Nigeria has forwarded blood samples of victims of Monkey Pox to Senegal for confirmation following the country’s inability to diagnose the actual cause of the disease which has so far spread to seven states in the country.
Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole disclosed this while briefing State House Correspondents, shortly after the Federal Executive Council meeting Presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday at the presidential Villa.
“One of our scientist professor Christian Appeh is looking into it in the laboratory to confirm if it is truly monkeypox we are also doing a double confirmation in Senegal because Senegal also have a public health lab that could make diagnosis. We are looking at the two and hopefully in the next 24 or 48 hours we should be able to make a diagnosis as to what we have.”
He had earlier presented report on public health situation in the country to the Council on the tracking of several outbreaks in the country.
“We presented the status report on Lassa fever, and we reported that no new confirmed case of lassa fever has been reported in the country, we also reported the declining case of cholera in Borno state and we are quite happy that no death has been reported from Borno state.
The Minister who noted that Nigeria was yet to understand the true nature and type of Monkey Pox victims in the country are suffering revealed however that it ” is less deadly”
He however confirmed that there is “ongoing outbreak of yellow fever which started in kwara, so far we have recorded four cases in kwara, two in Kogi, two in plateau one in Abia and one in Edo, making 10 cases in all, what we have decided to do is to start our reactive campaign in kwara and kogi starting from Friday 13th of this month”
“We have also decided to start a nationwide vaccination against yellow fever, we are going to bring that forward to December because of what is currently ongoing”
“We quite recognize the fact that we have a large number of Nigerians who are un- immune to yellow fever and so we want to do a nationwide vaccination against yellow fever.”
“The other one which is less topical but less deadly is monkey pox and this actually started in Bayelsa and we have recorded 33 suspected cases in all from the states, Bayelsa, Rivers, Ekiti, Akwa Ibom,Lagos, Ogun and cross river and what is particularly significant is that many of the cases so reported do not fit into the classic prototype of monkey pox but we are trying to confirm before the of today or early tomorrow we should be able to confirm exactly what we are dealing with, is it truly monkey pox. But what is obvious is that we have a disease that is close to the pox family”
“Our advise to Nigerians will be not to panic, report all suspected cases to health facilities and to continue to maintain a high level of hygiene, let’s wash our hands, let’s avoid contact with dead animals clean our surroundings and as much as possible for health workers to maintain barrier nursing while managing people with suspected cases of monkey pox”
“There are two types of monkey pox, there is the central African type and the west African type, we suspect that if confirmed we probably have the west African type which is milder because so far we have not recorded any death from monkey pox.”
“In addition council also considered an important memo on industrial relations particularly in the public sector, that report dealt extensively with several issues but for us the health sector the most important is the need to do comprehensive job evaluation, so government has decided to set up a committee that would evaluate what exactly do we do as individuals, how much should we be paid in a way that we can really pay appropriately across board through the entire country.”
“Council also looked at the issue of residency training programme and decided that the training should last for a fixed time of 7 years after training for 7 years individuals should exit from the programme so that other people can come into the programme”
“Council has also decided to look into the issue of private practice by medical doctors in the public sector and a committee has been set up to look extensively into that issue because we want to resolve the issue of what does the law of the land state and what the rule of professional ethics say.”
“The law of the land does not allow any public officer to do anything other than farming, so that committee would make appropriate recommendation to government on this important issues which is of considerable interest to quite a number of Nigerians.”
“In addition to that we will also look at the Yayale Ahmed report which tried to look into the relationship between professional groups in the health sector and the office of the SGF have been mandated to forward a white paper on the Yayale Ahmed report to the FEC so that once and for all government can restore harmony to the health sector.”
TONY AILEMEN, Abuja
