Reports say, Noma, a gangrenous disease that attacks facial tissue and bone has killed around ninety percent of its victims, mostly those who live in hard-to-reach rural areas, within a few weeks.
This came to the fore, as the Chief Medical Director at the Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital in the northwest region of Nigeria, Dr Shafiu Isah dedicates his days to treating children suffering from the neglected disease that few people have even heard of.
Dr. Isah, said, without treatment, usually due to extreme poverty and lack of awareness, a lot of the children die at home without even making it to the hospital, which according to him, exacerbates the substantial knowledge gaps regarding the preventable and treatable disease.
Dr Abubakar Abdullahi Bello, Chairman of the Medical Advisory Committee at Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital, said they have had cases where the patient is presented to the hospital, with the whole of the lower jaw already gone, or the whole of their nostril pathway gone, saying that if the cases present to the hospital early, they would not have such issues hence the advocacy for early admission so as to reduce the duration of the stay in the hospital and the patients will not require surgical intervention.
Seven hundred and forty-one patients have received training on Noma in 2021 and the first half of 2022 with funding from World Health Oorganisation, WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF, which helped the Ministry to scale up training of primary care workers.
WHO had on 28 July 2022, launched the Open WHO, a new free and interactive online Noma course to host unlimited users during health emergencies.
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