Sequel to an invitation to a meeting with the management on the 6th of January 2016, The Joint Health Sector unions (JOHESU), Federal Medical Center umuahia chapter has agreed to suspend its 7 Day ultimatum by Monday. This position was made known by the NANNM Chapter Chairman Mr Jude Unam. According to the NANNM Chairman, the management has promised to meet their demands in the January salary payment. He added that "by next week, JOHESU and the management would visit Abuja for a fact finding mission. He warned that if their demands are not met as at the time January salary would be paid, they would be left with no other option than to down tools without any further notice

You would recall that earlier agreements reached between JOHESU and the internal management up till date yielded nothing tangible. The agreements include payment of 2013 promotion arrears, payment of skipping arrears, Resuming payment of uniform allowances for nurses which ceased sometime ago as against extant circulars and payment of teachng allowance to officers on CONHESS 7 & 8 which was removed on the first quarter of 2014 and promised for it to be restored at end of the year. The JOHESU chapter of the FMC Umuahia had on 6th December 2015 resolved that a 14 day ultimatum be given to the management in accordance with labour laws relating to industrial conflict resolution mechanisms.

Ogun State Government, western Nigeria, has directed that all owners of private health facilities operating within the State must revalidate or register their facilities with the Department of Hospital Services, State Ministry of Health at Oke–Mosan in Abeokuta. The State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Babatunde Ipaye, stated that the step is necessary in order to enhance sanity and eradicate quackery in the state health sector. The release made available to the Ministry’s Press Officer, Mrs. Ebunlomo Taiyese, had it that all Medical Centres, Maternity Homes, Medical Laboratories, Diagnostic Centres, Physiotherapist Clinic, Mortuaries and Alternative Medicines Practitioners across the State should revalidate their facilities latest before 31 March, 2016. 

According to the release, the exercise was to ensure proper monitoring, quality assurance and regulation of practice of medical professionals in both public and private sectors. The exercise also seek to screen out all unqualified persons that had fraudulently registered and are running private health facilities in and around the State. The release also has it that Continue Medical Education (CME) would be organized to update the professionals like Doctors, Nurses, Midwives and Medical Laboratory Scientists operating private health facilities in Ogun State.

Malaria-carrying parasites in parts of Cambodia have developed resistance to a major drug used to treat the disease in Southeast Asia, according to research published on Thursday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. The drug piperaquine, used in combination with the drug artemisinin, has been the main form of malaria treatment in Cambodia since 2008. The combination is also one of the few treatments still effective against multi drug-resistant malaria which has emerged inSoutheast Asia in recent years, and which experts fear may spread to other parts of the world.

"(Treatment) failures are caused by both artemisinin and piperaquine resistance, and commonly occur in places where dihydroartemisinin–piperaquine has been used in the private sector," researchers said. Artemisinin resistance has been found in five countries in Southeast Asia - Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Resistance to both artemisinin and drugs used in combination with it has developed in parts of Cambodia and Thailand. Experts are particularly concerned that artemisinin resistance will spread to sub-Saharan Africa where about 90 percent of malaria cases and deaths occur.

Unqualified personnel flood government hospitals as health record officers as less than 20 % are qualified and licensed to take and keep records, Registrar of the Health Records Officers Registration Board of‎ Nigeria, Alhaji Mohammed Ibrahim Mami has said. He stated this yesterday when the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire visited the headquarters of the Health Records Officers Registration Board of Nigeria in Abuja. Mami said hospitals and clinics in the country are still far from getting maximum impact of the board because they recruit untrained persons to man health records departments, adding that there are few trained health records managers to meet the needs and expertise necessary for efficient health records management.

He lamented that the country’s health records management cannot attract meaningful international and regional recognised practice if it does not measure up to standardised heath information system. Mami urged the minister to give a directive that institutions and persons engaging in electronic health records system should meet certain standards before being employed or going into operation. The registrar also called on the minister to develop a memo to the National Council of Health seeking to compel every health facility in the country to engage trained and licensed health information managers to manage it records department.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have invested more than 100 million dollars in a new cancer test. Grail, the company developing the test, said on Tuesday in Beijing that the method was a universal blood test to identify early-stage cancers in people with no symptoms. Jay Flatley, Illumina Chief Executive, who would serve as chairman of Grail, said the technology was aimed at detecting newly-forming cancers, and treat them at an earlier stage to increase the chances of survival.

He said the company started this new test 18 months ago, and that it was estimated to take at least an additional year of research and development to refine it. Flatley said the process was being carried out through a technique called a “liquid biopsy’’. “It scans patients’ blood streams for signs of cancer DNA, which can indicate that a tumor is forming, even if a doctor can’t see it on a scan and the patient hasn’t

The Federal Government says Lassa fever has claimed 41 lives from 93 reported cases in 10 states of the country. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the federal government on Friday put the death toll at 40 out of 86 reported cases of Lassa fever outbreak in same 10 states. The number of the suspected cases also rose from 86 last week to 93. Prof. Isaac Adewole, the Minister of Health, confirmed this in Abuja on Tuesday at a joint ministerial news conference on the update of the outbreak of the disease.

However, Adewole said there were no new confirmed cases or death in the last 48 hours. He did not disclose the state from which the additional life was lost. “In the last 48 hours the government raised a four-man expert committee, chaired by Prof. Michael Asuzu, to visit Kano, Niger and Bauchi, the three most endemic states. “The committee will embark on a fact finding mission, assess the current situation, document response experiences, identify gaps and proffer recommendations on how to prevent future occurrences,’’ he said.

The dreaded lassa fever on Thursday claimed the life a medical doctor at the Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital (BMSH), Port Harcourt, Dr. Ehivai Njamala. The death of Njamala brings to three, the number of persons who have been killed by the disease since its outbreak in Rivers State in December 2015. Chairman of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) in the state, Dr. Duro Green, who disclosed this to newsmen in Port Harcourt, said the medical doctor contracted the disease while treating patients at the Disease Control Unit in BMSH.

Green used the opportunity to announced the commencement of a three-day warning strike by the NMA following the kidnap of two medical doctors in the state few days ago. Dr. Ib  Aprioku, a consultant with the Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital (BMSH), Port Harcourt, was kidnapped on Sunday, January 10, 2016, while Dr Isaac Opurum, the director in charge of Community Health Services in the Rivers State Primary Health Care Management Board, was kidnapped in the early hours of yesterday from his residence in the state capital.

Declaring the end of the most recent outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia and saying all known chains of transmission had been stopped in West Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday hinted that new flare-ups are likely to occur. This was made known in a statement obtained by our correspondent in New York from the office of Dr Alex Gasasira, WHO Representative in Liberia. The statement warned that the job is not over, stressing that more flare-ups are expected and that strong surveillance and response systems would be critical in the months to come.

It would be recalled that Liberia was first declared free of Ebola transmission in May 2015, but the virus was re-introduced twice since then, with the latest flare-up in November. The United Nations health agency however commended the West African governments and people on their effective response to this recent re-emergence of Ebola, adding that the rapid cessation of the flare-up was a concrete demonstration of the governments’ strengthened capacity to manage disease outbreaks.

Thanks to a steady increase in Americans willing to donate their organs to save the lives of others, organ transplants in the United States reached a milestone in 2015, exceeding 30,000 for the first time, a non-profit group reported Wednesday. Those 30,973 transplants of kidneys, livers and other organs were nearly 5% more than performed in 2014 and came after years of fairly slow, steady climbs, said officials with the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). The network coordinates U.S. transplant activities.

This landmark achievement is a testament to the generosity of the American public to help others through donation, and their trust in the transplant system to honor their life-saving gift,” the group’s president, Betsy Walsh, said in a statement. Stepped-up organ donations, rather than any breakthroughs in transplant surgery, likely drove increases in recent years, said David Klassen, the network's chief medical officer. Transplant centers also have worked to improve logistics, so that fewer donated organs are discarded, he said.