The Director-General of Kano Independent Research Center Trust (KIRCT), Professor Hamisu Salihu, has said Kano state is responsible for 30 percent of tuberculosis cases in Nigeria.
He says this makes Kano state the highest cases per capita globally.
The DG disclosed this during the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on clinical research between the center and the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Value Chain (PVAC) in Kano on Wednesday.
He said the center now has a full-fledged tuberculosis laboratory, noting that the MoU will help advance clinical research in the entire northern part of the country, adding that the center has developed a Hausa chatbot that helps address language barriers between Hausa-speaking patients and doctors.
The DG said the three-year MoU would focus more on clinical trials saying they have the staff and the facilities to handle it.
“There are 36 states in the country, but Kano is responsible for 30 percent of all tuberculosis cases in Nigeria. That means Kano state has the highest per capita TB in the world. That means something has to be done, and it is unfortunate that the two top-notch TB laboratories owned by the federal government are in Lagos and Zaria.
“So when I saw that, we decided to have one in Kano state, given the burden of tuberculosis. If there is any state that deserves a full laboratory in the world, it is Kano. That is why we are having one now.
“The chatbot is a means of facilitating the encounter between a patient and a doctor where one is speaking English and the other speaks Hausa. So the chatbot will be in between and at the end of the conversation, make a summary of everything and create an electronic medical record without the doctor writing anything,” he said.
Professor Salihu also said the center can carry out mammogram tests for breast cancer patients, which will lessen the burden on people who have to travel to South Africa or the United Kingdom to do so in the past.
Speaking earlier, the PVAC National Coordinator, Dr Abdu Mukhtar, expressed satisfaction with facilities at the center, saying they will make it the regional hub of clinical trials and basic research in Nigeria and beyond.
KIRCT is a non-profit, multi-million dollar Biomedical Research institute established by Pfizer for the Kano State Government to conduct biomedical and healthcare research with a focus on communicable and non-communicable diseases of public health importance in Nigeria and Africa.
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