Makerere University College of Health Sciences Students' Association

24/10/2020

DID U KNOW THE TEN FACTS ABOUT DIABETES???

Fact 1: About 422 million people worldwide have diabetes.
Fact 2: Diabetes is 1 of the leading causes of death in the world
Fact 3: There are two major forms of diabetes; Type 1 and Type 2
Fact 4: A third type of diabetes is gestational diabetes.
Fact 5: Type 2 diabetes is much more common than type 1 diabetes.
Fact 6: People with diabetes can live long and healthy lives when their diabetes is detected and well-managed.
Fact 7: Early diagnosis and intervention is the starting point for living well with diabetes.
Fact 8: The majority of diabetes deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries
Fact 9: Diabetes is an important cause of blindness, amputation and kidney failure
Diabetes of all types can lead to complications in many parts of the body and increase the overall risk of dying prematurely
Fact 10: Type 2 diabetes can be prevented
Thirty minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most days and a healthy diet can drastically reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

31/05/2020

The Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) has said they are doing a deeper study on the type of Covid-19 affecting people in the country.
More than half of the patients who tested positive did not have known symptoms for the disease like flu, cough and fever, as opposed to foreign countries where more than 80 per cent of patients present the symptoms.
The death rate of the patients in other countries, specifically in Europe, is also high (two deaths per 100 cases).

Dr Julius Lutwama, the deputy Director of UVRI, said the coronavirus is changing at a worrying rate. He said there are already four variations of the coronavirus that have emerged in a very short time.
Dr Lutwama said the UVRI is sequencing the genome of the virus to study this detail.
The genome of an organism is the whole of its hereditary information encoded in its DNA. Sequencing the virus is the way scientists use to understand changes in the DNA of a virus.
“Coronavirus moved from one population to another such as from China to Europe, then from China to Africa, they have formed four different clades,” the virologist told Daily Monitor last week.

Dr Lutwama explained that the fast mutation will slow the development processes and may affect the efficacy of vaccines and drugs being developed against the virus.
“The vaccine being developed should be tested for efficacy in each of the clades (mutated types of SARS-CoV-2),” he said.
He said with these fast-changing viruses, booster doses of vaccine are often given to increase efficacy and better protect the population.

Dr Bruce Kirenga, the director of Makerere University Lung Institute, said the behavior of Covid-19 in Ugandan patients is very different.
He explained that the type of Covid-19 being treated in Uganda is different from that in other countries with mortality rates of as high as 19 deaths per 1,000 cases. That means two deaths in every 100 cases.
“The idea of this being a different phenotype of Covid-19 is very strong. This different phenotype holds a lot of answers on how we are going to respond to the epidemic,” he said.

The death rate of the patients in other countries, specifically in Europe, is also high

26/05/2020

Follow this video to learn how to use COVIDCanIDoIt an everyday activity risk assessment tool that enable to make informed decisions before undertaking common daily activities. Follow this link to get to the tool https://covidcanidoit.com/UG. The tool has a location feature that tells you how crowded a given place is before you visit it.

19/05/2020

Prepare for 60 Days

So - I am trying to not let this get under my skin, but we have to wonder. The health sector has about 35,000 health workers that they consider critical for patient care. They are employed in health facilities whose locations are well known - public, private, mission facilities.

For the last 2 months, we have advised, begged, threatened, fundraised … anything, to get a small proportion of these health workers some personal protective equipment (PPE) – and we have failed. Up to today, the majority of health workers still do not have the equipment they need to safely take care of patients.

But in the next 2 weeks, the government is going to get a mask into the hands of some 30 million people – all across the country. Is there something they know that we do not? -

*Dr. Olive Kobusingye*

16/05/2020

*Anticipating the "butterfly effect" in the global CoVID19 pandemic*

Last week, I posted on how the global CoVID19 pandemic exhibited features reminiscent of chaos theory. Basically, what this means is that the mini-pandemics of each country are deterministic-fractals of the whole, even when the exact peak and duration each will assume, remains unpredictable.

In his lecture series on chaos theory, Steven Strogetz introduces a phenomenon in chaos theory dubbed the 'butterfly effect'. Basically what this means, is that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in Brazil, can initiate a cascade of down stream events that can result into a tsunami somewhere on the East coast of the United States.

Using this language, I want to highlight why the world, regions and nations must understand that, the ultimate control and management of the CoVID19 requires a global approach, and that controlling the pandemic in one country will not be sustainable without ensuring that all its neighbours and linked globalization partners, equally do the same. That's because, one case from a foreign country can reseed the pandemic and literally re-ignite a tsunami in another.

As we strive to address the issue of truck drivers in East Africa, it's important that Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan and Rwanda appreciate that all their efforts are futile, unless their counterparts in Tanzania and Burundi start to take the pandemic serious, and thereby actively strive to control and manage their fractals, on basis of evidenced public health measures.

Otherwise, one can predict an influx of travellers, truck drivers and even refugees: many carrying disease, from these 2 fractals once their pandemic hits an uncontrollable growth phase. The prior prophesied apocalyptic images of dead bodies in the streets of Africa will become a reality.

From Dr. Misaki Wayengera

09/05/2020

Truck drivers on it again!!!

07/05/2020

Prof. Peter Waiswa from School of Public health has been appointed to the World Health Organisation advisory board. He has been part of many strategic policies and initiatives in areas of maternal, newborn and child health.

Details👉 https://bit.ly/3frlfGN

03/05/2020

DID YOU KNOW THAT...
African countries don’t need donated ventilators without revamping their health systems first!

As Covid-19 has spread across the globe, a worldwide shortage of ventilators has left hospitals scrambling to care for the sick. Nowhere is the shortage expected to be more acutely felt than in Africa, where many countries have only a handful, and some have none at all.

An influx of ventilators may seem like the obvious solution, and organizations like the Jack Ma Foundation have generously stepped up in that regard. Unfortunately, I’ve learned firsthand why such an approach is insufficient.

In 2008, I co-founded an organization that sought to address the lack of access to clean water in several poor communities in Nigeria. Building water wells seemed like the best and quickest way to solve the problem, but a few months after building them, each one had broken down since the communities lacked the capacity or expertise to maintain them.

I later learned there are more than 50,000 broken wells in Africa alone, and in some communities as many as 80% of donated wells are broken. Through that experience, I learned a hard lesson: even when there seems to be an urgent need, simply providing resources without considering the local context is rarely the right approach.

For healthcare systems to effectively leverage ventilators in the fight against this coronavirus they require an immense amount of resources and expertise that many African countries lack. There’ll need to be constant electricity and a consistent supply of accompanying sedatives, intravenous medicines, and intravenous pumps for ventilators to add real value.

Healthcare professionals will need to be trained to use them, and a reliable system will need to be put into place for maintaining the expensive machines. This simply isn’t realistic for many healthcare systems on the continent, let alone an efficient use of limited resources. It’s clear that a different and more contextual solution is necessary for Africa to keep Covid-19 at bay.

What Africa needs
Africa needs solutions geared to the African context. Although that may sound trite and cliché, it’s important to note since the beginning of the global pandemic, many African countries have copied and pasted policies from wealthier economies with little regard for how those policies would work on the continent.

For instance, how is “sheltering in place” feasible in economies where a majority of people lack access to water and sanitation at home and must leave their homes in order to eat? Instead, African stakeholders must factor in countries’ strengths, existing infrastructure, and financial limitations. The depth of Africa’s poverty certainly complicates the continent’s response to the spread of COVID-19, but it doesn’t render it impossible.

In Senegal, for instance, innovators are developing interventions that the country’s healthcare system has the capacity to absorb and sustain, including a $60 ventilator produced by 3D machines. In contrast with donated ventilators that cost as much as $16,000 and require an entire infrastructure for use, the $60 ventilator doesn’t have as many features and requires less energy and medical training. Another example is a simple, $1 Covid-19 testing kit that can be administered in communities that lack sophisticated healthcare centers. As Senegalese scientist Amadou Sall explained, “there is no need for a highly equipped lab. It is a simple test that can be done anywhere.”

The knee jerk reaction to provide ventilators for Africa is understandable. It was the same reaction I had when I walked into poor communities that lacked water. But piecemeal solutions like these rarely have the intended impact since they fail to consider the local context; with some luck the solutions may work for a little while, but without a broader system in place to support them, they’re inherently unsustainable. With that, the next time an epidemic hits, Africa is bound to need donations of whatever new medical equipment will be deemed necessary.

What if, instead of donating expensive and resource intensive ventilators to African countries, more resources were channeled to fund local, context-driven innovations like the ones in Senegal? These innovations will not only provide care for the sick and speed up testing, but they will also birth a new generation of African innovators who will be better equipped to develop African solutions for the next pandemic.

For healthcare systems to leverage ventilators in the fight against coronavirus they require resources and expertise that many African countries lack