Health

A new diabetes drug that lowers blood sugar and also helps people lose weight has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Women who consume lots of sugar during pregnancy may increase the risk for asthma in their children, researchers report.

Previous studies have suggested that poor diet and obesity are linked to the current increases in childhood asthma. This new study, in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, implicates sugary drinks and fructose, or fruit sugar.

The World Health Organization through its Regional Director for Africa, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, said on Friday December 8 that Uganda has successfully contained an outbreak of Marburg virus disease and also prevented its spread just weeks after it was first detected.

The Ugandan Ministry of Health notified WHO of the outbreak on October 17, after laboratory tests established that the demise of a 50-year-old woman was due to infection with the Marburg virus. A Public Health Emergency Operations Centre was immediately activated and a national taskforce led the response.

The Federal Government has earmarked seventy hospitals across the country including 21 Federal Teaching Hospitals, 31 Federal Medical Centres, Four Specialist Hospitals and 14 Fistula and Cleft lip/palate Centres, for a special health intervention project aimed at tackling critical challenges in the health sector.

President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the patent right for the production and consumption of the Nigerian antiretroviral drug for the cure of HIV/ AIDS developed by Prof. Maduike Ezeibe, a renowned researcher at the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike in Abia State.

"It was a beautiful thing to watch," Dr. Giuliano Testa, the surgical chief of abdominal transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, said during the successful delivery of the first American baby born from a transplanted uterus.

The baby was delivered last month to a mother who had been born without a uterus, and received a transplant at Baylor University Medical Center, last September as part of an ongoing study.

The woman suffered from a type of infertility referred to as Absolute Uterine Factor Infertility, affecting approximately 1 in 500 women, where the uterus is non-functioning or nonexistent.