Expert wants Nigeria to take preventive measures against diseases
Rather than battling to cure or get rid of diseases when they occur, Sunday Omilabu, a professor of Virology at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, says it is important to take early preventive and proactive measures to prevent them from occurring.
“If we can educate our people now to maintain a very clean environment and on how to keep their food safe at home, we will prevent diseases from taking place,” Omilabu said.
“Once the food is contaminated by rodents through their urine and faeces that carry virus, you may have diseases such as Lassa Fever, Ebola, and Yellow Fever, among others. It is the laboratory that will do the diagnosis and for the diagnosis to be able to do it well, the laboratory must be well equipped and must be empowered with people that will do it well,” he said.
According to him, once the necessary instruments are in place, diseases can be detected on time and once this one is done, the doctor taking care of patient will take measures to get themselves protected.
“The doctors will not run away from such a patient. Once the diagnosis is made on time and the doctor goes into action to manage such a patient,” he explained.
“Once we have all these in place the disease outbreak will not get out of hand. It is only when you start having high morbidity and mortality cases that it becomes another thing. But when you limit it to the index then you now talk about disease control system and would need to introduce active surveillance, disease surveillance and search. So it is important we don’t wait until it strikes,” he further counselled.
Last year the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) recorded the largest outbreaks of Lassa fever in the country in its history between 2015 and 2016, with 273 reported cases resulting to 149 deaths.
At the outbreak of Ebola disease recently in Nigeria, the country witnessed influx of diverse products like hand-washing soaps, gloves, health personnel protective equipment, hand-held infrared thermometer, among others, to help checkmate the virus.
Most people were forced to cultivate the habit of either not shaking hands or washing hands at every contact with people.
However, it seems these precautionary measures have faded away after the country was officially declared free of the virus.
According to Omilabu, Nigerians need to be wary of the virus this dry season as it is usually a period when the virus or rodents carrying them come into contact with humans.
“During the dry season when the bushes are dry and then there are lots of bush burning that exposes those rodents, they start moving into nearby houses and then cover up and eat from such houses,” he stated.
TIAMIYU ADIO