Recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) gave Nigeria a clean bill of health over type A Meningitis epidemics, also known in medical term as meningococcal A meningitis. The WHO scored Nigeria high alongside 15 other African countries in the fight against the epidemics. This is indeed cheery moment for the nation’s health sector because the WHO high rating of the country in respect of Meningitis virus is but a consolidation of feats the sector recorded in recent past. That is talking about fights against deadly diseases like Polio myelitis, Ebola, etc.
It is interesting to recall that quite recently the WHO passed a confidence vote on Nigeria for eliminating Polio.
These are no mean achievements if separate annual mortality rate of the diseases is taken into cognizance, nevertheless sustaining the success lies the greater challenge. While basking in the euphoria stakeholders in the health sector and authorities should not be unmindful of the task ahead because as WHO warned it is not yet Uhuru. As Dr William Perea, Coordinator for Control of Epidemic Diseases Unit, WHO, puts it, “meningitis tends to hit Africa in cycles. “Cases of meningitis C have been rising since 2013, first in Nigeria in 2013 and 2014, and then in 2015.“We have to be ready for a much larger number of cases during the 2016 meningitis season.’’
Similarly other international organisations joined forces with the WHO and issued warning on imminent outbreak if the fight to eliminate it is not sustained. The other three organisations included the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The four bodies constitute the International Coordinating Group for Vaccine Provision for Epidemic Meningitis Control.
Before now Meningitis infection was spreading at alarming rate and became a cause for concern. With 800 deaths and 12,000 serious cases, recorded this year alone across the country meningitis became the new concern of the WHO and all and sundry.
However, of great worry is that the vaccine for its treatment is in short supply all over the globe. According to a statement by the WHO the world is short of vaccines. In view of this, the organization raised the alarm that the entire Africa is at risk of a large meningitis outbreak if production of vaccines are not scaled up. Local and international health officials are worried that Nigerian children may be the worst hit in the lingering shortage of meningitis vaccine in Nigeria and some parts of African countries following possible outbreak of child meningitis in some African countries.
Meningitis is a bacterial infection of the lining of the brain and spinal cord which has swept across 26 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa killing and disabling young people annually or cause severe brain damage within hours.
The virus can cause severe brain damage with fatality in 50 per cent of cases if untreated.
Medical investigations show that several different bacteria can cause meningitis and the Neisseria meningitis is the one with the potential to cause large epidemics. And with the acute shortage of meningitis -containing vaccine posing a serious threat to minimise the number of people with the disease leaves the society at the mercy of the infection.
The question is what should be done? To buttress a suggestion made in the foregoing a member of the team that developed the vaccine also an official of WHO, Dr Marie-Pierre Preziosi in her submission stressed the need to sustain the protection that initial mass vaccination campaigns provided.
She cautioned that “Our experience from other vaccine-preventable diseases has shown that if we let our guard down, these diseases will severely rebound.”
Simply put if no subsequent effort to sustain the anti-Meningitis programme the country should expect to see “catastrophic resurgences in disease. Nigeria cannot afford to allow the disease to rebound because not only does it place a great burden on the victims, the nation’s health system will also be thrown in jeopardy with high cost implications.