Olanike Adeyemo Quotes

Let me give you a quick example. Have you wondered why there is an upsurge in cases of kidney failure? Between 15 and 20 years ago, it was not this bad. But when you look at celebrities now, you will discover that kidney problems have increased. The celebrities are the ones we know. There are many unknown individuals who are down or have died as a result of kidney failure. And when you look at it, it is being caused by what we eat or what we are being exposed to. It is difficult to ascribe a cause to this illness because some of those things take years unlike when you shoot somebody and you see on the spot that the bullet is responsible for the person’s death. If somebody has hepatitis now, the person won’t have liver cancer the same day. It will take a while before it manifests. You are aware that there was a time when it was said that some people used detergent to ferment fufu. That kind of thing will not kill somebody in a day.

COVID-19 has brought that to us that we all live in the same state. You can not separate human health from animal health and environmental health and that is what we veterinarians call “one health”. That is the domain of my research.

Veterinary medicine has an increasingly important role to play in addressing the global challenges of the 21st century based on our societal contributions to Animal Welfare, Biomedical Research, Animal Health, Production, and Conservation of Species, as well as Safeguarding the Health of Humans. Worldwide the profession is facing challenges in maintaining the economic sustainability of veterinary education and practice, evolving veterinary service to meet changing societal needs; in addition, the populace, policymakers, and even medical professionals are frequently unaware of how veterinary medicine fundamentally supports both animal and human health.

It is in every profession. If you do something grudgingly, you are not likely to put in your best. So, I will advise people not to do any job grudgingly. The Managing Director of First Bank, Sola Adeduntan, is my friend. He was a year ahead of me at vet school. He is a veterinarian and there is another one at Stanbic IBTC, who graduated from Agronomy Department here at UI. It is better for you to find your way to your place of passion than to stay grudgingly in a profession.

“Science happened to me, but passion is what has kept my love for science burning”.

Nobody can excel in any profession they don’t have passion for.

There are different ways of transmitting diseases. I headed the Oyo State Decontamination and Containment Team of the COVID-19 task force. I know that there are so many factors causing the transmission of diseases from animals to humans and one of them is urbanisation. We cut down trees and move into the bushes and we come in more contact with animals. Ecotourism is another factor. Human beings don’t respect boundaries.

I don’t think we have enough. We don’t. In my area now, we don’t have enough. Veterinarians work in many areas and they are also in charge of ensuring that what we eat is safe aside from those who work on poultry farms and those that treat dogs and all that. We don’t have enough as I said. Even though we don’t have enough to cover our abattoirs, it is better now than when I was an undergraduate. The system does not even retain the ones we have. What used to happen back then was if you went into Vet Medicine, you would not be allowed to change your course even if you wanted to change. But now, we no longer want people that are there grudgingly.

She should not be in contact with a cat’s litter if she is pregnant. It also causes some changes and makes babies defective. But a combination of many factors makes disease transmission occur. If your level of immunity is high, you may not be down when others who are in the same place as you are down. We also have some people who do not believe in vaccines and those ones are usually the weaklings.

I didn’t choose Vet 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 during my time. If you were good at science subjects, they wanted you to become a doctor. When I took the University Matriculation Examination (now Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination), my parents chose Medicine but I did not meet the cutoff mark. I later changed my choice of course of study. One of my dad’s friends, a professor of Veterinary Medicine, said he would have loved me to study Vet Medicine but he said it was too tough that I would not be able to cope. But that was a challenge to me and because he said I would not be able to cope, I said that was what I wanted and that was how I ended up in Veterinary Medicine.

I trained as a veterinarian but I have evolved, although I still offer services at the teaching hospital as an aquatic veterinarian. In Veterinary Medicine we also have disciplines. For research, I teach at the Department of Veterinary Public Health and Preventive Medicine and I research what we call “one health.” Like every other thing, research evolves, and so I parted with environmental health because that was what I did my PhD on.

If you do something grudgingly, you are not likely to put in your best.