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On 26th March 2014, a newspaper published an article on the death of a 15 year old female student who attended a private university in Nasarawa state from suspected VHF; presumably Ebola. We investigated to know the cause of death, identified the agent and the source and proposed recommendations. We defined a suspected a case of Viral Haemorrhagic Fever (VHF) as any person with onset of fever and no response to usual causes of fever and at least one of the following signs: bloody diarrhoea, bleeding from gums, bleeding into skin (purpura), bleeding into eyes and urine within and around Abuja from 9th February 2014 to 2nd April 2014. We reviewed the hospital records of the index case and re-tested stored blood samples. We searched actively for contacts with the index case in hospitals where she was treated before her demise. Hospital staff were line listed at the various hospitals. We confirmed one death (index case) a 15 year old female who died on 15th March 2014. Serum sample tested positive for Dengue virus serotypes 1,2,3 and 4 using ELISA and PCR. We implemented VHF detection, management and reporting for health professionals in the country. We recommended sero-surveillance and entomological surveys be done to determine the prevalence of Dengue virus and its vector in Abuja and Nasarawa state. Dengue and other VHFs are emerging diseases that can easily be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages. Equipping laboratories and improving surveillance can help in early detection, management and epidemic aversion.

INTRODUCTION: Nigeria has one of the highest tuberculosis (TB) burdens in the world with estimated incidence of 133 per 100,000 populations. Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) is an emerging threat of the TB control in Nigeria caused mainly by incomplete treatment. This study explored factors that affect adherence to treatment among patients undergoing direct observation of TB treatment in Plateau state, Nigeria. METHODS: Between June and July 2011, we reviewed medical records and interviewed randomly selected pulmonary TB patients in their eighth month of treatment. Information on patients' clinical, socio-demographic and behavioral characteristics was collected using checklist and structured questionnaire for knowledge of treatment duration and reasons for interruption of treatment. We conducted focus group discussions with patients about barriers to treatment adherence. Data were analyzed with Epi Info software. RESULTS: Of 378 records reviewed, 229 (61%) patients were male; mean age 37.6 ,13.5 years and 71 (19%) interrupted their treatment. Interruption of treatment was associated with living 5 km from TB treatment site (AOR: 11.3; CI 95%: 5.7-22.2), lack of knowledge of duration of treatment (AOR: 6.1; CI 95%: 2.8-13.2) and cigarette smoking (AOR: 3.4; CI 95%: 1.5- 8.0). Major reasons for the interruption were lack of transport fare (40%) and feeling well (25%). Focused group discussions revealed unfriendly attitudes of health care workers as barriers to adherence to treatment. ONCLUSION: This study revealed knowledge of the patients on the duration of treatment, distance and health workers attitude as the major determinants of adherent to TB treatment. Training for health care workers on patient education was conducted during routine supportive supervision.

INTRODUCTION: Between February and October 2009 an increase in morbidity and mortality in dogs in a national kennel in Abuja, Nigeria, was observed with signs indicative of leptospirosis. Concurrent illness was observed in some kennel workers which had high titres of leptospira antibodies. METHODS: An unmatched case-control study was conducted to identify associated factors. Fifteen cases and fifteen controls were recruited. A probable case was defined as any person working at the kennel with history of fever, chills, headache, myalgia with either conjunctivitis or sore throat between February and December 2009. Controls were healthy kennel workers within the same period. Inclusion criteria were any person meeting the definition (for both cases and controls). Kennel workers who were sick but did not fit into the case definition were excluded. RESULTS: Bivariate analysis showed that wounds or cuts on either hands or legs of kennel workers during the period of the outbreak and contact with sewage at the kennel together (p = 0.001) was associated with leptospirosis among kennel workers. CONCLUSION: The findings revealed the importance of environmental hygiene in the prevention and control of leptospirosis. Sanitation and hygiene improvements were recommended.

This paper sets out to study pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery in Nigerian hospitals, an area that has received extremely little attention in the linguistic literature. It ultimately aims to see how these strategies are similar to or are different from those used in Western hospitals, especially as studied by Maynard (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004). The hospitals sampled were stratified into teaching, state-government owned and private hospitals, and a random selection of five hospitals from each group was made. Data were collected through tape recordings, and personal observation of hospital interactions. The analysis of data was based on insights from Levinson's (1979) notion of activity type and Maynard's (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1992, 2003, 2004) devices of diagnostic news delivery. The findings reveal that three strategies are used to declare diagnostic news. Two of these are the main strategies identified by Maynard, namely asserting the condition and citing the evidence, but the third, mitigating the blunt news through veils and hedges, is largely peculiar to Nigerian hospitals. The paper concludes that a study of pragmatic strategies of diagnostic news delivery contributes to a better understanding of hospital interactions, and provides insights into doctors' verbal outputs in diagnostic meetings.

The paper examines the pragmatic functions that crisis-motivated proverbs play in Ola Rotimi's The Gods is not to Blame. It picks its inspiration from the little attention hitherto paid, in the linguistic literature, to both the specific proverbs that are spurred by crisis in the play and the pragmatic roles of such proverbs. For data, only the proverbs that are necessitated by the crisis-situations in the text are sampled, and these are analysed, using the recent theory of pragmatic acts (Mey 2001). The study reveals that crisis-motivated proverbs in The Gods are not to Blame, which are of two types: social and political, are characterized by practs such as those of counselling, cautioning, challenging, veiling, persuading, prioritizing, encouraging, threatening and admitting. These are psychological acts which exploit contextual features such as reference, metaphor, inference, shared situation knowledge, shared cultural knowledge and relevance. The paper concludes that studying literary proverbs used in crisis situations, from a pragmatic perspective, both throws additional insights into the paremiological pool and promises to provide a veritably helpful tool for language teaching.

This study describes discourse tact in diagnoses in doctor-patient interactions in English in selected hospitals in South-western Nigeria. Using recorded conversations between doctors and patients in those hospitals as data, the mutual contextual beliefs of participants, speech act patterns, including linguistic patterns, and other pragmatic features are analyzed from the perspective of the pragmatics of discourse. The findings indicate the predominance of doctor-initiated spoken exchanges in which doctors elicit and confirm information and give directives to patients, while the patients give information and attempt to respond appropriately to the doctors’ moves. It is also observed that conversation maxims are flouted and politeness maxims exploited in order to enhance successful diagnosis in the interaction. Finally, it is observed that doctor-patient interaction is only one out of many aspects of medical communication that require the attention of language scholars in order to gain insight into language as an act of social behaviour and action, especially with respect to the institution of medicine.