HERFON HEALTH BLOG

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has raised the alarm over the disturbing rate of stunted growth in children in the country, disclosing that no fewer than 17.2 million children below age five are affected. The UNICEF Nutrition Specialist, Akure Office, Mrs Ada Ezeogu, who made the disclosure at the opening of a two-day Media Dialogue on Child Nutrition in South-west Nigeria  Tuesday , said stunting is a health situation in child growth in which a child’s height is shorter than his or her age. According to her, statistics showed that 37 per cent of children representing over six million are malnourished. She disclosed that the 17.2 million figure represents 43.6 per cent of an estimated 40 million Nigerian children under the age of five years, adding that 19.4 per cent children in the South-west are stunted resulting from malnourishment. “This is worse than the South-east and South-south but better than the North. And we must do more as agenda ...

Public Health England today announced it will send four specialists to help It is the sixth time the UK Public Health Rapid Support team has been deployed At least 1,081 suspected cases of the disease have been recorded this year                      The Government has deployed a rapid response team in Nigeria as scientists work round-the-clock to contain Lassa fever. Health officials in the African country state that 90 people have been killed in the unprecedented outbreak so far this year. And Public Health England announced it will send four specialists amid fears the crisis could soon spiral out of control. It is just the sixth time the UK Public Health Rapid Support team has been deployed since it was created two years ago. Help was requested directly by the Nigerian Government, which has already praised international aid efforts from the World Health Organization. In...

THE Save the Children International (SCI) has said three out of ten children under the age of five are malnourished in Kaduna state. This was disclosed by the Nutrition Advocacy Adviser, Malam Isa Ibrahim during the inauguration of the group’s Nutrition Advocacy Project ( 2018 to 2020) in the state on Monday. He said, ‘Kaduna State is vulnerable to disturbing nutrition indices, with three out of 10 under five children severely stunted, while 34 percent are underweight and 11.7 percent severely malnourished.” “We will also mobilise civil society groups, the media and individuals at state and national levels to leverage on the needed change toward improving nutrition behaviour,” he added. Ibrahim explained that the project would be funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its aimed at mobilising government agencies and stakeholders for additional funding for nutrition projects. He said the project would ensure that nutrition policies, strategies ...

  After more than four years of civil war and failed ceasefires , South Sudan is facing its ‘toughest year on record’ and is close to famine so says members of a working group including South Sudanese and U.N. officials. Aid groups say almost two-thirds of the population of the the world’s youngest nation will need food aid this year to keep off starvation and malnutrition. “The situation is extremely fragile, and we are close to seeing another famine. The projections are stark. If we ignore them, we’ll be faced with a growing tragedy,” said Serge Tissot, from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in South Sudan. The development is coming weeks after United Nations revealed that armed groups in South Sudan have released more than 300 child soldiers as part of an ongoing project to free at least 400 children. According to a statement by the UN mission in the country (UNMISS), the 311 children, including 87 girls, will now begin re-integrating into thei...

Lassa fever has claimed 43 lives in Nigeria with a total of 615 cases reported across 17 states since the beginning of 2018, a state agency has said. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, disclosed the figures in its weekly epidemiological report for Week 5 released on Monday. According to the report, 193 cases have been confirmed positive to the Lassa fever virus giving a case fatality rate of 23.9 percent. The report also stated that since the onset of the outbreak, there has been a high case 'identification rate' through the use of 'standard case definition' employed via the integrated disease surveillance and response (IDSR) strategy. "This is an indication of an active and improved surveillance system. This in itself, is a part of the case detection process as all cases have to be subjected to laboratory testing for further classification and disease burden estimation. "Currently, Lassa fever testing is...

No fewer than 24 Nigerian medical doctors and five agriculture engineer who were trained by the government of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela have returned to Nigeria after seven and half years course in Venezuela. Unveiling the graduants during a solidarity meeting to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) President, Ayuba Wabba, the Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Amb. Jorge Arreaza disclosed that they were trained on scholarship as part of the contribution of Venezuela to the development of Africa as a continent. Amb. Arreaza noted that Venezuela at the moment is facing blockade like the Cubans. He averred that the blockade is quite new for the country, adding that US President Donald Trump signed an executive order, imposing sanctions against Venezuela people and economy. According to him, “Banks closed our accounts. When we seek support from international financial institutions, they denied us because they have orders from the US not to help us. He debunked the remarks that Presi...

Maternal death: FG to engage 100,000 CHIPS agents.   As part of efforts at reducing was high rate of maternal and child mortality in Nigeria, the Federal Government said it was engaging 100,000 agents under the Community Health Influencers, Promoters and Services (CHIPS) programme. This was revealed by the Executive Director, National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Dr. Faisal Shuaib, in Kaduna, yesterday. CHIPS is a community- based programme where individuals with basic criteria including commitment, agility, connections would be selected by traditional institution to carry out basic medical needs of the people in their communities, diagnose and call on the next point of call when necessary. Shuaib, who was speaking shortly after the first meeting with Northern Traditional Leaders Committee on Primary Health Care Delivery in Kaduna yesterday said that the development became necessary because Nigeria was losing about one million women and children to ...

Twenty-four persons have been placed under surveillance while active case search and contact tracing is ongoing to curtail the spread of Lassa fever in Delta State. The new Commissioner for Health, Dr. Mordi Ononye, who disclosed this at the weekend in Asaba, said that since the re-emergence of the disease in the state on January 26 this year, there had been seven recorded confirmed cases with three deaths out of which two are from neighbouring Anambra State and one from Delta State. Ononye implored residents not to panic as the Ministry of Health through its rapid response team is on top of the situation and had been co-ordinating the state’s response to contain the spread of the disease. The commissioner explained that efforts so far put in place to contain the spread of the disease include the use of the ministry’s ambulance to convey patients to Irrua Specialist Hospital, Edo State and thereafter disinfect same, and procurement of some Personal Protective E...

Diagnostic tool developed by Swiss public health experts ready for scale-up in Nigeria Last year, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (TPH)external link developed a tablet-based tool to improve diagnosis and treatment of children under the age of five. According to a TPH press release external link on Thursday, the technology is now ready for scale-up following successful pilot projects in Nigeria and Afghanistan. The tool, named ALMANACH external link (Algorithms for the Management of Childhood Illnesses) was developed in collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)external link to help fight child mortality in the developing world. In a nutshell, the tool allows health care workers to more easily evaluate and diagnose sick children and prescribe treatment based on their symptoms. It was developed to replace paper-based assessment charts, which were often challenging for workers to use during consultations. ALMANACH also provides country-spec...

 Bayelsa govt orders compulsory measles vaccination.   The Bayelsa State Government has ordered a compulsory 13-days aggressive measles immunisation for children between the ages of 9 months and five years. According to investigations the compulsory vaccination is to forestall n outbreak of children in the state especially in the rural areas. Subsequently, to ensure full compliance and efficiency of its campaign, the state government has threatened to sanction any school that prevents children from being immunized. The State Commissioner for Health, Prof. Ebitimitula Etebu, who disclosed the vaccination campaign in a press conference over the weekend, said the measure is part of efforts to prevent children from untimely death and other serious lifelong complications associated with the viral disease. Etebu explained that the measles immunization will take place from First to 13 of March at every hospital, schools, market places, churches, mosques and...

447 foreign trained doctors fail assessment exam. No fewer than 447 of the 686 foreign trained doctors who wrote the assessment test of Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) failed. The Federal Government decried the poor performance of the foreign trained medical and dental graduates as only 249 were successful in the examination conducted in November 2017. Prof. Isaac Adewole, Minister of Health, said in Abuja on Thursday at the induction of the 243 successful medical doctors and six dental graduates that participated at the remedial course and assessment. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the examination was conducted at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH) in Nov. 2017. It is aimed at ensuring that the standard of training obtained abroad by candidates measured up to the standard of training in Nigeria. It is also geared toward ensuring the overall health and well-being of Nigerians and other people living in the country. Ad...

Give Women More Time To Give Birth, Make Choices: WHO Women in labour should be given more time to give birth and have fewer medical interventions, while participating more in decision-making, the WHO said on Thursday. Among 26 new recommendations, it rejected a traditional benchmark in labor wards worldwide for the dilation of a woman’s cervix at the rate of 1 centimeter per hour, saying it was “unrealistic” and often led to excessive caesarean sections. “What has been happening over the last two decades is that we are having more and more interventions being applied unnecessarily to women,” said Dr. Olufemi Oladapo, a medical officer in WHO’s department of reproductive health and research. “Things like caesarean sections, using a drug called oxytocin to speed up labor is becoming very rampant in several areas of the world,” he told a news conference. He was referring to the synthesized form of a natural hormone routinely injected intravenously to women to cause contractions, ex...

Have scientists found an anti-cancer vaccine? Researchers from Stanford University used stem cells to create a vaccine that has proven effective against breast, lung, and skin cancer in mice.    To produce the vaccine, the scientists turned to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), or stem cells that are generated from adult cells. Over a decade ago, Japanese-based scientists showed for the first time that adult cells can be genetically reprogrammed to behave in the same way as pluripotent stem cells. These cells can take any shape or function, "specializing" into whatever type of cell the body needs. Embryonic stem cells are probably the most well-known type of pluripotent stem cell. As Wu and colleagues write, about a century ago, scientists found that immunizing animals with embryonic tissue caused them to reject tumors. Over time, this led scientists to believe that embryonic stem cells could be used as a sort of vaccine against cancer tumors. The main challen...

HUMANITARIAN NEEDS AND KEY FIGURES.   The crisis in north-east Nigeria is one of the most severe in the world today. Across the six affected states of Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe and Taraba, 10.2 million people are estimated to be in need of humanitarian assistance in 2018, of whom 52 per cent are women and girls, and 48 per cent are men and boys. Children constitute 63 per cent of those needing assistance. The most acute humanitarian needs are clearly concentrated in Borno State – and areas bordering Borno in Adamawa and Yobe states – where the crisis shows no sign of abating. 1- Protection of civilians North-east Nigeria is facing a severe protection crisis in which civilians living in conflictaffected areas suffer from grave violations of human rights and dignity. Since the start of the conflict, more than 20,000 people have been killed, more than 4,000 women and girls abducted, and more than 2 million people forcibly displaced. Particularly in ...

Dealing with female genital mutilation

US initiatives to reduce maternal mortality globally.

1. The Central African Republic It is ranked as having the worst healthcare system and educational systems, the Central African Republic comes in at 3rd worst on educational spending, with only 1.2% of its GDP  spent on education. It ranks as having the 5th worst economic system and is the third most dangerous country. With this being said, it’s safe to say that the Central African Republic is the worst international country to raise a family. Overall quality of life: 2nd worst 2. Chad  It is ranked at #5 for the worst overall quality of life, has the 8th worst economy, with the 3rd worst educational system, 23rd most dangerous country, and the 2nd worst healthcare system. It will probably not come as a surprise that Chad borders the Central African Republic. The entire area is notably ridden with the same poverty, violence, and lack of economic growth. Overall quality of life: 5th worst 3. The Democratic Republic of Congo It is second to Iraq as being the...