Eleven per cent of the children that die in the world yearly are from Nigeria. Bukola Adebayo writes on the issue involved
Tunminu had been feeling feverish for the past two days, and her mother, Shade Akintayo, had been giving her some anti-malaria drugs for treatment.
Akintayo, a nursery school teacher, who is used to managing sick children in her school, thought her three-year-old daughter’s condition was really nothing to fret about.
However, three days after the fever started, Tumininu’s case grew worse, as she developed diarrhoea and was also vomiting blood in the night.
The agitated single mother called on her neighbours, who assisted her to take the ailing child to a private hospital in Surulere where they lived.
The nurse on duty told Akintayo that there was no doctor around,adding that it would take some time before the physician would come to attend to the child.
The doctor showed up two hours later and, after examining Tumininu, he advised them to rush her to the general hospital.
She said, “After waiting for two hours for the doctor, she started convulsing but the nurse reassured us that we would take care of her, all for him to tell us to take her to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital in Idi-Araba or the general hospital in our area. They did not have the facilities or the specialist to diagnose what was wrong with her. He also refused to give us a referral letter.”
Akintayo, who narrated her story to our correspondent in LUTH, on Thursday, said they opted for the general hospital that was closer to their area.
She said on getting to the hospital around 5am, there were other women with their sick children waiting to see doctors.
A nurse advised them to take her to LUTH if they wanted quick intervention because there were 15 children on emergency.
Akintayo rushed her sick daughter to LUTH.
“She was already gasping by the time we were leaving the general hospital.There was no ambulance. Tumininu had begun gasping for breath before we got to the hospital. But as we were taking her into the emergency unit in there, she died,” she says.
So, Tumininu’s was taken to the mortuary.
The overwhelmed doctors said the child died of acute diarrhoea.
Yet, about 13 children under the age of five-like Tumininu- die every minute in Nigeria due to lack of immediate care and basic medical interventions.
According to the World Health Organisation, 6.9 million children under five years of age died in 2011 globally.
It also estimated that 19, 000 children die each day and; almost 800 every hour.
What is troubling about these statistics is that though other countries have made remarkable progress in reducing the number of children dying in their countries, Nigeria still records an unbelievably high death rate of children under the age of five.
For example, after India, Nigeria is second on the list of countries with the highest infant deaths in the world.
Why are these children dying? Doctors and caregivers, who spoke with our correspondent at three-day training for doctors in Nigeria by the Imperial College Faculty, London, said dearth of trained health personnel at all the primary health care centres, poor child care workforce and lack of emergency paediatric response facilities in our hospitals were reasons for high infant mortality rate in the country.
For instance, a consultant paediatrician, Dr. Dayo Ajayi-Obe, said Nigeria, with a population of 70million children under the age of 18 ,has only 600 trained consultant paediatricians. Out of this 70 million children, over 40 million are under the age of five.
Read more: Punch News
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