Fans and well-wishers of Olanrewaju Fasasi, a.k.a Sound Sultan, have expressed concerns for the musician’s health after reports on Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with throat cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy in the United States.

As previously reported, The PUNCH contacted a close friend of the 44-year-old singer, who confirmed Sound Sultan’s presence in the U.S., but was unable to ascertain the purpose of the crooner’s visit to the country. The PUNCH provides an overview of throat cancer, explaining its types, causes, and symptoms. Throat cancer refers to cancer of the voice box, the vocal cords, and other parts of the throat, such as the tonsils and oropharynx.

About 38 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been acquired by the continent out of which 22.4 million doses have so far been administered, representing 1.8 per cent of the African population. Meanwhile, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Africa has reached 4,660,304 as of Thursday, the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said yesterday.

Medical doctors in Lagos State, under the aegis of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Medical Guild and Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN), have alleged that there are plans by political forces to impose a vice chancellor on Lagos State University (LASU).

It said there was also a plan to prevent medical doctors, who are professors of clinical medicine, from emerging as vice chancellor in the university as part of a larger conspiracy. Chairman, NMA Lagos, Dr. Adetunji Adenekan; Chairman Medical Guild, Dr. Oluwajimi Sodipo and Chairman, MDCAN LASUTH, Dr. Mumuni Amisu, yesterday, in a joint statement on the vice chancellor selection crisis in LASU, said:

The World Health Organisation Country Representative for Nigeria, Dr. Walter Mulombo, said Nigeria and other African countries would no longer receive funds to support polio eradication activities from January 2022.According to him, Nigeria and other countries on the continent had been removed from the priority list having been declared polio-free.

A statement by the Chief Press Secretary of the FCT Minister, Anthony Ogunleye, on Thursday, quoted Mulombo as saying this when he led a delegation of the WHO to update the minister on key public health issues. 

The World Health Organisation and the International Labour Organisation, say 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease occurred in 2016, noting that most of the deaths recorded are among people who worked for long hours. WHO, in a statement from its headquarters in Geneva on Monday, said that the figure was the first global analysis of loss of lives and health associated with working long hours.

“WHO and ILO estimate that in 2016, 398, 000 people died from stroke and 347, 000 from heart disease as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week. “Between the Year 2000 and Year 2016, the number of deaths from heart disease due to working long hours increased by 42 per cent and from stroke by 19 per cent,” it said.

The recently identified COVID-19 variant has stealthily spread to two continents, according to a new study. The variant, named B.1.620, according to data from across Europe, hosts a suite of mutations that have been linked to increased transmissibility and the ability to escape the immune response.

As reported by Nature, multiple travelers carried the new variant from Central Africa to Europe, where it has now spread to at least a dozen countries.The report noted that the variant was first detected in April in viral samples from Lithuania. “After noticing it, Gytis Dudas at the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre in Sweden and colleagues analysed SARS-CoV-2 genomic data from across the globe and found that B.1.620 had suddenly appeared in European samples in February.

A retired Director of Nutrition Services, Dr. James Oloyede, says that taking more than five cups of black tea a day may lead to caffeine-related health problems. Oloyede says this is because black tea also contains caffeine, just like coffee.

According to a study published online in ResearchGate, a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers, tea, next to water is the cheapest beverage humans consume. The study, co-authored by Hasan Mukhtar of the Department of Dermatology  at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, notes that drinking the beverage tea has been considered a health-promoting habit since ancient times.

A consultant cardiologist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Ikeja, Dr. Ramon Moronkola, says sleep deprivation and disrupted sleep patterns can be linked to strokes, heart attacks and cardiovascular disorders.

Speaking in an interview with PUNCH HealthWise, Moronkola said that even people who have obstructive sleep apnea and poor sleep can be at risk of developing stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. Moronkola spoke against the backdrop of a 2021 study published in the European Heart Journal showing that Nocturnal Arousal Burden is associated with long-term cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in women and, to a lesser extent, in men.

Nigeria may have to wait till August to receive the 29.5 million doses of Johnson & Johnson it is expecting through the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Trust even as the COVID-19 pandemic in India has continued to affect the worldwide supply of vaccines, Saturday NAN has learnt.

The Federal Government had last week released N29.1bn for the purchase of Johnson & Johnson vaccines through the AVAT initiative coordinated by the Afreximbank. The move was expected to alleviate the effect of the scarcity of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines caused by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, medical experts say face-to-face medical consultation is still crucial in healthcare delivery, especially in the management of certain health conditions. According to them, seeing patients face-to-face helps many of them to articulate their health concerns better than consultations via telephone, video or emails.

Though the outbreak of COVID-19 has reduced face-to-face consultation and increased telemedicine in some cases, the experts say most patients and physicians feel more comfortable having one-on-one discussion.