Nigeria

International Activity Report, 2009 Approximately 59,000 women die every year in Nigeria from complications in childbirth, giving the country the seventh-highest maternal mortality rate in the world according to the United Nations Population Fund.    In 2009 there was a meningitis epidemic, a cholera outbreak, and ethnic and religious tensions flared up in the northern and southern parts of the country. In response, MSF provided maternal healthcare and surgical support, launched a widespread meningitis vaccination campaign that treated 4.7 million people, and provided treatment for cholera.   Trauma care in the Niger Delta MSF runs programmes in the Rivers and Bayelsa states in the Niger Delta. Here in Port...

A GOLD rush in northern Nigeria risked exposing tens of thousands of children to lead poisoning in what might already be the worst such crisis in history, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MS F) said this week. ...According to the aid group, when miners return to their villages, or grind ore near their homes, they spread leadrich dust into houses and the ground on which children crawl, resulting in them eating the lead as they have more handto-mouth activity than adults. "We are looking at the possibility of eventually more of the lead working its way into the aquifers, into the wells, into the water systems," said Ivan Gayton, a country director for MSF... Read full article below

Obstetric fistulas, most often the result of prolonged obstructed labor, is an opening that occurs between the bladder and the vagina, or between the rectum and the vagina and causes a woman to become incontinent, among other devastating medical and social consequences. According to the UN, an estimated two million women live with fistulas today—about half of them in Nigeria.

More than 100,000 people have been forced to leave their homes due to flooding in northwestern Nigeria, after a dam failed on the Rima River near Goronyo, Sokoto State, on 8 September. Dozens of villages were rapidly submerged when a large section of the Goronyo dam’s spillway collapsed. The area is experiencing one of the wettest rainy seasons on record, which is being blamed for the collapse of the spillway.   In the affected villages, people have been struggling to hold back the rising waters with sandbags. Thousands of mud-brick houses have been destroyed by the flood. Homeless people are living under improvised shelters of plastic sheeting and sticks, on whatever dry ground they can find. The fortunate are...