With the advent of Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACTs) as the recommended treatment protocol for malaria by WHO, the menace of substandard and counterfeit anti-malaria drugs have been on the rise. Artesunate-amodiaquine, like other ACTs, has been widely implicated in this menace due to the market value and affordability. 13 representative brands of Artesunate/Amodiaquine were procured from different outlets in urban and peri-urban parts of Lagos, Nigeria. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were carried out on the different brands using HPLC. The results show all brands to contain the test APIs but in proportions varied about the USP specified limits. 30.8% of the test brands had artesunate within the USP specification. 30.8% of amodiaquine also had met the quality specification of USP. But only 15.4% of the sample had both amodiaquine and artesunate within the USP specification. 53.8% failed the active content test for both amodiaquine and artesunate.

Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), the main ingredient in green tea, holds promise as a potential treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). However, EGCG has many drawbacks, including stability issues, low bioavailability, and a short half-life. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to develop and optimize an inhalable EGCG nano-liposome formulation aiming to overcome EGCG’s drawbacks by applying a design of experiments strategy. The aerodynamic behaviour of the optimum formulation was determined using the next-generation impactor (NGI), and its effects on the TGF-β pathway were determined using a cell-based reporter assay. The newly formulated inhalable EGCG liposome had an average liposome size of 105 nm, a polydispersity index (PDI) of 0.18, a zeta potential of −25.5 mV, an encapsulation efficiency of 90.5%, and a PDI after one month of 0.19. These results are in complete agreement with the predicted values of the model. Its aerodynamic properties were as follows: the mass median aerodynamic diameter (MMAD) was 4.41 µm, the fine particle fraction (FPF) was 53.46%, and the percentage of particles equal to or less than 3 µm was 34.3%. This demonstrates that the novel EGCG liposome has all the properties required to be inhalable, and it is expected to be deposited deeply in the lung. The TGFβ pathway is activated in PAH lungs, and the optimum EGCG nano-liposome inhibits TGFβ signalling in cell-based studies and thus holds promise as a potential treatment for PAH.

Background and Introduction: COVID-19 has affected almost 180 million people around the world, causing the death of about 5 million persons, as of November 16, 2021. The disease presents with a plethora of pulmonary and extrapulmonary symptoms of varying severity. After an exhaustive review of the literature, we found no data on the mild and moderate COVID-19 disease phenotypes in Northern Nigeria. Our objective is to describe the clinical characteristics of non-severe COVID -19 disease phenotypes in Kano State. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study at the COVID-19 Isolation Center of Muhammad Buhari Specialist Hospital Kano, Nigeria. We included all patients admitted from May 2020 to December 2020. Patients’ medical records were assessed and evaluated to describe the clinical characteristics at presentation. We explored time to discharge between patients aged ≤ 50 years old versus those >50. We applied the Kaplan-Meier product-limit estimator to generate cumulative probabilities of discharge over time and used the Log-rank test to determine differences between the two age groups. We applied Cox Proportional Hazards to identify predictors of time to discharge among the patients in the study. The study variables comprised of time of viral clearance and time to discharge as outcome variables, while main exposure variables included, age, sex, occupation, mode of exposure, presence of co-morbidity, and duration of hospitalization. Results: A total of 187 COVID-19 patients were reviewed. The commonest symptoms were fever, breathing difficulty, and dry cough. There was no recorded death. Contact with a confirmed COVID-19 positive person was the source of infection in 167(89.3%) of patients. We noted faster time to viral clearance in patients on lopinavir compared to those on chloroquine (Log-rank test p-value = 0.048). There were no significant differences in time to discharge between younger (< 50 years) versus older patients (≥ 50 years) [24 days vs. 26 days respectively; Log-rank test p-value = 0.082]. Age, sex, and source of infection did not appear to be predictors of infection phenotype. Conclusion and Implications for Translation: The findings of this study have a bearing on the surveillance and diagnosis of COVID-19 in Nigeria. While the plethora of clinical features may not be limited to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, healthcare practitioners should consider these symptom clusters in addition to cognate contact and travel history when confronted with a suspected COVID-19 infection.   Copyright © 2022 Maiyaki et al. Published by Global Health and Education Projects, Inc. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0.