COVID-19: Abayomi Blames ‘Destroyed’ Environment, Expects More Similar Outbreaks

The Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akin Abayomi, believes that environmental pollution and degradation have affected Nigeria’s ability to find traditional solutions to diseases such as the COVID-19, currently ravaging the world.

According to him, Nigeria has a whole ecosystem of plants and herbs which could be used as a remedy for the disease but issues such as deforestation have limited the country’s ability to explore those options.

“We have a whole ecosystem of plants and herbs. If we haven’t destroyed them all by our wanton deforestation, we would have access to a lot of therapies from the environment that we could test out,” the commissioner said during an interview on Channels TV’s Sunrise Saturday.

“Destroying the ecosystem is what’s causing these zoonotic events and it’s depriving us of our natural heritage to find traditional solutions to these problems,”.

He also raised concerns that the recurrence of such diseases are likely to be on the rise because of the current realities of the environmental.

“The way the world is going now, we are seeing an increase in the number of these zoonotic events…what we call the ability of a dangerous pathogen to jump from the animal kingdom, to the human kingdom and that’s because we’ve destroyed our environment and the opportunity for these kinds of events is going to keep increasing,” the commissioner added.

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He, however, stated that Lagos State has a traditional medicine board as well as a traditional medicine research committee which is looking into the area of natural or traditional therapies.

Abayomi said this while outlining some other key steps for recovery for patients infected with the flu or even the COVID-19.

“One of the best ways to raise your immune system is sleep,” he said.

“If you get sick with the flu or with Coronavirus, the best thing is to stay in bed and get lots of rest and allow your body’s energy to be consumed by the immune system which is trying to do the curing.

“Of course, you can support yourself with good diet, good food and lots of natural therapies and that’s one thing that we are pushing very hard in Lagos – our traditional medicine.

“We have a traditional medicine board, a traditional medicine research committee and I believe that there are several natural therapies that we need to investigate”.