Senior area epidemiologist, Dr Peter Adewuyi, has referred to as on the Nigerian authorities to permit the nation’s skilled epidemiologists to guide efforts to comprise the confirmed Ebola case and forestall additional transmission.
Adewuyi, who led contact tracing throughout Nigeria’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, mentioned the nation had sufficient skilled personnel to assist the response with out counting on overseas consultants.
“We have about 500 epidemiologists in the country and the government should just allow the epidemiologists to do their work.”
Speaking throughout an interview on ARISE News on Thursday, Adewuyi mentioned the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) had began the response early however famous that the detection of the most recent case took longer than the really helpful timeframe.
“We have this thing called 717 which is a key performance indicator that we use in surveillance to be able to know whether we are detecting early. We are supposed to detect within seven days, report within a day and then response within seven days. Response is okay, reporting is okay, but the detection took for this about eight to nine days and that is the fear as far as the response that we are given right now,” he mentioned.
Adewuyi, who led contact tracing throughout Nigeria’s 2014 Ebola outbreak, mentioned the nation didn’t want overseas epidemiologists to handle the response.
“Nigeria does not need people to come from outside,” he mentioned.
He additionally mentioned the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET) was supporting the NCDC to deploy extra epidemiologists to the sphere.
“I think, for example now, AFINET is supporting the NCDC to get more epidemiologists on ground.”
He defined that Nigeria already had a surveillance system designed to trace illnesses from well being services and native authorities areas to state and nationwide ranges.
“The IDSR is Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response System whereby we are able to track diseases in all the local governments of Nigeria, starting from the government to the health facilities to the local government to the state and then to national. This is part of the system that works,” he mentioned.
The epidemiologist additionally burdened the necessity to establish everybody who could have come into contact with the affected person earlier than her analysis, together with individuals who labored within the hospitals the place she acquired therapy.
“So in this case, all the people that treated this person from day one till the time she was diagnosed, all of these people are contacts. Whether the person that came to sweep the room, whether the person that came to make the bed, every one of them,” he mentioned.
Adewuyi mentioned the variety of recognized contacts may rise as investigations continued, noting that individuals who may need been uncovered wanted to offer correct info to well being authorities.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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