Professor Yoshia YAMAOKA, Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Oita (Japan), current Vice-President (Vice-rector) and Top 4 World Expert on Helicobacter pylori, honored our Faculty of Medicine (of Kinshasa) and that of Mbuji-Mayi.

He has indeed agreed to stop in Kinshasa, on his Oita (Japan)-Cape Town (South Africa)-Oita route.

Cape Town where he participated yesterday in the Inaugural Conference of the African Study Group on Helicobacter pylori (Hp) of which the Congolese DR team is a stakeholder.

This was a great opportunity to revisit the HP news, seven years after his last visit (2017). Here are some highlights from his conference on Monday morning, August 19, 2024:
– Hp would have been “born” in Africa and would have followed the migratory movements of the populations;

– the strains are different from one region to another (could this explain the differences in virulence and resistance?);
– machines for rapid diagnosis are coming soon; as are resistance susceptibility tests;
– the African enigma still not well understood (prevalence of Hp infection as high in Africa as in Japan, but relatively little gastric cancer than expected in Africa, etc.). Environmental factors? Dietary? Traditional products? Others?

– the problem of antibiotic resistance remains current and acute;
– Be careful with eradication protocols; they vary from one country to another;
Some questions specific to Hp infection in the DRC:
– Role of the environment, our eating habits, our socio-traditional practices, our spiritual practices;
– How effective is this or that traditional formula? Think about contextualized studies;
- etc.
The assistance was truly transdisciplinary, coming from different disciplines and specialties (HepatoGastroEnterology, Cardiology, Surgery, Pulmonology, Pediatrics, Pathology, Biology, Gynecology, Pharmacy, Toxicology, etc.).