This blog post is the result of of the first of a series of joint polls by the NOIPolls team and the EpiAFRIC team. The I-narrator is Dr. Ike Anya.
I was at work in London, that afternoon, in 2009, when in between meetings, my phone buzzed and I picked it up to glance at it. The text was from my younger brother and it contained devastating news- one of my oldest friends, someone I had been at secondary school with, someone I had shared a room with in our first year at university was dead. He had been found slumped at his desk in his office in Lagos, an otherwise healthy husband and father, not yet forty.
In the dark days that followed, as I and his many friends struggled to make sense of the news, I sought to understand if he had suffered from high blood pressure or diabetes, if he had had anything that may have led to what I was convinced was a sudden cardiac death. There did not appear to be any conclusive evidence, and even the autopsy carried out later was said not to have found anything significant. This was not my first encounter with sudden unexplained death in Nigeria, many years before, a beloved uncle had collapsed on the lawn tennis court, just hours after I had last seen him. Again there was little information about the circumstances, but looking back I am inclined to believe that my friend and my uncle had both succumbed to cardiovascular disease. Although neither of them smoked or were overweight, and although both were fairly physically active; being African, they were at greater risk of cardiovascular disease- the diseases of the heart and circulation including coronary heart disease (angina and heart attack), heart failure, congenital heart disease and stroke.
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