Category «Health»

The growing threat of Leukemia

Leukemia is one of the most deadly cancers that affect children. Also known as cancer of the blood, it accounts for 40% of the cases of cancer reported among children at Mulago Hospital. As I enter the children’s ward for cancer, my attention is first drawn to a 14 year old boy. Badru Were looks much younger than his age, a condition blamed on his disease. Am later told he is battling Leukemia. His mother Monica Kaija says he has been battling the disease since he was 8 years old and slowly, they have lost hope of his recovery. Monica says that aside from the pain her son has endured, raising the money from his treatment is also very difficult. …

Cases of kidney disease in children on the rise

Doctors say that we can live quite well with only one kidney, and some people live a healthy life even when born with one missing. But while bones can break and muscles can waste away without causing a major risk to life, if both of your kidneys fail, as happens in end stage kidney failure, bone, muscle or brain cannot carry on. Without any kidney function, the body dies which means one ought to act immediately once they discover they have a kidney problem. Why are kidney diseases on the rise among children? For a long time, kidney diseases were associated with adults, particularly those that have HIV, smokers and the diabetic. The trend has however changed. Statistics show that …

A swollen neck has left him jobless

Seven years ago, 48-year-old Joram Tusiime noticed a small swelling on the right side of his neck, but since it was not painful, he did not go to the hospital to check it out. “The swelling was very small and I didn’t have money to go to the hospital to check it out since it wasn’t even painful,” he recalls. By that time, Tusiime worked as a sales person in Kabale district. Tusiime says in 2005, he was fired from his job when the boss was changed. He says the swelling kept growing steadily. “It kept increasing so in 2007, I went to Kabale hospital and was told to go and look for money for an operation, which I was …

Kirabo battles second cancer bout

In June last year, five-year-old Kirabo Mirembe was declared cancer-free, after two years of battling the disease. “I was happy and thought I would go to school again and attend Sunday school that I love so much,” she says. Her family, overjoyed by the news, started making plans for a thanksgiving, only to be told that the cancer had returned – just four months after they had received the good news. Baby Kirabo, as she is known by people who have heard about her, was first diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in March 2009. It is a cancer, which occurs when the bone marrow has too many immature white blood cells, which suffocate normal ones. Children have an eight out …

Church cleaner needs Shs90m for kidney transplant in India

It is by God’s grace that 26-year-old Catherine Nakato is still alive. She is in pain because she cannot afford either the treatment or replacement of her failed kidneys. And if she does not get any of them in time, she could lose her life. Nakato’s problem started when she was diagnosed with diabetes aged seven. “The doctors at Nagalama Hospital first detected diabetes when I was young but the good thing is that they treated it and I got better. Unfortunately I suffered from the same disease again when I was 19 years. This was after the several tests doctors took. I was advised to get drugs that were prescribed by the doctors to treat the detected diabetes,” she …