Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari recently signed the country mental health bill into law. Described as groundbreaking, the new law aims, among others, to improve access to mental health care and services in Nigeria. The mental health bill aims to improve access to care and services for people with mental health issues. The bill, which has been long-awaited by mental health advocates, aims to address the significant gap in mental health services in the country. The new law will establish a National Mental
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
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
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
Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) has released its guidelines for the treatment of people co-infected with visceral leishmaniasis and HIV, to recommend better treatments based on the results of two studies conducted by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and their partners in Ethiopia and India. In Ethiopia, the new treatment strategy was shown to have an 88% efficacy rate at the end of therapy (after 58 days), whereas the efficacy
To facilitate early detection of new strains and variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) is now conducting genomic sequencing of all positive samples from travellers arriving Nigeria. This development was highlighted in the center’s Weekly Epidemiological Report for Week 15. From South Africa to Egypt, England and India, new strains of the virus are being identified with potential implications on virulence and vaccine effectiveness. Last week, the World Health Organisation
The Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has advised governments to refrain from spending public funds on food contributing to unhealthy diets. He described this decision as a way for governments to lead by example. “Now is the time for governments to lead by example through ensuring that the food served or sold in public settings contributes to healthy diets and saves lives. No public funds should be spent on food contributing to unhealthy diets,” said WHO DG, Dr
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about 75% of all abortions in Africa are unsafe. It added that across the world, women in Africa have the highest risk of dying from unsafe abortion. While the WHO recently raised alarm regarding unsafe abortion, the situation is most severe in Africa where abortion is largely unsafe and the risk of dying is highest but this does not mean that it is not a global crisis. According to the WHO, 45% of
Late October 2020, Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said it received a report about the US FDA’s warning on the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) around 20 weeks or later in pregnancy which may cause rare but serious kidney problems in an unborn baby. This can result in low amniotic fluid. “After about 20 weeks of pregnancy, the unborn babies’ kidneys produce most of the amniotic fluid, so kidney problems can lead to low