Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Nigeria, Unsafe Healthcare and Bloodborne Virus Epidemics

An article in a Nigerian newspaper highlights the very serious hepatitis epidemic there, with an estimated 20 million people, about 12% of the population, infected with either hepatitis B (HBV) or C (HCV). Although one of the ways HBV can be transmitted, and the way HCV is usually transmitted, is through blood, it is less common to find explanations of why or how people come into contact with someone else's blood, or how to avoid this.

The Don't Get Stuck With HIV site gives details of numerous ways you can come into contact with someone else's blood through healthcare, cosmetic and traditional practices. Healthcare practices include antenatal care, birth control injections and implants, transfusions, child delivery, dental care, donating blood, injections for curative and preventive reasons, catheters, male circumcision and others.

Cosmetic practices include manicures and pedicures, shaving, tattooing, body piercing, use of Botox and other products, performance enhancing drugs and perhaps colonic irrigation. Traditional practices include male and female genital cutting (FGM and MGM), traditional medicine, scarification and various other skin-piercing practices.

The Don't Get Stuck with HIV site also lists some of the steps you can take to protect yourself from exposure to HIV, HBV, HCV or other bloodborne pathogens, even ebola. The site also links to articles and sources of data about unsafe healthcare, unexplained HIV infections and other indications that risks for bloodborne transmission of various viruses are not always so widely recognized.

As a result, people often don't know there is a risk and they don't know how to protect themselves. This is as true of HIV in high prevalence countries with inadequate health services, HBV and HCV in countries where those viruses are common, and even ebola or other haemorrhagic viruses, when such an outbreak occurs. Indeed, ebola epidemics have only occurred in countries where healthcare is known to be unsafe, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and most recently Nigeria.

Two lengthy reports on healthcare safety in Nigeria have been published in the last few years. The second was a survey using the WHO's 'Tool C', also used for the survey from Philippines mentioned in a recent blog. Bearing in mind the warnings we are currently hearing about ebola, and the warnings we should have been hearing about HIV and hepatitis:

"Of the health facilities observed, only 23 (28.8 percent) had soap and running water for cleansing hands, and no facility had alcohol-based hand rub available.

Overall, fewer than half of all injections observed were prepared on a clean surface...

They found that injection providers only washed their hands in 13 percent of cases; none used an alcohol-based hand rub...

Fewer than half of the providers were seen to use water or a clean wet swab to clean the skin before vaccination, therapeutic, and family planning injections...

For vaccination, in 79.7 percent of cases, auto-disable syringes were used.

However, for dental procedures, there were two observations where providers used sterilizable syringes, and of these two, one of them also used a sterilizable needle...

18.7 percent had a needle left in the diaphragm of a multi-dose vial.

When glass ampoules were used during vaccination, the providers used a clean barrier in 1 of the 11 vaccination injections observed. Providers used a clean barrier in the only such dental injection observed, 3 of 11 family planning injections, and 4 of 43 therapeutic injections observed (9.3 percent).

Providers generally used standard disposable needles and syringes (70 percent) for phlebotomy procedures, and lancets for procedures requiring lancing (78.6 percent). Providers were rarely seen to use safety devices such as auto-disable and retractable syringes...

62.6 percent of procedures were prepared on a clean, dedicated table or tray where contamination of the equipment with blood, body fluids, or dirty swabs was unlikely (in 42 out of 67 hospitals and 20 out of 32 lower-level facilities).

[for blood draws and intravenous procedures] Overall, providers washed their hands with soap and running water in only 2 of the 99 observations.

Data collectors observed that patients shared a bed or stretcher with another patient in 17.6 percent of IV infusions. This was also the case for 4.5 percent of IV injection patients.

Data collectors observed that in 69.3 percent of cases, the provider used a clean gauze pad and gently applied pressure to the puncture site to stop bleeding after the procedure.

Only 10.5 percent of providers cleaned their hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand rub following the observed procedures. In the 35 cases in which there was blood or body fluid contamination in the work area, the area was cleaned with disinfectant in 20 percent of observations (see Table 14).

During interviews, five percent of providers (11 out of 217) reported that they used sterilizable needles in injections, phlebotomies, IV injections, or infusions. Of the 5 out of 187 supervisors who reported use of sterilizable syringes and needles, three said that fuel was always available to run the sterilizer, while the remaining two reported that fuel had been unavailable for less than one month at some point.

Half of the 80 health facilities had infectious waste (non-sharps) outside of an appropriate container."

This list includes only some of the risks to patients. There is also a section on risks to the provider, risks to other health staff, such as waste handlers, and risks to the community. Nigeria is unlikely to have the worst health facility conditions in Africa and there are many areas of healthcare safety requiring urgent attention.

When news reports about ebola constantly emphasize things like eating bushmeat and 'traditional' practices at funerals, think of the kind of conditions that can be found in Nigerian hospitals even when healthcare personnel are aware that an inspection is taking place. When reports about hepatitis concentrate on intravenous drug use and other illicit practices, and when reports about HIV seem to be almost entirely about sexual behavior, conditions in health and cosmetic facilities and contexts where traditional practices take place must also be relevant.

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