Dr Samuel Sackey (middle), a retired lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Ghana, interacting with Dr Neema Rusibamajila Kimambo (right), World Health Organisation Country Representative, and Dr Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt, Director, Technical Co-ordination, after the conference

Surveillance experts in health conference underway

Emmanuel Bonney Health Nov - 26 - 2019 , 17:41

Surveillance experts in health from 24 Anglophone countries have converged on Accra to build their capacity to monitor and control the spread of diseases on the African continent.

The five-day Africa Regional Training of Trainers Workshop is on Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR), a comprehensive evidence-based approach for strengthening national public health surveillance and response systems at all levels.

The objective of the IDSR strategy is to strengthen national capacity for early detection, complete recording, timely reporting, regular analysis and prompt feedback of IDSR priority diseases, events and conditions at all levels.

In 1998, member states adopted the Integrated Disease Surveillance in Africa: A Regional Strategy (1999-2003), which was later renamed the IDSR.

Objectives

The Minister of Health, Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, said the aim of the conference was also to update the knowledge and strengthen the ability and skills of the experts on the third edition of the training modules of the IDSR technical guidelines.

The training guidelines, he explained, were to provide standard evidence-based step-by-step instructions for health and non-health care workers in disease surveillance and response measures to reduce morbidity, mortality, disability and social economic losses due to epidemics and other public health emergencies in the Africa Region.

He said current situation analysis indicated that there was increasing recognition of the threat epidemics posed to global health security and the livelihoods of people, beyond their impact on human health.

He said everyone of the 47 member states within the World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) Africa Region was at risk of security threats, adding that emerging and re-emerging threats, with pandemic potential, continued to challenge fragile health systems on the continent, exacting an enormous human and economic toll.

“A 2019 WHO evaluation of disease trends indicates that the risk of emerging infectious diseases has risen.This is largely attributed to the growth in cross-border and international travel, increasing human population density and the growth of informal settlement.

“Other factors include climate change, changes in the way humans and wild animals interact and changes in trade and livestock farming,” he said.

Mr Agyeman-Manu, however, said there were effective tools available to prevent, early detect and respond to all those public health emergencies, saying the challenge was how to build capacity and extend interventions country-wide in all countries in the Africa Region.

Relevance

The WHO Country Representative in Ghana, Dr Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, said the IDSR strategy, which was developed for implementation for public health surveillance and response systems in the Africa Region, was even more relevant today than it was in 1998 when it was first adopted.

“The strategy explicitly highlights the skills, activities and resources needed at each level of the health system to operate all surveillance functions and helps public managers and decision-makers improve detection and response to the leading causes of illness and death,” she added.

Skill acquisition

The Deputy Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Anthony Ofosu, called on the participants to take the training seriously to acquire the needed knowledge and skills for implementation in their respective countries.

He expressed the hope that the programme would go a long way to reduce morbidity due to recurrent episodes of public health emergencies such as Ebola, cholera, measles and yellow fever outbreaks that had bedevilled the Africa Region.