Why Pregnant Women Should Avoid Cats – Ex-UI DVC

A former Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships), University of Ibadan, Professor Olanike Adeyemo, tells OLUFEMI OLANIYI sa career and the ongoing strikes of the University Academic Staff Union

Besides being an academic, what else do you do?

In order of importance, I'm a mother, I'm a wife, and I take everything about my family seriously. I have brothers and sisters and I have a mom but my dad is late. These are some of the things that define me. Also, I am a researcher and lecturer as well as an administrator. Those are the three things we do in academia. Some people think that because there is a strike, the teachers don't work, but I am actively researching now. Even when I'm not teaching, I'm doing other things.

What is your field of study?

I trained as a veterinarian but I have evolved, even if I still offer services to the CHU as an aquatic veterinarian. In veterinary medicine, we also have disciplines. For research, I teach in the Department of Veterinary Public Health and Preventive Medicine and I research what we call “one health”. Like anything else, research evolves, so I dropped out of environmental health because that's what I did my PhD on. I looked at the impact of lead in fuel and at the time other countries had banned lead in petrol but we were still using it and I wanted to study the impact on the environment. When you put all of that into the atmosphere and it rains, it goes into the rivers and most of our pollutants go into the rivers. I looked at the lead level in the rivers of Ibadan. I watched the impact on the fish and I could see that what goes around comes around.

COVID-19 has brought us that we all live in the same state. You cannot separate human health from animal health and environmental health and that is what we veterinarians call "one health". This is the area of ​​my research.

What did you find out about the impact of lead on aquatic animals?

Of course there are many. Lead causes cancer and other things that we saw when I did my research. The impact is not just on the animals. We eat fish and accumulate it in our body. When you take a fish that has been exposed to lead, some of these things are in its flesh and liver and when you eat it you are also exposed to lead. So whatever we push into the environment eventually comes back to us because we're higher animals, but it takes longer for those effects to show up in us because of our body mass and all that.

Let me give you a quick example. Have you wondered why there is an upsurge in cases of kidney failure? Between 15 and 20, it wasn't so bad. But when you look at celebrities now, you will find that kidney problems have increased. Celebrities are the ones we know. Many unknown people are shot or died from kidney failure. And when you look at it, it's caused by what we eat or what we're exposed to. It's hard to assign a cause to this disease because some of these things take years unlike when you shoot someone and see on the spot that the bullet is responsible for the death of the person. If someone has hepatitis now, they won't have liver cancer the same day. It will take some time before it shows up. You know there was a time when it was said that some people used detergent to ferment fufu. That kind of thing won't kill someone in a day.

You talked a lot about human health. Why did you choose to study veterinary medicine in the first place?

I didn't choose veterinary medicine. You know how it is with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board and during my time there were few professions parents wanted their children to go into. Parents wanted their children to become lawyers, doctors and engineers in my time. If you were good at science, they wanted you to become a doctor. When I took the college matriculation exam (now the unified college matriculation exam), my parents chose medicine, but I didn't pass the cutoff mark. Later, I changed my choice of major. One of my father's friends, a professor of veterinary medicine, said he would have liked me to study veterinary medicine, but he said it was too hard for me to cope. But it was a challenge for me and because he said I wouldn't be able to cope I said that's what I wanted and that's how I ended up in medicine veterinarian.

I tell younger people now that they can be whatever they want to be and it's now easier to find their way around. What you do may be different from your ca...