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Volume 354:221-224 January 19, 2006 Number 3
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Noma — The Ulcer of Extreme Poverty
Cyril O. Enwonwu, M.D.S., Ph.D., Sc.D.

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In 2001, my research team was visiting a farming community in northwestern Nigeria, where word quickly spread to neighboring villages that foreign doctors were examining the mouths of sick children. Soon, a farmer arrived with one of his three wives and their two-year-old daughter. The mother told us that the girl was her fifth child and that three of the previous four had died before five years of age — two from "high fever" (presumably caused by malaria or measles) and one from noma, or cancrum oris, a noncommunicable infectious disease that destroys the hard and soft tissues of the . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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Dr. Enwonwu is a professor of biomedical sciences at the School of Dentistry and an adjunct professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore. He was formerly director of the Nigerian National Institute for Medical Research, Yaba, Lagos.

An interview with Dr. Enwonwu can be heard at www.nejm.org.


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