Public Health
RSSPosts tagged with "Africa"
Nigeria ‘baby factory’ raided in Imo state
Seventeen pregnant teenage girls and 11 babies have been rescued from a house in Nigeria’s south-eastern Imo state, police have said.
They say they are looking for a woman suspected of planning to sell the babies.
“The girls claimed they were fed once a day and were not allowed to leave the home,” said spokeswoman Joy Elomoko.
It is not uncommon for such “baby factories” to be found in south-eastern Nigeria.
The rescued girls said they had all been made pregnant by a 23-year-old man, who has been arrested, reports the AFP news agency.
The European Union says Nigeria, along with China, is one of the biggest sources of people trafficked into Europe, where they are often forced into prostitution.
In 2011, the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip), said their investigations showed that babies are sold for up to $6,400 (£4,200) each.
Poor, unmarried women face tough choices if they get pregnant in Nigeria, often facing exclusion from society, correspondents say.
Naptip says desperate teenagers with unplanned pregnancies are sometimes lured to clinics and then forced to turn over their babies.
The babies can be sold for illegal adoption, used for child labour or prostitution or sometimes killed with their body parts used for ritual purposes.
(From BBC)
Ratting Out TB: Scientists Train Rodents To Diagnose Disease
Rats are notorious for spreading nasty diseases. Think the plague, lassa fever and even salmonella.
But could some jumbo-size African rodents help health workers diagnose diseases more quickly? They just might.
A group in Tanzania is training rats to detect tuberculosis in people. The critters in question are African giant pouched rats. They are about twice the size of your average house gerbil — and half as pretty.
The critters have very poor vision, which they make up for with a keen sense of smell. For the past decade, workers at the nonprofit have been taking advantage of the rat’s olfactory prowess to detect buried land mines around the world.
(From NPR’s Shots: Health News from NPR)
Harnessed up and ready to detect land mines: A rat earns a nibble of a banana after successfully sniffing out explosives at APOPO in Morogoro, Tanzania.
(via To Get Medicine to Africa, Health Experts Turn to Coca-Cola - Businessweek)
“Since September, more than 40,000 medicine kits designed to slip between Coke bottles stacked in a case have made the journey deep into the Zambian countryside. Called Kit Yamoyo, the packets were designed by London branding agency pi global for the U.K.-based health charity called ColaLife to fight one of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest child killers, diarrhea. The kits, priced at the equivalent of $1, carry vital antidiarrheal medicine—a blister pack of zinc pills, oral rehydration salts—in a container that doubles as a mixing vessel. (The kit also carries a thin bar of soap.)”
Drugmakers Eye Africa's Growing Middle Class
Link above to Reuters…
Seeing Africa as a potential market, rather than an object of charity, could change the way pharmaceutical companies operate on the continent.
Cervical Cancer Screening in Zambia. HIV positive women are at a higher risk of developing cervical cancer, so finding low cost, effective screening methods like the acetic acid (vinegar) swab are important. This blog has previously posted on a similar program in Botswana.
Packed and Ready To Go: Community Health Workers in the Millennium Villages with Feed Backpacks
In many parts of rural Africa, clinics and hospitals are too far and few in between. Through a partnership with FEED HEALTH, Community Health Workers provide testing, treatment and consultation to the most vulnerable population in need of health care.
http://www.millenniumvillages.org
http://www.feedprojects.orgVideo by http://zoeflood.com/
Music track by Peter Mawanga
“Even now it’s a major challenge. People have stopped taking their drugs and they don’t know what to do, who to trust or which place to go. It has become a major problem in our community.” - AIDS activist Rodgers Stephan on the prevalence of fake drugs in Uganda. Stephan is HIV-positive and takes medications.
Fake pharmaceuticals have flooded the market in Uganda and other African countries. People who are tired of playing a deadly game of pill-Russian-roulette are turning back to traditional healers for care.
Pictured here is Muwangula Misambwa, a traditional healer in Kampala who has noticed an increase in business. Image by Pulitzer Center grantee Kathleen E. McLaughlin. Uganda, 2013.
Cancer can be triggered by infectious diseases, especially in impoverished parts of the world. Scientists in the US and Africa are working to unravel how viruses and bacteria cause malignancies. By breaking that cycle, they hope to prevent tumors from forming in the first place.
Fighting cancer with cell phones: Innovation to save lives in Africa
(CNN) — Only innovation can reduce illness and poverty in Africa, according to a program that is funding creative approaches to healthcare in developing countries.
More than 50,000 women die each year of cervical cancer in Africa, according to World Health Organization estimates, as more than 80% of the cases are detected in late stages.
In countries such as Tanzania, where nearly 4,500 women die annually from the disease, the problem is exacerbated by an acute shortage of medical experts and a lack of quality screening services, especially in rural areas.
But now a group of Canadian and Tanzanian health innovators have joined forces to apply simple and safe mobile technologies to improve cervical cancer screening and thus potentially reduce mortality rates in the East African country.
The idea is to send teams of two trained non-physician healthcare workers in remote Tanzania to examine women living several hours away from health centers. The nurses, who will be equipped with cervical screening and treatment tools as well as standard smartphones, will take a photograph of the cervix with their phone and send it via SMS to a medical expert in a specialized clinic.
Trained doctors will then be able to review the image immediately and text the diagnosis back to the health worker, as well as give instructions about treatment.
(From CNN - Inside Africa)
Patient ‘Imprisoned’ at Kinshasa Hospital
In many African hospitals, patients must settle their bills before they’re released. That means if patients can’t pay, they end up stuck in the hospital — sometimes for weeks — until a family member bails them out. Cindy Shiner of AllAfrica.com recently met one such patient at a hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
(From PRI)
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