Health
COVID-19 response in southern Nigeria boosts surveillance of other diseases
In many countries, tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has taken cues from other disease approaches, such as lessons from protecting communities against Ebola. But in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, health workers have found inspiration from guarding against the coronavirus.
They have exploited the rigorous surveillance standard set by the COVID-19 response to keep from losing sight of other priority diseases. Mostly what they have learned is how not to divide their attention.
The unifying surveillance strategy they have enveloped is quickly producing significant and – possibly oddly – uplifting results.
“I recorded my first acute flaccid paralysis case since last year while I was following up on the contact of a confirmed case of COVID-19,” says Sarah Oladimeji, a Diseases and Surveillance Notification Officer in charge of finding cases of preventable and infectious diseases in Oredo Local Government Area of Nigeria’s Edo State.
When COVID-19 crept into the southern Delta region in April, health workers had to learn to overcome their worries and hunkered down to the needed work. The odds seemed stacked against the six states that make up the South-South zone: Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo and Rivers. COVID-19 cases increased daily while community attitudes towards the virus grew lax. Health workers scrambled to manage the time and resources available to respond to both COVID-19 and other endemic-prone diseases.
One solution government teams and health workers hit upon: bring the aggressive COVID-19 surveillance into the systems used to monitor priority diseases.
Across the Niger Delta, the World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners retrained 3874 surveillance officers who had been mobilized to detect COVID-19 cases in hospitals and communities to also look for acute flaccid paralysis (AFP), polio, meningitis, cholera, neonatal tetanus, yellow fever, measles and more.
After the Government decentralized the COVID-19 response in April, some states began also training religious and community leaders – who are often important decision-makers, influencers and informants – to help find and report suspected COVID-19 and other priority diseases in their communities.
Now, four months into the region’s COVID-19 outbreak, health workers are seeing spectacular efficiency. Detected cases of AFP, for example, increased substantially (doubling and even tripling in one state) between the end of March and end of July as the harmonized surveillance ramped up.
Protecting immunization gains
Keeping eyes on both COVID-19 and other diseases, most of which are vaccine-preventable, is an important but challenging task in the Niger Delta where immunization coverage had been low for years. Located along the Niger River and the Gulf of Guinea, the Niger Delta, or South-South zone, comprises a system of coastal communities that rely on farming and fishing. Waterway systems here are often inadequate and moving around is difficult. In the past, residents in the deepest riverine communities, far from a mainland, had little luck accessing a health centre. Many were discouraged by the distance from taking their children for vaccinations, which led the region to its poor immunization coverage and thus heightened risk of disease outbreaks.
Since 2016, community engagement, better access to health care and increased surveillance have led to rising numbers of vaccinated children. Health workers now attend patients in on-sea treatment centres or travel into the deep-river communities by canoe to provide services.
Navigating the creek communities may be hard but health workers accept that medical care has no boundaries, says Dr Edmund Ogbe, WHO Coordinator for Bayelsa State. Public health commitment and resourcefulness seem to be ingrained characteristics of this region.
Increased detection of measles and yellow fever
To protect their gains in immunization coverage and keep from neglecting other worrisome diseases in these times of COVID-19, the integrated surveillance is making a difference. In March, Bayelsa State recorded nine cases of AFP. But 16 new cases were investigated over the next four months – a 180% increase.
With COVID-19 case findings now meshed with the systems used to detect and report priority diseases, more cases of measles and yellow fever are emerging, too. The reported numbers of both diseases increased considerably between the end of March and the end of July. In a couple states, case detection nearly doubled.
The next step will be to accelerate case search throughout the region. State governments in the South-South zone, supported by WHO, continue to train more surveillance officers and community informants on combining COVID-19 and preventable-disease surveillance. Involving communities by educating them and appointing them as public health informants will help ensure that the combined surveillance continues to be a success, says Dr Olubowale Ekundare Famiyesin, WHO Zonal Coordinator of the Niger Delta.
Early detection of any disease is the goal for health workers in the Delta. “All resources for surveillance at our disposal will be deployed to improve early infectious disease detection and reporting, including COVID-19,” Dr Famiyesin promises.
The West African Society of Parenteral & Enteral Nutrition (WASPEN) has called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to make clinical malnutrition a national healthcare priority, warning that the crisis is growing but remains largely overlooked in Nigeria’s healthcare system.
WASPEN’s Founder and President, Dr. Teresa Pounds, made this appeal on Monday during a press conference ahead of the 2025 WASPEN Clinical Nutrition Conference, scheduled for June 17–19 in collaboration with the National Hospital Abuja.
Themed “Bridging the Gap: Integrating Hospital and Community Malnutrition Care in Developing Countries,” the event aims to foster solutions for hospital and community malnutrition.
Describing malnutrition as “the skeleton in the hospital’s closet,” Dr. Pounds emphasised the need for urgent awareness, policy reform, and collaboration among healthcare stakeholders to ensure effective hospital nutrition programs.
“Many patients in Nigerian hospitals suffer from inadequate nutritional support, leading to prolonged hospital stays, increased complications, and higher mortality rates. This issue must be addressed at the highest level,” she stated.
The press conference was attended by the management of Genrith Pharmaceuticals Limited, a major partner, led by its CEO, Chief Emmanuel Umenwa.
Call for National Clinical Nutrition Policy
Dr. Pounds, a U.S.-based specialist in critical care nutrition and a board-certified nutrition support pharmacist, urged the government to implement a national policy framework to support specialised clinical nutrition interventions. She stressed the importance of integrating mandatory nutrition screening and intervention into all healthcare facilities.
She also called on the Federal and State Ministries of Health to expand and enforce standardised clinical nutrition policies, ensure hospitals conduct structured nutrition screening for all patients, makes medical nutrition therapy accessible and affordable, and support research and local production of specialised nutritional products.
She further encouraged NAFDAC, NIPRD, pharmaceutical companies, and NGOs to collaborate on research, funding, and product development to improve hospital and community-based nutritional care.
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“We need a national framework that ensures no patient suffers due to a lack of proper nutrition,” the expert stressed.
Conference to Attract Top Medical and Policy Experts
Speaking on the upcoming conference, Dr. Pounds noted that it will bring together leading medical experts, policymakers, and healthcare stakeholders to develop strategies for addressing malnutrition.
Prominent figures expected at the event include Prof. Ali Pate, Coordinating Minister of Health (Special Guest of Honour), Nyesom Wike, Minister of the FCT (Chief Host), Prof. Muhammad Raji Mahmud, Chief Medical Director, National Hospital Abuja (Host), Prof. Audu Bala, President, Nigerian Medical Association (Keynote Speaker), Pharm. Ibrahim Tanko Ayuba, President, Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (Guest of Honour), and Prof. Salisu Maiwada Abubaka, President, Nutrition Society of Nigeria (Guest of Honour) admiration.
Pre-Conference Activities
Prof. Raji Mahmud, Chief Medical Director of the National Hospital Abuja, represented by the Chairperson of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), Pharm. Adesola Clara assured that the hospital has the necessary facilities and expertise to host a successful conference. He emphasised that the hospital is fully prepared for the programme.
Also, the WASPEN Central Planning Committee, led by Mrs. Ghinsel Blessing, revealed that pre-conference activities will include a hands-on training workshop on nutritional kits in hospitals, scheduled for June 16, a health walk to raise awareness about hospital malnutrition, expected to be led by First Lady Sen. Oluremi Tinubu.
With malnutrition posing a silent but deadly threat to healthcare outcomes, WASPEN hopes that the Tinubu administration will take decisive action to integrate nutrition-focused interventions into Nigeria’s health policies.
The 2025 WASPEN Clinical Nutrition Conference is expected to be a game-changer in shaping the future of clinical nutrition in Nigeria and West Africa.
Two US biotech companies say the Food and Drug Administration has cleared them to conduct clinical trials of their gene-edited pig kidneys for human transplants.
United Therapeutics along with another company, eGenesis, have been working since 2021 on experiments implanting pig kidneys into humans: initially brain-dead patients and more recently living recipients.
Advocates hope the approach will help address the severe organ shortage. More than 100,000 people in the United States are awaiting transplants, including over 90,000 in need of kidneys.
United Therapeutics’s approval, announced Monday, allows the company to advance its technology toward a licensed product if the trial succeeds.
The study authorization was hailed as a “significant step forward in our relentless mission to expand the availability of transplantable organs,” by Leigh Peterson, the company’s executive vice president.
The trial will initially enroll six patients with the end-stage renal disease before expanding to as many as 50, United Therapeutics said in a statement. The first transplant is expected in mid-2025.
Meanwhile, rival eGenesis said it had received FDA approval in December for a separate three-patient kidney study.
“The study will evaluate patients with kidney failure who are listed for a transplant but who face a low probability of receiving a deceased donor offer within a five-year timeframe,” the company said.
Xenotransplantation — transplanting organs from one species to another — has been a tantalizing yet elusive goal for science.
Early experiments in primates faltered, but advances in gene editing and immune system management have brought the field closer to reality.
Pigs have emerged as ideal donors: they grow quickly, produce large litters, and are already part of the human food supply.
United Therapeutics said trial patients would be monitored for life, assessing survival rates, kidney function, and the risk of zoonotic infections — diseases that jump from animals to humans.
Currently, there is only one living human recipient of a pig organ: Towana Looney, a 53-year-old from Alabama who received a United Therapeutics kidney on November 25, 2024.
She is also the longest-surviving recipient, having lived with a pig kidney for 71 days as of Tuesday. David Bennett of Maryland received a pig heart in 2022 and survived 60 days.
The Swiss government said Thursday it aimed to overhaul its law on medically-assisted reproduction to legalise egg donations and give broader access to sperm donations.
Currently egg donations are not allowed and only married couples can access sperm donations.
The Swiss parliament has long said it wants to change that, and has asked the government with coming up with a proposal to provide broader access.
A government statement said it had “decided to completely revise the law on medically assisted reproduction in order to adapt it to the current context” and had asked the interior ministry to draft a proposed law by the end of next year.
The government said it wants to legalise egg donations in cases where a woman in a couple is infertile, as a parallel to the already legal use of sperm donations in cases of male sterility.
Bern said its priority was “the protection of donors and the welfare of the child”, stressing that “this protection cannot be guaranteed if parents resort to egg donation abroad”.
The government also said it wanted to expand access to both egg and sperm donation to unmarried couples.
After Switzerland legalised same-sex marriage in 2022, married lesbian couples have also had access to sperm donations.
But the government said the current law barring unmarried couples from access to such medically assisted reproduction was “outdated and no longer corresponds to social reality”.
