In her bid to eliminate severe Noma in children, the federal government has developed and implemented the programme’s national action plan for noma prevention and control in collaboration with World Health Organisation (WHO) and other partners.

On Wednesday, WHO launched a new free and interactive online noma course through OpenWHO, the first WHO platform to host unlimited users during health emergencies.

“This course will be a useful self-learning tool for health workers to increase their capacity to prevent, identify, treat and refer noma, considering both public health and human-rights aspects. Officers in charge of noma at the national and district level can also utilize the course material to train primary care workers,” says Yuka Makino, a Technical Officer for Oral Health at the WHO Regional Office for Africa.

Noma is a gangrenous disease that attacks facial tissue and bone. Without treatment, it kills around 90 per cent of its victims, most of whom live in hard-to-reach rural areas, within just a few weeks.

A medical expert and the Chief Medical Director, Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital, Sokoto, Dr Shafiu Isah, said: “Due to extreme poverty and lack of awareness”, adding: “Unfortunately, a lot of these children die at home without even making it to the hospital.”

Dr Isah says the situation, in turn, exacerbates the substantial knowledge gaps regarding this preventable and treatable disease.

The experts said even for those who ultimately survive the disease, if not treated immediately, it takes mere days for them to be left with severe facial disfigurements that make it hard to eat, speak, see or breathe.

They added: “In turn, this often leads to severe stigmatization within their communities and a range of accompanying human rights violations”.

Also, speaking, the Chairman of the Medical Advisory Committee at Sokoto Noma Children’s Hospital, Dr Abubakar Abdullahi Bello, said: “We’ve had cases where when the patient presents to the hospital, the whole of the lower jaw is already gone, or the whole of their nostril pathway is gone.”

In the absence of reliable epidemiological data, a 1998 World Health Organization (WHO) global estimation of 140,000 new cases yearly remains the most widely cited source on noma. The majority of these cases are found in sub-Saharan Africa in children between the ages of two and six.

Noma can be prevented by basic public health interventions such as improving nutrition and oral hygiene; controlling comorbidities such as measles, malaria and HIV infection; and improving access to routine vaccinations.

In recent years, Nigeria has sought to increase awareness of noma and scale up its response activities as part of a commitment to eliminate the debilitating disease. Since 2016, it has been among 10 priority countries to form part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) African Regional Noma Control Programme.

The Federal Ministry of Health has integrated noma into its existing surveillance system and incorporated it into the curricula of all national and district health professional schools, while the country now commemorates an annual National Noma Day in November each year.

Funding from WHO, as well as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), has also helped the Ministry to scale up training of primary care workers, with 741 having received training on noma in 2021 and the first half of 2022.

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