The African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) has announced a £500,000 award from United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Care’s Fleming Fund for the first phase of a project to strengthen external quality assurance (EQA) for pathogen identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing in Africa.
Using this funding, ASLM said it will prepare a proposal for a second-phase award of £2.5 million to implement the project.
“This project will strengthen or build regional capacity to prepare, purchase and distribute proficiency testing panels for bacterial identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing across the different regions of Africa. In addition, the project will improve the participation of clinical and public health laboratories using a ‘One Health’ framework throughout existing proficiency testing programmes, supervision visits and other quality management systems activities towards accreditation, whenever applicable,” ASLM stated.
Dr John Nkengasong, the Director of Africa CDC and partner in this project said: “A regional EQA programme for bacteriology testing based on local capacity is key to establish a sustainable antimicrobial resistance surveillance system on the continent. It will help countries to better control and prevent the emergence of antimicrobial resistant bacterial infections and to participate to the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) and support the Global Action Plan on antimicrobial resistance, which is one of the top priorities of the Health Agenda of the African Union.”
In addition to this grant, ASLM is the lead grantee of a first-round, regional grant aimed at collecting and analyzing retrospective data on antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial use in 14 countries of sub-Saharan Africa (the MAAP consortium). Additionally, ASLM is leading a consortium of partners coming together to serve as a host institution for the Fleming Fund Fellowship in Tanzania.