Health
DR Chikwe Ihekweazu, Assistant Director General, WHO Division of Health Emergency Intelligence & Surveillance Systems, says building trust and collaborative relationships is the first step to preventing diseases’ outbreaks.
Ihekweazu said this on Tuesday, at the second International Conference on Public Health in Africa (CPHIA 2022), in Kigali, Rwanda, in a plenary session themed: ‘The COVID-19 pandemic – Lessons Learned for Future Health Threats, Prevention, Prep & Response’.
The News Agency of Nigeria(NAN) reports that the CPHIA 2022, aims to significantly advance efforts to strengthen research, innovation and emergency management in Africa.
He advised the continent not to wait for the next pandemic and try to build collaborative systems during a crisis.
Meanwhile, on building trust in National Public Health Institutes, he said that it was about negotiating access to people, infrastructure and resources.
“During my time as the Director-General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), it was a feat that required me to build trust with various stakeholders.
“Nigeria is not collaborating sufficiently with Chad, Cameron, Niger and Benin, our four neighbouring countries. To build trust, we need to look at ourselves first and ask where are the opportunities to collaborate to achieve our objectives,” he said.
Ihekweazu said that every country needed to decide on its accountability framework for emergency preparedness and response.
He stressed the need to build a collaboration mechanism that does not solely defend on legal instruments, but draws from and is responded to by all key players and is responsive to the urgency that epidemics came with.
According to Prof. Christian Happi, Director of African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), said during the COVID-19 pandemic, Africa became resilient.
”It is a continent that can come together to be a key player, not only in the generation of knowledge but in using genomics for surveillance and Research and Development,” he said.
Happi, who is also a Professor of molecular biology and genomics, at Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria, said that the global health inequity was very strong and the continent ”stands to lose if it does not change its mindset of over-dependence on tools to respond and prepare for a future pandemic.”
He said that research and development should not be seen as a luxury.
“It must be invested in if we must respond effectively to a pandemic and adequately prepare for a future outbreak,” Happi advised.
Dr Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, acting Director, Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said that the sheer value of a national institution that was vested in the responsibility of the country’s health security was invaluable.
Ouma said that countries that had national public health institutions did much better than countries that did not.
“If we must respond quickly during a pandemic, we must own the tools to end the pandemic.
“We struggled in many ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of those was our inability to use data to make decisions rapidly.
“The second area was in the development and deployment of vaccines. We have also not included thinking around how we deliver our clinical health services,” he added.
NAN reports that the CPHIA 2022 will feature nine plenary sessions, 14 parallel sessions, nine abstract-driven sessions,
a high-level ministerial session and closing ceremonies.
According to the organisers, there are more than 50 official in-person side events in Kigali that commenced on Monday, including 10 side events held virtually.
The conference was now in its second edition and aims to build on conversations started at CPHIA 2021, helping to catalyse accelerating progress against the continent’s most significant health challenges and building more resilient health systems.
CPHIA 2022, hosted by Africa CDC in partnership with the Government of Rwanda, will include remarks from several distinguished speakers including Mr Macky Sall, President of the Republic of Senegal and Chairperson of the African Union. (NAN)
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Tags: Ahmed Ogwell Ouma Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu Macky Sall NCDC
