At least 28 children under the age of five have been killed by drinking stream water contaminated with lead in Nigeria’s Niger State, Health Minister Fidelis Nwankwo has said. Officials have however blamed the contamination on illegal mining. Villagers “were mining for gold, and (the water was made toxic) by its impurities,” said Mohammed Usman, a government health official in Niger State on Friday. Nwankwo said on Thursday that 28 out of 65 children who became ill from the contamination had died, according to reports up to May 12 from villages in the Rafi Local Government Area (LGA) that borders…
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About 200 houses and huts were swept away on Friday in Makurdi, the Benue state capital, following over four hours of torrential downpour. Many valuables worth millions of naira were also submerged in the flood. Makurdi is located along the Benue River, the nation’s second biggest waterbody after the Niger. The latest incident which has taken its toll on residents was the second major flood disaster in the state capital, in the last four weeks. The hardest hit areas included the Wurukum Roundabout and Railway Crossing, Wurukum Market, Judges Quarters on Gboko Road, Logo and Angwa Jukum, which were completely taken…
The Government of Nigeria and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have announced they have reached more than a million Nigerian children with a highly successful and cost-effective treatment for acutely malnourished children, saving over 200,000 lives in the past six years. Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition was piloted in Gombe and Kebbi States in 2009 and has now been introduced in 11 northern Nigerian states where malnutrition poses the greatest threat. CMAM treats acutely malnourished children from six months to five years old on an out-patient basis. More than 830,000 children have been cured in the programme with the…
A World Health Organisation (WHO) report released in Geneva, Switzerland has revealed that 10 percent of global population suffers from mental disorder amid insufficient workforce. The WHO Mental Health Atlas 2014 report says it is an indication that there is less than one mental health worker per 10,000 people worldwide. The orgainsation’s statistics also shows that one in four people is affected by mental health disorder at some point in their lives. It added that this was amid predictions which indicated that depression would be the leading cause of global disease burden by 2030. The WHO said suicide, which was the…
The Republic of Kenya has submitted its new climate action plan to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), making it the 49th party to the UNFCCC to do so. Tagged: Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), the document comes well in advance of a new universal climate change agreement which will be reached at the UN climate conference in Paris, in December this year. The East African nation estimates in the paper that over $40 billion is required for mitigation and adaptation actions across sectors up to 2030, stating that she will require international support in form of finance, investment, technology…
Students of the University of Benin have achieved a major feat: they built a car. The vehicle was built for the Shell Eco-marathon competition. It was exhibited recently at the 2015 conference and exhibition of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE) in Lagos. The University of Benin (UNIBEN) is a public research university located in Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. It is among the universities owned by the Federal Government of Nigeria and was founded in 1970. The school currently has two campuses with fifteen faculties including a central library called the John Harris Library. The buildings in UNIBEN are sparsely built, they are not close to each other. UNIBEN has a teaching hospital called the University of…
With fewer than 100 Sumatran Rhinos surviving in the wild, the species will likely become extinct unless the Indonesian Government urgently implements the Sumatran Rhino recovery plan, warns the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as the world celebrates World Rhino Day. The remaining 100 Sumatran Rhinos represent less than half of the population size estimated during the last IUCN Red List assessment of the species in 2008. Listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, the Sumatran Rhino is now presumed extinct in the wild in Malaysia, as announced last month in the…
Rainstorm destroyed no fewer than 200 residential houses and shops in Zaria City and parts of Sabon-Gari Local Government Area of Kaduna State. The storm also destroyed electric installations and brought down trees to block some streets. The areas worse hit are Sabon-gari, Samaru, Danmagaji, Wusasa, Kofar Gayan Low Cost Housing Estate and parts of Nuhu Bamali Polytechnic temporary site, among others. Residents were trying to salvage some items, while the debris of destroyed structures were being cleared. Efforts to speak with the Interim Management Committee Chairman of Zaria Local Government Council, Alhaji Ja’afaru Abbas, were not successful but a top…
Floods are said to have ripped through seven local government areas of Sokoto State, leading to the death of a seven-year-old boy and destruction of farm produce worth N500 million. The Deputy Head of Sokoto State Zonal Operations Office of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Mr. Thickman Tanimu, announced the flood havoc at the weekend in Sokoto, the state capital. He said that the seven-year-old boy was killed when a wall fell on him after a rainstorm in Umbutu village of Kebbe Local Government area. According to him, the local government areas that were worst affected by the flood…
Sixty pupils from primary schools in the Niger Delta states of Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers were on Friday (September 4) awarded full secondary school scholarships under the ‘Cradle-to-Career’ (C2C) programme run by the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd (SPDC) operated Joint Venture. They are the latest beneficiaries in a scholarship scheme that has placed 360 bright children in top secondary schools since the initiative was launched in 2010. “The C2C approach marks a significant improvement in our portfolio of scholarship schemes,” pointed out General Manager, External Relations, Igo Weli, while speaking at the award ceremony in Port Harcourt.…