the Relief Foundation and providing financial assistance to needy families and orphans inside the country.

Iranian charities abroad supported 13,000 needy orphans in various provinces during the first six months of the past [Iranian calendar] year (March 21-September 22, 2021).

Adoption of orphans

There is a basic slogan in the country that children must grow in the family so that the priority is to foster the orphans.

In addition to families with no child, families with one kid and single women are able to apply for adoption.Since [the Iranian calendar year] 1392, the number of adoption cases has increased and 2,000 children are placed for adoption annually, some of whom are placed under temporary custody because a temporary trustee is better than care centers.

The Welfare Organization in July 2019 announced that there were 10 applicants for fostering each child in the country.

The country’s adoption and foster laws that dated back some 44 years ago was revised and modified in 2013. Within the new law, kids could be adopted up to the age of 16 while the former law states that kids aged 12 or less could be adopted. In addition to families with no child now families with one kid and single women are able to apply for adoption.

The law formerly authorized adoption only for orphans while the new law permit adoption for children with dysfunctional families as well in case the judge concludes that the new family is suitable for adoption.

Previously, the adoptive families were required to sign over one-third of their property to their child-to-be but some could not afford to do so and now the judge gets to decide how a family, depending on their financial status, should be treated.

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Pastu Covac is one of the safest vaccines available for injection in children aging 2-18, Alireza Biglari, head of the Pasteur Institute said.

He went on to say that the Ministry of Health will announce the plan to inject the vaccine into children within the next two weeks.

The study of Pastu Covac (called Soberana 02 in Cuba) was performed in Cuba on children and the emergency use license has been obtained, he added.

The results of the study showed that this vaccine should be injected in adults with a booster dose, but in children, a third dose is not needed and 2 doses are enough to achieve immunization, he highlighted.

Pastu Covac vaccine is a conjugate vaccine with two injectable doses. It consists of the receptor-binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein conjugated chemically to tetanus toxoid.

The two first phases of the human trial have been conducted in Cuba, while the third phase was carried out on 24,000 volunteers in Iran and 44,000 volunteers in Cuba.

It is the only vaccine in the world that can fight several mutations simultaneously, Biglari said in July.

Homegrown vaccines

Made by researchers at the Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam, COVIRAN BAREKAT was unveiled on December 29, 2020, and received the license for public use on June 14.

It proved effective against Indian strain, according to Hojjat Niki-Maleki, head of the information center of Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam.

Eleven countries from Asia and South America, and a European country have asked for importing COVIRAN vaccine, Hassan Jalili, the vaccine’s production manager, said in June.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, 14 vaccines are being domestically developed in the country which are in different study phases.

Pastu Covac is another homegrown vaccine, which has received the emergency use license, after COVIRAN.

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UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) director Matthias Schmale had made the controversial remarks to Israel’s Channel 12 on Sunday.

 “I am not a military expert, but I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way that the Israeli military strikes struck over the last 11 days,” he was quoted as saying. “Yes, they didn’t hit, with some exceptions, civilian targets, but the viciousness, the ferocity of those strikes was heavily felt.”

Schmale hastened to add that the “precision was there but there was unacceptable and unbearable loss of life on the civilian side.”

His remarks were vehemently denounced by Palestinian rights groups, as well as regional countries.

Stung by the growing criticism, the UN official later apologized for his comments.

“I deeply regret that my comments about the precision of IDF strikes are being misused to justify what cannot be justified,” he said on Twitter. “Killing children breaks the rules of war and must be independently investigated. There must not be impunity!”

Responding to a news report on Twitter, quoting his remarks, Schmale termed it “manipulative”.

“My issue is that the precise strikes of the sophisticated army killed more than 200 civilians including 20 children that went to UNRWA schools. This is unacceptable and cannot be white washed!” he wrote.

Quoting me like this is manipulative. My issue is that the precise strikes of the sophisticated army killed more than 200 civilians including 20 children that went to UNRWA schools. This is unacceptable and cannot be white washed!

— Matthias Schmale (@matzschmale)

In another tweet, the UN official said he did not say the Israeli forces operated “within the laws of war.”

“Killing more than 200 civilians including innocent women & children is NOT acting within laws of war. There must be independent investigation & accountability for those actions,” he remarked.

This is blatant manipulation of my interview, I did NOT say the IDF operated within the laws of war. Killing more than 200 civilians including innocent women & children is NOT acting within laws of war. There must be independent investigation & accountability for those actions

— Matthias Schmale (@matzschmale) May 26, 2021

In a series of tweets, Schmale regretted hurting “those who had family members and friends killed and injured” during the 11-day aggression by the Israeli regime.

(1-8) Recent remarks I made on Israeli TV have offended & hurt those who had family members & friends killed & injured during the war that has just ended. I truly regret to have caused them pain, & reiterate following points I have made through countless interviews & tweets:

— Matthias Schmale (@matzschmale) May 25, 2021

“There is no justification whatsoever for killing civilians. Any civilian killed is one too many. It is simply unbearable that so many innocent people have paid with their lives,” he wrote, stressing that military precision and sophistication were “never a justification for war.”

“Many people were killed or have been severely injured by direct strikes or collateral damage from strikes. In a place as densely populated as Gaza, any strike will have huge damaging effects on people and buildings,” he added.

The UN official, recounting the horror of Israeli regime’s bombardment on the besieged territory, called it a “collective punishment of the civilian population”.

“Wrong to reduce Gaza situation to humanitarian crisis,” he emphasized. “While Gaza citizens barely starting 2 grapple with magnitude of losses, crucial to put this brutal conflict in context of 14 years of blockade, succession of conflict, Great Marches of Return & devastating COVID impact.”

Schmale said the blockade must be lifted and a meaningful political process must resume, stressing that the people in the occupied Palestinian territories are “entitled to a life in dignity, including Palestine refugees.”

Aggression and ceasefire

At least 254 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli regime’s military strikes on the besieged Gaza strip earlier this month, before Tel Aviv was forced to beat the retreat.

The latest escalation was triggered by the Israeli regime that forced Palestinian families to vacate their homes in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, followed by a violent onslaught on worshipers at the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque.

After Gaza-based resistance groups retaliated, the occupying regime started conducting strikes against civilian areas in the besieged territory, targeting high-rise residential buildings and media offices.

The regime’s atrocities sparked anger and outrage across the world, with massive rallies organized to condemn the blatant aggression.

An Egyptian-brokered truce that came into force in the wee hours of May 21 ended the apartheid regime’s 11-day aggression on the besieged Gaza strip.

Devastating impact on children

The Palestinian casualties included at least 66 children, who were killed in the Israeli regime’s bombardment of the Gaza strip during 11 days of imposed war.

As the occupied territory slowly recovers from the devastation caused by the Israeli regime’s aggression, there are growing concerns about the psychological effects of violence on survivors, especially children.

Children and youth bore the worst brunt of the Israeli regime’s onslaught on the besieged coastal enclave, according to rights groups.

The Israeli regime’s offensive also razed to ground around 1,800 residential structures in Gaza and partially damaged at least 14,300 others.

The latest Israeli regime aggression came nearly seven years after the regime’s 51-day bombing campaign of Gaza in 2014, which killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 500 children.

At least 67 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded in one night, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas then described as a “massacre”.

Hala Shehada, a 28-year-old mother from northern Gaza’s Beit Hanoun area, described her harrowing experience of living and experiencing both wars.

“Living in Gaza means having to relive trauma time and time again. War is the ugliest thing in the world. And the real war is the one you have to live with your memories of it,” she was quoted as saying by AlJazeera.

“It’s very hard to be a mum in Gaza. I was terrified myself. My daughter’s mental state deteriorated severely during the offensive. She was crying hysterically when she heard the bombs,” said Shehada.

Like many mothers in Gaza, Shehada said both her and her daughter are in need of psychological healing. “Whatever I managed to overcome in the 2014 offensive has come back to haunt me,” she said.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), 12 of the 66 children killed by the Israeli regime’s attacks were participants in its program to help Gaza’s children overcome trauma from previous wars.

The children who survived the offensive are likely to relive the experience of the bombing nightly, NRC said in a recent statement, adding children in Gaza have five nightmares a week on average.

Children under 18 years of age constitute 45 percent of the population in the Gaza Strip.

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Global disruption of essential maternal and child health interventions – such as family planning, birth and postnatal care, and vaccinations – could lead to an additional 1.2 million deaths of under-fives in just six months, according to analysis by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in The Lancet Global Health Journal.

This projected figure threatens to reverse nearly a decade of progress on ending preventable child deaths, said the UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF, on Wednesday, The Guardian reported.

“This pandemic is having far-reaching consequences for all of us, but it is undoubtedly the biggest and most urgent global crisis children have faced since the second world war,” said UNICEF UK’s executive director Sacha Deshmukh.

“Children’s lives are being upended across the globe – their support systems ripped away, their borders closed, their educations lost, their food supply cut off. Even in the UK, children face the threat of a measles outbreak and school closures are putting vulnerable children at increased risk.”

The research underlines just how disruptive to medical supply chains coronavirus has been in countries with weak health systems. Visits to healthcare centres are declining due to lockdowns, curfews and transport disruptions, and fear of infection, it says.

The analysis, which looks at three modelled scenarios in low- and middle-income countries, warns that in the most optimistic scenario, where health services are reduced by about 15%, there would be a 9.8% increase in under-five child deaths – an estimated 1,400 a day – and a jump of 8.3% in maternal deaths.

In the worst-case scenario, where health services are reduced by about 45%, there could be as much as a 44.7% increase in under-five child deaths and a 38.6% increase in maternal deaths per month.

“Our estimates are based on tentative assumptions and represent a wide range of outcomes,” the report authors write.

“Nonetheless, they show that, if routine healthcare is disrupted and access to food is decreased (as a result of unavoidable shocks, health system collapse, or intentional choices made in responding to the pandemic), the increase in child and maternal deaths will be devastating.”

Closed borders have also prevented people from accessing medical assistance, said Jordan representative in UNICEF, Tanya Chapuisat.

“An estimated 10,000 Syrians (along the Syrian-Jordanian border near Rukban) have been unable to receive any medical services (in Jordan) since lockdown started six weeks ago and the border was closed.

“Children aren’t getting vaccines, and women who were due to have caesareans haven’t been able to. We’ve had many a sleepless night, but luckily no one has died.”

Among the countries projected to have the highest death tolls in the worst-case scenario are Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Uganda.

UNICEF has launched its biggest appeal to reach those impacted by the virus.

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The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first to describe the characteristics of seriously ill pediatric COVID-19 patients in North America, Science Daily reported.

“The idea that COVID-19 is sparing of young people is just false,” said study co-author Lawrence C. Kleinman, professor and vice-chair for academic development and chief of the Department of Pediatrics’ Division of Population Health, Quality and Implementation Science at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “While children are more likely to get very sick if they have other chronic conditions, including obesity, it is important to note that children without chronic illness are also at risk. Parents need to continue to take the virus seriously.”

The study followed 48 children and young adults — from newborns to 21 years old — who were admitted to pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) in the United States and Canada for COVID-19 in March and April. More than 80 percent had chronic underlying conditions, such as immune suppression, obesity, diabetes, seizures or chronic lung disease. Of those, 40 percent depended on technological support due to developmental delays or genetic anomalies.

More than 20 percent experienced failure of two or more organ systems due to COVID-19, and nearly 40 percent required a breathing tube and ventilator. At the end of the follow-up period, nearly 33 percent of the children were still hospitalized due to COVID-19, with three still requiring ventilator support and one on life support. Two of the children admitted during the three-week study period died.

“This study provides a baseline understanding of the early disease burden of COVID-19 in pediatric patients,” said Hariprem Rajasekhar, a pediatric intensivist involved in conducting the study at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics. “The findings confirm that this emerging disease was already widespread in March and that it is not universally benign among children.”

The researchers said they were “cautiously encouraged” by hospital outcomes for the children studied, citing the 4.2 percent mortality rate for PICU patients compared with published mortality rates of up to 62 percent among adults admitted to ICUs, as well as lower incidences of respiratory failure.

Kleinman noted that doctors in the New York metropolitan area are seeing what appears to be a new COVID-related syndrome in children.

“Although our data collection for this study has ended, we continue to develop collaborations with colleagues in our region and across the country to try to understand these more severe complications,” he said, citing concerns such as heart failure and the Kawasaki disease-like condition termed pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome as examples.

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Tens of thousands of refugees have been trying to cross into Europe via Turkey since Ankara late last month decided to loosen controls on refugees seeking to reach Europe via its territory, violating the 2016 deal with the EU. That has caused tensions on Turkey’s border with Greece, where Greek forces have been clashing with the refugees to block them.

Cavusoglu said in an interview with state-run Anadolu news agency that the EU had to grant visa-free travel to Turkish citizens within the 28-nation bloc’s Schengen area and that an update of the country’s customs union with the bloc must be implemented to help solve the refugee issue.

His remarks came after Erdogan left meetings with EU and NATO leaders in Brussels late on Monday without issuing a joint statement or appearing at a joint press conference, as had been planned.

Erdogan made the trip to Brussels amid heightened tensions between Ankara and the EU over Turkey’s decision regarding its border controls last month, which sparked fears of a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis, when over one million refugees arrived in the EU, most of them fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East and North Africa, via Turkish territory.

Greece — which shares a border with Turkey — and the EU have accused Ankara of deliberately encouraging the refugees to cross the border as a way of pressuring European leaders into offering more financial assistance or backing Turkey’s campaign in Syria.

In March 2016, Turkey and the EU sealed a deal intended to stem the flow of refugees from Syria and other troubled countries to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara, including visa liberalization. Ankara, however, failed to meet the 72 conditions demanded by the EU for the visa exemption to be approved.

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The figure is stated according to a survey conducted by the Statistical Center of Iran in the past Iranian calendar year 1396 (ended on March 20, 2018).

“However we can consider this figure as an opportunity,” he said during a meeting held on children and cyberspace at the ICT Ministry on Wednesday.

All Iranian and foreign software and applications have some limitation for different age ranges in their setting, however many parents are unaware of it, he lamented.

No organization is responsible for development of cyberspace services for children. The Ministry of Education is responsible for children above six however only 13 percent of kids go to kindergarten below that age, he explained.

Hence the parents should be informed about children psychology and training, he lamented.

He said that there is very small appropriate content for Iranian children in cyberspace.

Iran Computer and Video Games Foundation has published a guideline for different computer games for children however most of the parents are unaware of it, he explained.

Investment on IT, information and services for children is one of the most beneficial ones, which can attract Iranian as well as foreigner investors, he explained.

Deputy education minister for training Alireza Kazemi announced in December 2018 that about 20 million internet users out of 56 million users are below 18 in Iran.

People spends from 20 to 80 hours per week in cyberspace, which change sleeping time and encounter them to unnecessary information and issues, he said.

In mid-November, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Ministry announced that it plans to introduce parental control applications in the near future.

According to a survey conducted by the ICT Ministry, only eight percent of Iranian parents monitor their children’s online activity.

The survey revealed that Iran is not very successful in content creation for children and to control children’s online activity.

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 The Iranian team comprising 35 boys and girls managed to win first place in team and individual categories of the 18th PAMA (Pan Pacific Abacus and Mental Arithmetic Association) Global Abacus and Mental Arithmetic Championships in Malaysia.

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