The Chief Medical Director at the Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital, Dr Shafiu Isah, has called for increase access to treatment of Noma diseases.
Dr Isah dedicates his live to treating children suffering from neglected diseases that few people have heard of.
Report says Noma is a gangrenous disease that attacks facial tissue and bone. Without treatment, it kills around 90% of its victims, most of who live in hard-to-reach rural areas.
Dr Isah said due to the extreme poverty and lack of awareness, a lot of children die at home without making it to the hospital, which in turn exacerbates the substantial knowledge gaps regarding this preventable and treatable disease.
“In the absence of reliable epidemiological data, a 1998 World Health Organization (WHO) global estimation of 140,000 new cases yearly remains the most widely cited source on Noma. The majority of these cases are found in sub-Saharan Africa in children between the ages of two and six.
“For those who ultimately survive the disease, if not treated immediately, it takes mere days for them to be left with severe facial disfigurements that make it hard to eat, speak, see or breathe.
In turn, this often leads to severe stigmatisation within their communities and a range of accompanying human rights violations,” Chairman of the Medical Advisory Committee at Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital, Dr Abubakar Abdullahi Bello said,
“We’ve had cases where when the patient presents to the hospital, the whole of the lower jaw is already gone, or the whole of their nostril pathway is gone.
“But if the cases present to the hospital early, then they don’t have such issues. That’s what we are advocating for. With early admission, we can also reduce the duration of the stay in the hospital and these patients will not require surgical intervention.”