Simple antibiotics help - if they're available If she had better food or been able to see a doctor when she first fell ill, it's likely she wouldn't have suffered the fate she did. Mulikat's circumstances allowed for noma – this life-threatening opportunistic infection – to take hold. You can see the traces of flies all around your food," she says. "The food they were giving us in the village. So she doesn't know exactly how old she is now, though her colleagues at Doctors Without Borders guess she's about 38. She doesn't have a birth certificate the Nigerian village in which she was born didn't record births. Mulikat's experience is a clear example of how a lack of basic resources can lead to dire consequences. "The irony of noma is that when a country is able to count the victims of noma" – when it has developed a comprehensive way of keeping records – then the country has seen other improvements in public health and childhood health so "that the disease stops to exist," says Srour. The last time the World Health Organization (WHO) gave an estimate was in 1998: 140,000 new cases each year. What we do know is based upon data from those who do make it to a hospital or by looking for survivors in remote places. "Those children are most of the time born in places where their birth wasn't even recorded, and their death won't be either." "Noma is a biological indicator of extreme poverty," says Srour. Not only do we not know exactly what causes noma, but we don't know how many children get it either. Then because it's an infection, it can get into the bloodstream. The disease spreads through the soft tissue and through the hard tissue and creates a hole. Leila Srour, a pediatrician working with the organization Health Frontiers in Laos to fight noma. "It's almost like that part of the body is dying," says Dr. Mark Sherlock, a health adviser with Doctors Without Borders who oversees their noma operations in Nigeria.įor reasons doctors don't yet understand, the bacteria in the mouth start to eat away at flesh and bone. But we're not really sure which ones," says Dr. She arrived with her mother for reconstructive operations, including a skin graft taken from her chest to replace tissue destroyed by noma.Īnd they know that noma is deadly – WHO estimates that 90% of patients die if they don't receive treatment.īut we still don't know exactly what causes noma. Researchers do know that noma primarily affects children between the ages of 2 to 6 in regions of extreme poverty, like parts of Africa and Asia, but it's unclear why children are more at risk.Ĭlaire Jeantet and Fabrice Caterin A young girl in the courtyard of Nigeria's Sokoto Noma Hospital. The name noma comes from the Greek word "nomē" meaning "to devour" and despite cases of noma being recorded over 1,000 years ago, in the 21st century we still don't know a lot about it. That's why some global health workers call noma the "face of poverty." A mysterious thousand-year-old ailment Those who survive are left with substantial facial disfiguration that requires repeated reconstructive plastic surgery to repair. Mulikat Okanlawon was a child, only 6 or 7 years old, when she contracted noma – a rare gangrenous infection that ate away at the flesh and bone in her face.Ĭompared to others who get noma, Mulikat was lucky. But there was another devious infection lurking beneath the surface of her skin and inside her mouth. It started out as malaria – or at least that's what her grandparents thought.
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