With continued rise in the cost of cancer treatments and management in Nigeria, experts have called for massive but a positive awareness campaign on cancer, saying it would prevent further avoidable deaths from the disease.

The reigning Carnival Calabar Queen, Mayen Ekpo, has called for gender friendly laws to prevent violence against women. Ekpo who stressed that recent statistics have revealed growing proportions of gender violence in Nigeria added that stiffer penalties should be put in place for such offenders.

ACCOLADES continued to pour in for Nigeria’s remarkable polio eradication efforts in the last one year even as the 63rd World Health Assembly closed last Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, but a note of caution from the World Health Organisation, WHO, punctuated the wide acknowledgment of the country’s successful march towards a polio-free world. Expectations are that as efforts continue to wax stronger, Nigeria will not be the last to eradicate polio.

Less than 1000 qualified physiotherapists are serving about 150 million Nigerians. Physiotherapists are health practitioners that implore physical modalities in the management of various disease condition such as stroke.

Today, the burden of cancer in Nigeria is appreciable. Statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO) show an estimated 100,000 new cancer cases occur in Nigeria each year although observers believe the figure could become as high as 500,000 new cases annually by 2010.