This Doctoring Is A Deadly Job! Juxtaposing Ebola Threat With The "Care" Of Nigerians For Their Doctors

It comes as no surprise that the first Nigerian case of Ebola Viral Haemorrhagic Fever is a medical doctor who got the disease while caring for her patient. Doctors stand this peculiar risk because we are the front-line professionals who attend to ill persons. We "play around" with diseases....infectious or not. While an average individual would strive to avoid diseased persons...or diseases especially highly infectious ones, we "go" for them! If diseases were to be alluded to as Devils, you may be correct in saying that we dine with the Devil....always, eagerly, innocently, without regrets, forgetting to equip ourselves with the proverbial long spoons! We lend ourselves open to extreme hazards.

A soldier in the fronlines still has a fighting chance of survival. But with Ebola killing 90% of afflicted persons within 14 days, even the warring solider fares better in matters related to survival on the job! Ebola is not alone in hatchet-bearing...thanks to global epidemics of cholera, HIV and Influenza....as they took their toll on doctors. Surely, this doctoring is deadly "business"! It is unlikely that a healthy person would seek to consult with a doctor.

Yet the doctor is only human....as his performance cannot by any modicum of wisdom, be divested from the level of care the society bestows on his own life.

He like any other normal person deserves to live his life, does he not? We still remember our Oath....and we are well guided by it. The Lagos State Government after sacking all postgraduate doctors (called residents) in its teaching hospital, makes do with non-academic medical officers....albeit grudgingly and uncharacteristically....in this tertiary centre. The government's decision to run the hospital this way could not have been without the input of the Commissioner for Health!

It now finds it necessary through this commissioner, to call on doctors to call of the current strike....after keeping mute on this strike since inception! So, as a normal human being, the doctor may quietly muse..."they now beckon to me to come and die?" Two American Ebola doctors got infected with the disease in the care of their patients. We saw the prompt response of the US government in evacuating them home and giving them the best of care. We did not hear any snide remarks from their fellow citizens. (Two other doctors have died!) Can the Nigerian government....and its people....measure up to these standards? The lady doctor in question is on admission at the Mainland Hospital, Yaba, Lagos. It is our fervent hope that she would not merely be "dumped" there!...abandoning her and her family to the elements. Our fears are real....

Dr Tosin Akindele is a Lagos-based medical practitioner, a good health advocate and social critic

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Articles by Tosin Akindele