Week in health: RBC, media heighten efforts to halve HIV cases

The Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) and the media fraternity, as part of the year-long campaign against HIV/Aids that began in December, have urged media practitioners to use their respective platforms to heighten the fight against the virus. Dr Sabin Nsanzimana, the head of HIV/Aids division at RBC, called on journalists to play a greater role ensuring that by the end of the campaign in November this year, HIV/Aids-related deaths have reduced by at least half. According to Nsanzimana, research conducted last year shows that some people who test HIV-positive delay to start treatment hence causing thousands of death every year. Dieudonne Ruturwa, the community mobilisation advisor at Unaids, applauded Rwanda’s decision to scale up HIV treatment combined with robust HIV-related financial support from development partners substantially strengthened the country’s primary care system Meanwhile, the global leader of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Ted Wilson, while at the Adventist University of Central Africa in Kigali, last week, announced plans to construct facilities that will host a medical school that is envisaged to be a centre of excellence in the region. The school will be part of the Adventist University of Central Africa. Among the facilities to be constructed as part of the school include a 1,000-seater dining hall, 100-bed dormitories and a twenty-room guest house. At the event, the university’s rector, Dr Abel Sebahashyi, requested other church leaders and followers to pray hard for the medical school to be up and running by next year Meanwhile, efforts to curb malnutrition have been boosted by community workers mastering the use of mid-upper arm circumference tapes (MUAC). The MUAC of children, aged between 6 and 59 months, provides the degree at which a child is considered healthy and can even predict mortality. Research also shows that the device is good for screening and selecting those in need of therapeutic feeding. The MUAC tapes that were distributed to all CHWs in the country are made from plastic paper and are almost indestructible yet useful in patients with HIV and TB. In other news, the number of new cases of Ebola went up in all three of West Africa’s worst-hit countries in the last week of January, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday last week. It is the first weekly increase in 2015, ending a series of encouraging declines. The WHO says Sierra Leone registered 80 of the 124 new cases, Guinea 39 and Liberia the remaining five.