I’ve been itching to comment on this matter since this award was announced but work has been such a pesky distraction. What came to my mind when those Swedes made the announcement was: Poor Stephen Hawking! If he had been alive, he surely would have shared the award with his collaborator Roger Penrose. Earlier in…
A Reader’s Impression of The Mechanics of Yenagoa by Michael Afenfia (2020)
Reading this novel as I did over the better part of two days during the Eid break felt like binging on accumulated episodes of a TV series like Grey’s Anatomy, House, or Bones. The episodic nature was unmistakable, a carryover of the way the novel was birthed. It started life as a weekly blog. The…
COVID-19 Diary: June 22
COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to soar. During the weekend, the NCDC DG, WHO Officer-in-Charge, and the NCDC Director of Surveillance were in Lagos to listen to our plans for strengthening surveillance and data management and coping with the challenges of case management and isolation. The outbreak is entering a new phase. But it was time…
COVID-19 Diary: June 7
It was time to get back to the thick of things. For the field epidemiologist, the place of work, by definition, is the field. But the airports had not opened yet and there was no special Presidential Task Force flight going to Lagos. So, again, I hit the road after sixteen days away from the epicentre. I…
COVID-19 Diary: May 21
The lagoon was a vast sea of quicksilver reflecting the golden light of the morning sun. The rising sun appeared in a hiatus between grey floating clouds, which soon sailed in front of it, the reflection on the water vanishing for a few moments. Today, at the first Third Mainland Bridge interchange, instead of taking…
An outbreak of terminological inexactitude
The ongoing pandemic of a respiratory infectious disease known as COVID-19 which started in December 2019 has occasioned an explosion of information and an outburst of myths. This has been described as an infodemic. More interesting to me as an epidemiologist and teacher are the medical and epidemiologic terms that it has introduced into common…
On the train again
Saturday, February 1, 2020 It was the time of the year when the nights were longer than the days. So that, by the time we finished morning prayers, it was usually some minutes past six. There was little time to get home, call Uber and get to the train station early enough to catch the…
Another close shave
January 19, 2020. There was a motorcade ahead of us preventing us from overtaking. One of the vehicles was a police pick-up while the others were black SUVs. The SUVs were full of men in military fatigue wielding guns. They menacingly waived down anybody that tried to overtake them. But their speed was not bad…
To Atlanta again, via Istanbul
I looked at my boarding pass and saw the words ‘saat’ and ‘tarihi’, Arabic words meaning time and date respectively, and chuckled as I always do when I see the stubborn residue of Arabic in the modern Turkish language. Starting from the 1930s the Turks, under the guidance of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had conducted the…
Universal Health Coverage – the right thing, the smart thing
One cold evening in 2005 I was with my cousin in Grays, a quiet town in Essex County some 35 km east of London. Glued to the computer screen as was my wont for several hours every day, I was utterly oblivious to my surroundings until I began to hear a barely audible, almost musical…
