Nigeria - Getting Sick

You don't want to get sick in Nigeria. In recent times, more than 2,000 of Nigeria's doctors have fled to the United States, with another 2,000 opting for Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Canada and Britain. Health services are generally limited to the cities, and are only affordable for wealthy Nigerians. Modern medicine is nonexistent in rural areas. Public health has crashed with the government's pilfering of anything of value sent into the country. Yellow fever, chloroquine-resistant malaria, trachoma and yaws are the biggest medical threats in Nigeria. Malaria is found in all parts of the country, including all urban areas, and the risk is present all year. There is a 17 percent risk of malaria exposure. Dracunculiasis, meningitis, lassa fever, leishmaniasis (both cutaneous and visceral), rabies, relapsing fever, African sleeping sickness and typhus (endemic flea-borne, epidemic louse-borne and scrub) are prevalent. Muslim northern Nigeria is the area worst affected by the meningitis scourge that has killed thousands of people in the Sahal belt of West Africa. Nigeria is also receptive to dengue fever, and schistosomiasis may be found throughout the country. There is one doctor for every 6,134 people in Nigeria.

Outbreaks of meningitis, cholera, measles and gastroenteritis swept across the arid areas of West Africa in March and April 1996, particularly in Nigeria. Around 70,000 people in 17 African countries have been afflicted by meningitis alone, and nearly 9,000 have died, more than half of them in Nigeria. The health problem was seen as so grave by Saudi Arabia that it banned all Nigerians from entering the Kingdom to perform the annual pilgrimage, or hajj, to the Islamic world's two holiest shrines. Meningitis is inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. If treated in time, its victims can be saved, although complications can bring deafness or loss of the fingers.