Nigeria has made significant advances in health policies development and legislation aimed at achieving health for all, but challenges remain for mental health services. An initiative is addressing the country’s monumental mental healthcare challenges by deploying a multi-pronged approach that includes conventional online and unique offline interventions. But challenges remain. Studies have shown that mental health, like physical health, is essential to overall well being, yet stakeholders argue it is often overlooked in Nigeria due to poor societal attitudes
Access to necessary medications for illnesses such as HIV/AIDS can be a struggle for patients in emerging markets like Nigeria and other African countries. With pharmacists being the first point of access, patients are often required to visit them every month to receive their medications and to keep track of their drug use. This creates a tedious process for patients, which can result in low adherence and missed doses. However, a new technology-based solution is aiming to improve this situation by
Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, together with a consortium of global partners, have announced that an independent data review of the Phase 3 Mosaico study of Janssen’s investigational HIV vaccine regimen was not effective in preventing HIV infection among the study participants. The study will be discontinued and further analysis of the data will be conducted. They revealed no safety issues with the vaccine regimen were identified during the trial. The consortium of global partners
Despite the large number of lives threatened by unsafe practices, abortion remains a highly controversial issue in Nigeria, where it is mostly illegal except to save the life of the mother. Despite the restrictive laws, however, unsafe abortions continue to be a major public health concern in the country, with an estimated 3.5 million induced abortions taking place each year. This is due to a lack of access to safe and legal abortion services, as well as cultural and religious
An estimated 7 million children in Africa died before their fifth birthday, according to the latest estimates released by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME). The group also found that 1.9 million babies were stillborn in the same period. Many of these deaths could have been prevented with equitable access and high-quality maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health care. “Every day, far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes even before
Health authorities in Uganda have admitted that even though the country’s latest Ebola outbreak is over, the source of the outbreak still remains unknown. In her remarks at the event marking the official declaration of the end of the outbreak, Dr. Aceng Jane Ruth Ocero, Uganda’s Minister for Health, said the health ministry is working with its local and international partners to identify the source of the outbreak in addition to factors suggesting possible seasonal occurrences. “The source of this outbreak,
Uganda has declared the end of an Ebola outbreak caused by Sudan ebolavirus, just four months after the first case was confirmed in the country’s central Mubende district on September 20, 2022. The country’s Minister of Health, Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng Acero, praised the swift response to the outbreak, which included surveillance, contact tracing, and infection prevention and control measures. In total, there were 164 cases of the disease (142 confirmed and 22 probable), with 55 confirmed deaths and 87
The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a statement in The Lancet Public Health stating that there is no safe amount of alcohol that does not affect health. Alcohol, classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common types such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. The statement clarifies that currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the
Since February 2022, Nigeria’s federal ministry of health has not posted anything on its official Facebook and Twitter pages. The minister of health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, has also not posted on his official social media handle since March 2021. The health ministry’s last post on Twitter was on February 24 when the health minister received the Japan Ambassador to Nigeria, Matsunaga Kazuyoshi to discuss possible areas of collaboration as regards capacity building of medical personnel and health care reform. On
While the COVID-19 pandemic has declined significantly in 2022, there are still many gaps and uncertainties that prevent the World Health Organization (WHO) from declaring the pandemic over. Addressing journalists recently, WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that gaps in surveillance, testing, vaccination, treatment, and health systems are preventing the ending of the pandemic. Gaps in surveillance, testing and sequencing mean we do not understand well enough how the virus is changing; Gaps in vaccination mean that millions