By Ezekiel Nabieu
Everybody needs medicine. This is simply because the most healthy human being gets sick. But before I get down to the nitty-gritty of the headline let us indulge in some circumlocution.
Our thanks should go to medical scientists for their dauntless efforts in the discovery of medicines that prolong life. In passing, however, let us note unhappily that medicine can only cure curable diseases. Did Ebola come to your mind? I guess so.
Ebola seems to have joined the obnoxious band of incurable cancers. Is it a cancer? Ask your doctor or better still let our Ministry of Health and Sanitation find out and tell us. Talking about curable diseases and illnesses still, restoration to health depends either on the quality of the medical personnel or the drugs or both. Many a hapless patient has been sent to an early grave through wrong diagnosis or through a surgeon’s knife.
It reminds me of a period in our history and in fact in the history of many other African countries when medical students trained and qualified in the former USSR were not allowed to practice in the communist country. In other words they were being told “Go and kill your own people and not ours”. Can you beat that? I wouldn’t know whether in fact the Russians were killing their own kith and kin inadvertently.
Some of them had to undertake further studies in Western countries for better acceptance and promotion. USSR courses were mainly undertaken at their friendship university.
This imbroglio had its counterpart in the quality of American degrees in colonial days. They were not accepted on the same level as Western degrees. Their first degrees were equated with Higher School Certificates and their Masters degrees with British first degrees.
Back on track we may be wondering about thousands of counterfeit and/or expired drugs that are flooding the market menacing the lives of even the elite and the sophisticated. The rub is that even physicians can hardly detect the difference between a fake and real drug. Who else for heaven’s sake? When I heard that most of the millions of leones worth of drugs that were destroyed by fire at the New England Medical Stores were expired drugs I shook my head in sheer disbelief. How safe are we since the death of Daudis Koroma, former Deputy Minister of Health? The Latins say “whom the gods love dies young.” Patriots can only wish that the gods hated him so much that he could have continued his own part of cleansing the Augean Stables in spite of political differences. Since his death we have neither heard of the regular burning of expired/ counterfeit drugs nor the closure of so-called pure water companies springing up with impure water all over the place.
Would the Ministry of Health and Sanitation do us the favour of giving us a broad guide to the differences between genuine and fake drugs?
In central Freetown, and I am sure in provincial cities and towns as well, medicines are sold ‘fiti-fata’ and I wouldn’t know whether they are patented and what the patents mean. I just regard them as mini-pharmacies.
The "Pepe" doctors are in a class by themselves going from village to village selling counterfeit and expired drugs to people who need any sort of medicines to get well quickly.
The Ministry of Health and Sanitation should be commended for extending free health care for malaria to the populace. I only wish this facility could be extended to typhoid and some other common ailments like severe colds and headaches.
It's high time our government with the so-called second fastest growing economy in the whole –wide world shows some evidence of this by giving passes to elderly needy citizens as Medicare especially for retired civil servants some of whom earn as low as Le29,000 (twenty-nine thousand Leones) per month. These sorts of facilities could encourage more blood donations as a quid pro quo.
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE
Like its no-position stance over the gay/lesbian issue, like its (APC government’s) stance over the question of traditional medicine. No one can say for sure whether the government is serious about recognition of traditional medicine. No section of the Connaught Hospital has been set apart for traditional medicine patients to report to save a lone lecturer of the medical school tucked inside an indistinguishable corner. That is not good enough.
One snag with traditional medicine however is that it lacks standards. Its strengths and dosages vary so much that it is hard to depend on assuredly. But I understand rightly or wrongly that in Nigeria departments of hospitals are conspicuously set aside for traditional medicine. Why should our Traditional Medicine Association not take a leaf from them even if that leaf is dry. Rather, we find regrettably members or others engaged in killing by witch guns. Stop the idea!
FLYING OUT PATIENTS
Do you remember that a hospital was opened at Jui in the Western Area Rural District touted as being state-of-the-art. The questions now are whether that is the kind of hospital we need at this point in time and whether its impact is being felt by the public at large. With the opening of such a hospital one would have thought that the frequent flying-out of seriously ill citizens would have now been rendered infrequent or a thing of the past.
Besides that disappointment the fees charged at the hospital are just out of the reach of even most senior government officials.
Over one year ago I was diagnosed with as suffering from pneumonia after paying Le350, 000 for diagnostic tests. I was then told that I was to be hospitalised after paying a fee of Le 4 million. I returned home downcast. I consulted a dispenser who asked me whether I had pain on my sides or whether I had difficulties breathing. I answered in the negative. He then said categorically that I was not suffering from pneumonia. He prescribed medicine that cost Le 30, 000 (thirty thousand Leones). Here I sit writing in fine fettle. If that was not fleecing tell me what it is!
Government should cease from this odious idea of flying out dangerously ill patients on party basis. A lecturer is dying in the United Kingdom by inches for want of less than two thousand pounds sterling. Can this “grassroots” government be humane for once?
ON SLAJ 2014
I was not there. That notwithstanding, I was able to glean from professionals whose favourite pastime is rumour mongering and gossip in lieu of their mandate of information, entertainment and education. Their communiqué albeit prosaic has some food for thought and was too wide-ranging. One up-hill resolution that caught my attention was “convening a way forward for the SLBC that will, among other things, ensure its political and financial independence.” Wow! In the first place you don’t “convene” a way forward. You find one. Secondly it’s going to be a whale of a task to delink SLBC that is now virtually SLKC from State House.
Another resolution that was undone could have been to encourage regular columnists to become Associate Members of SLAJ. Outstanding contributors like Dr. Sama Banya, Andrew Keili and Winstanley Bankole-Johnson and others should not be sidelined. Ezekiel Nabieu is a hybrid journalist and is unclassified. How about that SLAJians?
(C) Politico 24/06/14
