Nation Media Group’s health reporter Elizabeth Merab has passed away this morning.
Merab, 30 died after battling sickle cell anemia for over two decades.
“ I was diagnosed at the age of ten. That’s when my parents knew what the doctor told them, that I had Sickle Cell Disease,” Merab said in a previous interview about her condition.
“I had spent about 5 days in hospital with my mother. The doctor came and sat my parents in her office and as she was giving this news to them, I was behind the door on the other side and I just heard ‘Merab has Sickle Cell’,” she recalled.
Despite her battle with the disease, Merab in 2021 became the first recipient Global Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Journalism Award by Amref Health Africa where she was awarded alongside World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the regional director of WHO-Africa, and Dr. John Nkengasong, Director of the Africa CDC, who received an award for the leadership in global health respectively.
Merab has also been health communications specialist, speaker, moderator, and trainer who has lent her expertise to organizations like the East African Community (EAC) and Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Risk and Crisis Communication sub-working group to support Pandemic Preparedness in the East African region (PanPrep).
In 2021 she collaborated on a media project looking at how health issues are currently being covered in the news by Sparknews, Paris, France.
May God rest her soul in peace.
