The Federal Ministry of Health in partnership with Resolve to Save Lives (a Nongovernmental organisation) has launched a six-month pilot health intervention programme with a view to addressing the menace of hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases in Kano state.
Over 35 percent of population are said to be at risk of the disease.
The programme seeks to strengthen the management of hypertension in primary healthcare centres in the state, targeting adults from 18 years and above with a view to identifying persons with traces of the disease for proper and holistic treatment.
Speaking at the flag-off of the programme which was organised by the World Health Organization(WHO), in Kano, over the weekend, permanent secretary, Federal Ministry of Health, A. M. Abdullahi, described the disease as one of the leading causes of premature deaths accounting for 11 percent of deaths from non-communicable diseases in the country.
Represented by Ene Obong, a top official from the FMoH, Abdullahi urged the residents of Kano metropolis to always be proactive by taking appropriate diet and proper and timely medical checks against the killer disease.
He said, “Systematic review with meta-analysis conducted by the Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with WHO in 2018 found the prevalence of cardiovascular disease with hypertension to be 31.2%, hypertensive heart diseases 27.6 %, cardiomyopathies 11.5% and ischemic heart diseases at 0.7%.”
He said the prevalence of heart diseases could have been higher if there were proper diagnosis and documentations conducted routinely, adding, “It was in combating this challenge of inadequate documentation that the Resolve to Save Lives is supporting the Federal Ministry of Health in collaboration with WHO to implement the National Hypertension Control Initiative in Kano and Ogun states before scale up to other parts of the country.”
