Nigeria Health Watch
In February, several global biosafety lab experts joined a roundtable organised by Chatham House in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. They were seeking solutions to a major challenge facing the world today – finding and staying ahead of the viruses and bacteria that challenge human existence. To achieve this, the global scientific community needs to detect these bugs rapidly and then mount an appropriate response. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has […]
Editor’s Note: Last week Nigeria Health Watch Team members Ada Ezeokoli, Chibuike Alagboso and Bashar Abubakar were in Kenya to participate in the 8th KEMRI Annual Scientific and Health Conference (KASH), held at the Safari Park Hotel in Nairobi, and organized by the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI). The team learnt quite a bit about […]
Editor’s Note: As part of global efforts to end AIDS as a public health threat, UNAIDS, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and partners have launched a new road map to reduce new HIV infections. The HIV prevention 2020 road map was launched at the first meeting of the Global HIV Prevention Coalition. In this […]
Editor’s note: Chikwe Ihekweazu was Curator of Nigeria Health Watch until he was appointed as Chief Executive of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, a role that obviously made it impossible for him to continue directing the editorial content of NHW. However, when he sent in this piece, although not directly related to health in […]
Iruka Okeke is at the University of Ibadan. She writes this week about the progress made in the world of laboratory medicine in the last five years as portrayed in this year’s African Society for Laboratory Medicine Conference, and what Nigeria still needs to do if it will catch up with the rest of the […]
Editor’s Note: Iruka N. Okeke is a Professor of Pharmaceutical Microbiology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and a UK Medical Research Council African Research Leader. She writes extensively on the need to grow microbiology research and practice in African countries. In this week’s Thought Leadership piece she writes about the need for action in the fight against […]
[dropcap]O[/dropcap] ver the last week, your Nigeria Health Watch team has been at the 21st International AIDS Conference, the largest conference on any global health or development issue globally. Many of the burning issues on HIV/AIDS discussed at the conference, which was back in Africa after 16 years, have significantly moved on from the dark […]
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]inally, the moment came – The 21st International Conference on AIDS kicked off in Durban, South Africa on the 18th of July, the birthday of Nelson Mandela. With the largest number of registered delegates at a health conference, it has been a refreshing and yet challenging start. The efficiency of the organisers, the warmth of […]
I have profound memories of the 13th International AIDS Conference that was held in Durban, South Africa, in July 2000. I was privileged to be part of 12,000 people from all over the world who attended, including scientists, clinicians, healthcare workers, public health agencies, people living with HIV/AIDS, and at least 100 from Nigeria. For […]
This has been an increasingly controversial question recently. Understanding the burden of HIV in Nigeria is more important now than ever before, because, aside from Nigeria having the second largest population of people living with HIV, and only being able to find about 750,000 people to put on treatment, we are also the subject of […]
Reading Nigerian newspapers, or browsing the plethora of social media platforms, it is easy to think that the country is doomed. On some days, this feels especially so in the health sector. There seems to be no end to the list of things that are not working for Nigerians when it comes to their health. […]
Gloria is a vibrant young lady who is “living positively” with HIV. She featured on our #OpenMoH radio show five months ago and shared with us the difficulties faced by people living with HIV (PLHIV) in accessing their life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs). At that point there was a drug stock-out at most health facilities where PLHIVs […]