vaccination Archives - TalkAfrique

August 4, 2014

Deadlier than HIV: Hepatitis B – by Darasimi Oshodi

by Darasimi Oshodi

The World Hepatitis Day was recently observed. So this post is my own way of contributing to the sensitisation on Hepatitis.

The First Service in my church on Sunday is tagged ‘Empowerment Service’, where issues like entrepreneurship, academics, health, wealth, purpose, etc., are addressed. At one of our services, a medical doctor, spoke on the deadliness of Hepatitis infection and its prevalence in Nigeria. A staggering revelation the speaker made was that Hepatitis infection is deadlier than HIV and costlier to manage. Hepatitis B, he said, is incurable while Hepatitis C can be treated but can you imagine spending 30,000 naira per week on treatment for 48 consecutive weeks? That should be around 200 dollars per week. Please try to calculate what that amounts to. How many people in Nigeria can afford such a treatment? It is however surprising to know that vaccination for this disease is not supposed to be more than 1000 naira (that should be around 7 dollars) and I want to hazard a guess that many people are not aware of this. What is painful about this disease is the fact it is prevalent in Nigeria and many people are ignorant about it. How many Nigerians have died from Hepatitis infection with the death attributed to something else? Continue reading “Deadlier than HIV: Hepatitis B – by Darasimi Oshodi”

April 1, 2013

Democratic Republic of Congo Gets Boost for HealthCare

NAIROBI, 31 March 2013 (IRIN) – The British government has announced a major new programme aimed at providing essential healthcare to six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The five-year, US$270.7 million project will focus on rebuilding health facilities, training health workers, and supplying drugs and equipment.

Civil war has destroyed much of the country’s health infrastructure, as well as the road networks and vital services such as electricity, meaning patients often have to travel long distances to health centres that may not be equipped to handle their complications.

IRIN has put together a list of five health issues in DRC that require urgent attention:

Maternal and Child Health – DRC’s maternal mortality ratio is 670 deaths per 100,000 live births, with an estimated 19,000 maternal deaths annually. The country has a severe shortage of health workers – less than one health professional is available per 1,000 people.

With 170 out of every 1,000 children dying before they reach the age of five and 10 percent of infants underweight, DRC has one of the worst child health indicators in the world. It is one of five countries in the world in which about half of under-five deaths occur. Some of the biggest killers of children are diarrhoea, malaria, malnutrition and pneumonia.

Sexual violence – Several studies report high levels of sexual violence perpetrated against women, children and men in DRC, both by armed groups and within the home; one study, conducted in the North and South Kivu and Ituri in 2010, found that 40 percent of women and 24 percent of men had experienced sexual violence. Continue reading “Democratic Republic of Congo Gets Boost for HealthCare”

December 5, 2010December 25, 2010

Hope for millions with a new meningitis vaccine

By Celia W. Dugger (The N.Y. Times)

For over a century, epidemics of bacterial meningitis have swept across Africa, arriving with the dry harmattan winds to kill with terrifying speed. But on Monday, a drive will start to inoculate tens of millions of West Africans with a new vaccine in what scientists hope will be the beginning of the end of ravaging meningitis epidemics.

The aim is for these immunization campaigns to spread from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east and bring the disease under control in a belt of 25 nations that girds the continent, saving an estimated 150,000 lives by 2015.

Hundreds of millions more dollars are still needed to accomplish that goal in coming years, public health officials say. But the meningitis vaccine itself is a major milestone in developing inexpensive immunizations against neglected diseases that afflict poor countries, experts say.

More than a million cases of meningitis have been reported in Africa over the past two decades. The vaccine works against the group A meningitis strain that causes more than 8 out of 10 cases on the continent. Moreover, it costs less than 50 cents a dose. In the United States, Novartis and Sanofi Pasteur market a single dose of meningitis vaccine against multiple strains of the disease for $80 to $100.

"Wow, that’s remarkable!" exclaimed Dr. Gregory Poland, head of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, when he heard how little the new vaccine would cost.

Bill Gates, whose foundation largely financed the endeavor, contrasted the undertaking with the development of vaccines for measles, smallpox and polio.

"All those things were created because rich people got sick," the billionaire Microsoft co-founder said. "This is the first vaccine that went through the whole process where there was no rich world market, and it had to be optimized at a very low price."

The meningitis vaccine relies on a technology that was devised by researchers at the Food and Drug Administration and donated by the U.S. government at the cost of only token royalties. It is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, a major vaccine producer, and it was developed independently of the major American and European pharmaceutical companies.

The meningitis vaccination drives will begin Monday in Burkina Faso and will also get under way in Mali and Niger this month, but public health experts caution that the promise of the meningitis vaccine should not be oversold. It will not eradicate the disease because it is effective only against the group A strain most common in Africa.