The Pan African medical journal
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West Africa is experiencing the largest ever reported Ebola outbreak. Over 20,000 people have been infected of which about 9000 have died. It is possible that lack of community understanding of the epidemic and lack of institutional memory and inexperienced health workers could have led to the rapid spread of the disease. In this paper, we share Uganda's experiences on how the capacity of health workers and other multidisciplinary teams can be improved in preparing and responding to Ebola outbreaks. ⋯ Training of multidisciplinary teams improves the country's preparedness, alertness and response capabilities in controlling Ebola. West African countries experiencing Ebola outbreaks could draw lessons from the Uganda experience to contain the outbreak.
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Despite the well-known maxim "publish or perish" among academicians, productivity remains low in Nigeria. There are barriers to academic writing which must be identified and addressed. Even after addressing those barriers, authors are faced with another dilemma-where to publish. It was the concern of the authors to evaluate perceived barriers to academic writing and the determinants of journal choice among Nigerian academics. They also attempted to evaluate the determinants of journal choice and perceived barriers to academic writing among Nigerian academicians. Respondents were academicians used in the context of this study to mean anyone involved in academic writing. Such persons must have written and published at least one paper in a peer-reviewed journal in the preceding year to be included in the survey. An online-based self-administered questionnaire. ⋯ In this study, the major determinant of journal choice among Nigerian medics is journal indexing and unfriendly environment appears to be the major perceived barrier to publication. Encouraging a friendly and conducive environment in the universities will impact positively in academic productivity amongst Nigerian faulty members.
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The recent Ebola Virus Outbreak had a devastating effect on West Africa's already feeble national health systems. We suggest that such an impact turned out to be catastrophic because it hit particularly hard human resources for health and the delivery of primary healthcare services, which are cross-sectional to any health system. ⋯ Such patchwork and vertical intervention strategy was always going to fail to tackle a system-wide problem, particularly in already fragile systems. We suggest that future interventions will have to learn from the experience of past initiatives for the introduction of HIV-AIDS services, which started as vertical programs and ended up including ever growing health system strengthening components.
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Epidural analgesia is highly recommended in cancer anorectal surgery. In addition to the fight against pain it provides some benefit in allowing early rehabilitation of patients. ⋯ Clinical features the typical positional headache, a procession of various more or less severe symptoms: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, visual or hearing impairment or radicular pain. We report a dural of unusual cause secondary of the obstruction of tuohy catheter by vertebral cartilage.