Tanzania has confirmed its first-ever cases of Marburg Virus Disease, after laboratory tests were carried out following reports of cases and deaths in the country’s north-west Kagera region. According to the country’s National Public Health Laboratory, eight people developed symptoms including fever, vomiting, bleeding and renal failure. Five of the eight cases, including a health worker, have died, and the remaining three are receiving treatment. A total of 161 contacts have been identified and are being monitored. In response to the
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
The Central Public Health Laboratory (CPHL) in Lagos, Nigeria has achieved full laboratory accreditation status from the World Health Organization (WHO) for its contribution to the fight against measles and rubella in the country. The CPHL is one of the laboratories under the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) Measles and Rubella laboratory network. “WHO full accreditation status attained by the laboratory is a great achievement for Nigeria as quality laboratory is critical to understanding the impact of a country’s vaccination
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,
The World Health Organization’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has urged countries to increase their COVID-19 sequencing efforts and share data with the global community in order to detect and track the emergence and spread of new variants. The Director-General stated that despite the progress made in the fight against the pandemic, such as the development of vaccines, the number of sequences being shared has dropped by over 90% since the peak of the Omicron wave and the number of countries
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