Health

What is a heart attack?

A heart attack happens when blood supply to heart muscles is blocked. This is usually caused by a clot in the heart artery. The affected heart muscle starts to die because it lacks blood supply. The medical term for heart attack is “myocardial infarction” or just “M.I”.

How do you recognize heart attack symptoms?

Heart attack symptoms can be different in every individual especially among women and people living with diabetes. The most common symptom is a sudden chest pain, which may present as pressure, squeezing pain or discomfort in the chest. It may progress into your left arm, neck, back or stomach. It could be accompanied by nausea, vomiting, lightheadedness, cold sweating and anxiety. The pain could lasts for a few minutes, cease and then come back. Other symptoms could be shortness of breath.

A heart attack sometimes gives warning signs days before like extreme tiredness, shortness of breath, anxiety, cold sweats, nausea or vomiting and sometimes indigestion.

People with diabetes may not feel any symptoms at all. Women might have atypical presentation of symptoms in the neck area or upper abdomen.

Heart attack symptoms may begin slowly, causing mild pain and discomfort. They can occur at rest or while you’re active.

What to do if you are experiencing a heart attack

This is an emergency that can cause death. It requires quick action. Do not ignore even minor heart attack symptoms.About half the people who die from heart attacks do so within the first hour after heart attack symptoms begin. Immediate treatment lessens heart damage and saves lives.

If you are alone:

• Call for help. Call your medical emergency number
• Do not drive yourself to the hospital
• Stay calm! Stress or strenuous activity is dangerous for the heart in this moment
• If you are not allergic to aspirin, chew a tablet of aspirin and swallow it. Aspirin helps dissolves blood clots.
• Health myths like coughing hard and regularly during a heart attack have no scientific proof that they work. It might even add strain and stress to the heart.

If you experience someone having a heart attack:

• first call your medical emergency number or a doctor
• while waiting for help to come, calm the person down, make them lie down or sit down
• give them a tablet of aspirin to chew and swallow if they are not allergic to aspirin
• if the person stops breathing or goes unconscious, start CPR
• if an automated external defibrillator (AED) is available and the person is unconscious, begin CPR while the device is retrieved and set up. Attach the device and follow instructions that will be provided by the AED after it has evaluated the person’s condition.
• if you are in an area without emergency health services, carry the individual to a hospital

  Many people delay treatment because they doubt if they really are having a heart attack. They don’t want to bother or worry their friends and family. But it is always better to be safe than sorry.

  

  What to do after you recover from a heart attack

  • follow your doctor’s advice for recovery, both in the days immediately following the heart attack and over the long term
  • you will be prescribed medication to reduce blood clotting and chances of having another heart attack or heart failure. You will probably take this medication for the rest of your life
  • know the risks of a second heart attack and reduce them. About one-third of people who survived a heart attack suffer another attack. The following advice will reduce your risk of a second heart attack:
    • Stop smoking. Smokers have a double chance of suffering a heart attack.
    • Reduce your cholesterol level. Check at least once a year your cholesterol level with your doctor. Cholesterol can be especially dangerous when it occurs in conjunction with high blood pressure, diabetes, and smoking. There are two types of cholesterol: HDL which is the good cholesterol and LDL, the bad cholesterol. Strive to keep your bad cholesterol level under 70. Your doctor will prescribe medicines and dietary changes for this.
    • Check if you have diabetes. If you already have diabetes, control it more and keep your HbA1c under 7%
    • Control your blood pressure. Click here to learn how to control your blood pressure.
    • Cut down on weight: being overweight can raise your cholesterol, blood pressure and cause diabetes. Use your body-mass-index (BMI) to control your weight. Your body-mass-index tells you if your are overweight or not, depending on your height. A healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 25. Click here to calculate your Body-Mass-Index.
    • Cut down on alcohol consumption and avoid binge drinking
    • Reduce salt consumption. Excess salt can lead to high blood pressure and worsen heart failure
    • Exercise. Consult with your doctor on how you can start an exercise program. With your doctor’s advice you can work out a program of cardiovascular exercise with achievable goals over time (e.g., walking, swimming, bicycle riding).
    Dr. SEA Initiative is geared towards empowering individuals and communities to attain quality of life through health education.The Dr. SEA team has set itself the task of using the fast growing digital and internet era as a tool to create an independent and always available informative resource for patients and victims in times of lack of care and shortage of medical professionals especially in developing countries. Visit doktorsea.com for more educative articles on your health.

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Dr. SEA

06.Aug.2016

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World Breastfeeding Week (Aug 1-7) has taken on special urgency in Cameroon where a recent government survey revealed that as many as 70 percent of babies are not exclusively breastfed during the first six months of life. Health workers in Cameroon are trying to get the message out.

Nineteen-year old Lilian Ngetchi dishes up a local maize porridge called pap for her two-month old baby. She says she breastfed the child just for a month and a half.

She says she has had only one child and does not want her breast to lose its shape because she is still very young. She says at her age she does not want to look like old mothers whose breasts have become flabby.

Across town in the capital, three-month-old Henrietta Ngufor cries at the Messassi district hospital. Her mother, 26-year old Comfort Ngufor says she started losing weight when she stopped breastfeeding her a week ago.

"I prefer artificial milk. It saves time," she said. "There are some very nice milks in the market that you could get for your child. It is just all about quality."

Dr. Evelyn Mah at the pediatric hospital in Yaounde works to debunk myths. 

"Whether you breastfeed the baby or you don't breastfeed your baby, you will age and with age, your breast will become flabby," she said. "Breast milk contains all what the baby needs. When they breastfeed their babies exclusively, what they have to do is to eat balanced meals and drink a lot of water."

Pediatrician Dr. Dorianne Mvogo of the family welfare department of Cameroon's health ministry, told VOA a quarter of infants who die in Cameroon have been denied exclusive breast milk during the first six months of their lives.

The World Health Organization has also noted a correlation. The WHO says more than 800,000 lives would be saved globally if all babies were fed nothing but mother’s milk until six months of age.

Myogo says women shouldn’t believe local myths like that having sexual relations will contaminate their milk and make their babies sick. There is no relation between the two, the doctor said. She says some women also tell her they think that breast milk can go bad in a woman’s body, something else the doctor says is simply not true.

Myogo says Cameroon should take a lesson from Kenya which she says has boosted breastfeeding and infant health by regulating how formula is marketed and requiring safety notices on the packaging.

She says human breast milk contains natural antibodies that protect babies against infection and formula milk does not.

Cameroon gives a period of two months for working mothers to remain at home and breastfeed their newborns. After the two months, the law requires they be given two hours each working day for a period of four months to go home and breastfeed their babies.

Some family welfare advocates are calling for the state-protected maternity leave to be extended to six months, though there is concern that this would only benefit mothers working in higher income jobs.

VOA

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Rita Akana

05.Aug.2016

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Mobile phones have in recent years changed the ways institutions deal with citizens or tackle issues. Some individuals have taken advantage of the availability of these phones to help tackle some social problems.

Over 7000 women die per year in Cameroon from pregnancy related complications which can be prevented by a simple educative SMS.

GiftedMom notifies women who have subscribed to the SMS platform on when they should do their antenatal care and tells them the importance of going for check-up

GiftedMom was developed by Alain Nteff at the age of 20. He was alarmed by the high infant and maternal mortality rate in his community; hence he tried to come up with a solution. At his young age, he was able to discover that many Cameroonians lack access to prenatal and antenatal care.

The app offers services such as vaccination tracker, breastfeeding information and general antenatal care

GiftedMom currently impacts over 6000 users in Cameroon, Mali & Niger

Alain Nteff has been named CNN & Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs and was awarded the first ever Queen’s Young Leaders Award by Queen Elizabeth II as GiftedMom targets over 5 million pregnant women and mothers across Africa by 2018.

Is a social enterprise that aims at using  technology to reduce maternal and new-born mortality rate and to reduce new-borns’ developmental disability.

Totohealth uses an automated SMS and web-based platform that contains a database of maternal, new-born and child health related messages.

The SMS and Voice content is sent to mothers and fathers based on the age of the child as well the pregnancy stage of the mother. This allows Totohealth to deliver more targeted and timely information.

The messages help in monitoring pregnancy /child growth to enable parents seek early intervention case of problems, give timely advice specific to child or pregnancy, and get referral to the right healthcare facilities and to give a platform to ask questions about pregnancy directly from mobile phone.

The application has mostly helped change the lives of women living in the slum areas.

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Rita Akana

22.Jul.2016

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Nigerian girl with a rare condition lives in a bucket

Rahma Haruna who is now 19 -years- old was born with a mystery condition. She has no limbs and has spent most of her life in pain.

According to her mother, she was born a healthy baby but when she turned six months old her growth came to a halt and she stopped hitting key development milestones.

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Rita Akana

22.Jul.2016

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It is not a cure, nor a vaccine, but experts at the ongoing International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa are optimistic about a pill that could prevent the spread of HIV.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is a key topic at this week’s conference.  According to a recent study unveiled at the conference, people who take a pill of antiretroviral drugs each day, often the same pill that HIV-positive people take, showed extremely low rates of HIV transmission.

Chris Beyrer, the president of the International AIDS Society, lauded the results at the conference, “Now is really the time to start the PrEP access era,” he said.

Seven countries have approved the use of PrEP, and it is increasing in the United States among high risk groups.  In South Africa, the program has been tested, with good results among sex workers.

Hetero Drugs Limited is an Indian pharmaceutical company that specializes in generic drugs.  About 2.5 million Indians are known to have HIV.

“It is advised that a person who is at risk of developing HIV should take two pills before the intercourse and two pills within 24 to 48 hours after the intercourse,” Hetero’s international marketing manager, Rahul Lande, told VOA News.

"And the success rates for these studies are showing like 97 percent rate, and those three percent are those that did not take pills, basically.  So it’s quite a successful study.”

Cameron Cox, a sex worker and activist in Sydney, said neither he nor his partner use PrEP because both men are HIV-positive.  He said he is cautiously supportive of PrEP and that some of his male clients use the treatment.

"The boys who have gone on to PrEP, even though that when they come to see me, we still use condoms, they are much more comfortable having sex and they are much more relaxed, and they tell me that when they have sex, say, privately, non-commercial sex with other partners, that they feel much better about having sex," he said.  "They're not all the time scared that this is maybe going to be the time that there's a slip-up and something happens and they seroconvert.  So it's a wonderful thing for their mental health, if you know what I mean."

But, he said, he is worried that PrEP may lull people into a false sense of security.  If the HIV rate falls among people with high risk, like men who have sex with other men, it may foster a false sense that the epidemic is no longer a threat, and people of all risk levels may stop taking precautions against HIV, he says.

Indian sex worker Kiran Deshmukh, who is HIV-positive, says she welcomes any advance in the fight against HIV.  She proudly noted that none of her three children are HIV-positive because she was able to take precautions to prevent transmission of the disease.

But she said it's impossible to talk about sex and HIV without talking about trust.

"I would not have any problem with my partner using PrEP," she said, "but my basic question would be: when I'm already using a condom 24-7, why would you need to use PrEP as an additional medication?"

Like many questions that swirl around the AIDS virus, it's one that science alone cannot answer.

VOA

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Rita Akana

21.Jul.2016

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he United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has disclosed that despite successes chalked in the fight against Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), a lot more needed to be done particularly in Africa.

UNICEF’s Executive Director, Anthony Lake, revealed that adolescents were generally dying of AIDS at an alarming rate and that the disease remained the leading cause of death in Africa.

“After all of the saved and improved lives thanks to prevention, treatment and care; after all of the battles won against prejudice and ignorance about this disease; after all of the wonderful milestones achieved, AIDS is still the number two cause of death for those aged 10-19 globally – and number one in Africa,” he said.

The 21st International AIDS Conference currently underway in Durban, South Africa; has thus reaffirmed that despite remarkable global progress in tackling the HIV/AIDS pandemic, much work remains to be done to protect children and adolescents from infection, sickness and death.

‘‘And while rates of new infections among adolescents have levelled off, UNICEF is concerned that projected increases in their population in the coming years will mean an increase in the overall number of infections,’‘ the children’s group observed.

UNICEF was also particularly concerned about girls who constituted the most vulnerable group of persons. ‘‘Girls are particularly vulnerable, making up about 65 per cent of new adolescent infections worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for about 70 per cent of people in the world living with HIV, 3 out of every 4 adolescents newly infected by HIV in 2015 were girls,’‘ a UNICEF statement revealed.

In the view of the UNICEF boss, the fight against the disease was far from over and required a focused and concerted effort to better the current situation.

“The undeniable progress we have made in the last three decades does not mean that our struggle is over,” Lake said.

“The battle against AIDS will not be over until we redouble prevention and treatment efforts; until we reach those young lives still being denied the progress that millions before them have enjoyed; and until we end the stigma and fear that prevent so many young people from getting tested,” he concluded. 

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Rita Akana

20.Jul.2016

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