Feature Stories

Abuja – Four months before her wedding and on the eve of starting a new job, Dada Titilope went in for a routine medical check. It was then that the 36-year-old resident of Ile-Ife Osun State in Southwestern Nigeria discovered that she had hepatitis B.

Kara – At the edge of a small field in the outskirts of Kara city in northern Togo where a crowd gathered for the annual Evala festival¬—a traditional celebration featuring wrestling contests—in mid-2022, a bright coloured bus drew small groups of people for a crucial issue: COVID-19 vaccination.

Nouakchott – In late August 2022 Mauritania’s health authorities received reports of several cases of miscarriage among camel herds in the southern Boutilimit Valley region. Within less than 24 hours, three emergency teams had been dispatched to respond to the alert.

Accra/Lusaka/Pretoria —Twice a week, a team of scientists from South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) traverses the country’s metropolitan areas, visiting up to 50 wastewater treatment sites to fill bottles with effluent. The bottles are sealed and disinfected, then transported to a network of laboratories across the country where their contents will be tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Abuja, 13 December, 2022 - “I recall growing up in a comfortable home and lacking nothing until my father fell ill in 2010. I was in secondary school when his sickness started.  He was a farmer and businessman who sell cocoa in Ondo state, southwest Nigeria, says Adetutu Ibironke, a mother of one residing in Abuja, Nigeria. 

She says her father’s sickness started like malaria and seems to be no cause for alarm until he began frequenting the hospital.