Nigerian public health and modeling data

IRIN: A joint pilot study by Nurses Across the Borders, a Nigerian health NGO, and SeaTrust Institute, a US- based scientific and educational non-profit organization, will collect data to help map the impact of global warming on malaria in the West African country. “The nurses will note if malaria is recorded in any area where it usually isn’t, and all this information will be fed into a climate model which will help prepare health-related climate change projections for the country,” said Dr Lynn Wilson, executive director of the Institute.

About 500 nurses in Lagos, Nigeria, will participate in the pilot project starting in 2011, officials of the organizations announced at a side event at the UN climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico. The initiative will also create awareness about the links between health and climate change at the community level. Peters Omoragbon, who heads Nurses Across the Borders, said nurses were the primary healthcare givers in Nigeria and often the first point of contact during a disease outbreak.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected that the already high burden of disease and vulnerability in Africa meant climate-related health impacts could be more severe than in other parts of the world. Higher temperatures and altered rainfall patterns could potentially lead to an increase in the incidence of vector-born diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, onchocerciasis or river blindness, and trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, the IPCC said in its last assessment.

The scientific body also noted that in Africa “little evidence exists of causal changes in disease transmission and climate”, but this did not mean these changes did not exist; “rather, it may reflect the lack of available epidemiological data as a result of poor or absent surveillance and health information systems”….