The heat wave currently being experienced across the nation has been excessive making more Nigerians uncomfortable, especially urban dwellers. This situation has somehow been compounded by the erratic electricity supply in the country at present.
According to New Telegraph reports, the hot weather, heat and ailments associated with it have made life miserable for people. With the dry conditions and dusty environment, many, according to medical experts, are likely to come down with dehydration, heat rashes, respiratory ailments, and other illnesses allied with heat.
A community medicine and public health expert, Prof. Bayo Onajole, however, said in Nigeria, people are used to relatively high temperature. For one to die of heat wave, the person, he said, must have had dehydration, that is, loss of body water, which is not very common in this part of the world.
“If you are in a position where you lose a lot of body water and this water is not been replaced, it could lead to adverse health effect but if not treated because a lot of the body fluid is made of water, it may lead to something very serious.
“The other effect could be inability to sleep well, insomnia, because of the heat not been comfortable, couple with the fact that electricity is not regular and also a situation where houses are built close to each other.
“It could also lead to more accident on the road, when they are not patient for one another.” Another resident doctor at the department of family medicine, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital, Osogbo, Osun State, Dr. Lekan Bello, added that there were many health risks associated with hot weather.
He, however, happed on the need for measures to be taken to ameliorate the situation in the country. For Dr. Ipede Victor, a general medicine practitioner, heat wave comes occasionally, and at times the temperature could rise, but Nigeria, he insisted, is so blessed that there has not been extreme weather in recent times.
“I don’t think we are suffering heat wave in Nigeria;we are only going through the process of no rain.
