In a packed San Francisco conference room last Tuesday, upbeat company representatives and scientists presented detailed clinical trial data on the first Alzheimer’s treatment shown to clearly, albeit modestly, slow the disease’s normal cognitive decline. The antibody therapy has buoyed a field marked by decades of failures. Now, it appears to be on the cusp […]
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Health Issues in Africa
Health Issues in Africa is an online news portal dedicated to exclusive and comprehensive coverage of the issues surrounding health and development affecting the people of the African continent.
Our readers include policymakers, health professionals working in the government, private and non-profit sector, research and the media.
HIV/Aids
Out of the 34 million HIV-positive people worldwide, 69% live in sub-Saharan Africa. There are roughly 23.8 million infected persons in all of Africa. 91% of the world’s HIV-positive children live in Africa. More than one million adults and children die every year from HIV/AIDS in Africa alone.
Diarrhoeal diseases
The fact that almost 40 percent of all diarrhoea deaths in children under five worldwide occur in the African region is striking. The diarrhoea mortality burden among children under five in Sub-Saharan Africa reveals the persistent magnitude of this preventable and treatable disease in the region.
Malaria
It is because the most effective malaria vector – the mosquito Anopheles gambiae – is the most widespread in Africa and the most difficult to control, ninety percent of all malaria deaths in Africa occur in young children.
The situation of access to clean water and sanitation in rural Africa is even more dismal than the previous statistics imply. The WHO (2006) stated that, in 2004, only 16% of people in sub-Saharan Africa had access to drinking water through a household connection (an indoor tap or a tap in the yard).
When it comes to killer diseases in Africa many people think of infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, or even Ebola. But the reality is thatdiseases like cancer, diabetes and heart disease – known as non–communicable diseases (NCDs) – are a major threat.
Access to medicines refers to the ability for people to get needed medicines required. Such access is part of the right to health as supported by international law since 1946. The World Health Organization states that essential medicines should be available, of good quality, and accessible.