LAGOS STATE GOVERNMENT REFUNDS 145 FORMER SUBSCRIBERS OF EGAN HOUSING ESTATE
admin By Oyebola Owolabi
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has promised greater commitment to ending maternal mortality, especially from Post Partum Hemorrhage (PPH).
Co-Chair of the Foundation, Bill Gates, made the promise while addressing journalists on the sideline of the 2024 Nutri-Vision: Pan African Youth Dialogue on Nutrition in Abuja.
According to Gates, the foundation’s trial on the $2 dollars anti-bleeding drugs has proven to be very effective and so it encouraged the World Health Organisation (WHO) to change its recommendation.
He said: “Our most exciting work is in the Mother and Child area. We were trying out the idea of putting a drape under a mother who’s delivering to see how much bleeding is happening. We had two cutoff points in the trial where you could give a woman these very cheap anti-bleeding drugs after 200 milliliters of bleeding. The current WHO standard is that you should treat women if they bled over 500 milliliters, but there are no tools to measure that, so often women who even exceed that level don’t get treatment.
“But what we showed in the trial was that if you use these anti-bleeding drugs at the current recommended level, you saved a little over 50 per cent of lives, but if you did it at the lower level, you actually saved 70 per cent. So we got the WHO to change its recommendation. Now we are trying to get it rolled out such that you have this plastic mat that’s very inexpensive to measure the blood loss, and then if needed, the $2 drugs that actually stop the bleeding can be used.
“That study was supposed to go on for three years but in six months, the effect was so dramatic and we ended the trial early, which almost never happens. If something is so miraculous, it then becomes unethical to continue the trial.
“We’re trying to do the same thing for other maternal conditions like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes because these issues that drive the level of maternal mortality are unfortunately still fairly high in Nigeria.”
Gates also hinted of efforts on developing cheap effective vaccines to combat tuberculosis. He lamented that tuberculosis had resumed its number one position as the biggest infectious disease killer of about 1.6 million people every year, and yet it is underfunded.
He said: “The foundation works on tuberculosis diagnostics because it’s still too hard and expensive to diagnose, and we want to get a $2 test. We don’t have that yet, but we’re pretty optimistic we’ll get it.
“We’re making great progress on the drugs and bringing new drugs in because patients have to sadly take the current drugs for nine months, even as there are the drug-resistant strains, either single drug resistance or multi-drug resistance.
“We’re also working on a vaccine, and the trial will take like four years, and we’re hoping it will show like a 70 per cent reduction rate. It’s a very expensive trial, going for about $500 million, yet there is the possibility it won’t work. The vaccine is also very risky but we’ve decided to go ahead and fund it because there are no good TB vaccines, and this one, at least at the trial level, looked like it might give us a 70 per cent reduction rate.
“But we are very hopeful, and we’ll try other vaccines as well. The drugs and new diagnostic I guarantee will work.”
