A single new pathogen, a single new virus can set us back 100 years. It can wipe out half of our population in a month. We really have to focus on building our health security.”
The Director General of the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, has revealed that the emergence and reemergence of disease outbreaks in Nigeria indicate that the center has become a victim of its own success. He said this while speaking during Aso Rock Villa’s Facebook Live session.
“We are basically a victim of our own success. As we looked harder, we found more of these diseases and we are facing up to that challenge,” Ihekweazu said.
He attributed NCDC’s dilemma to Nigeria’s large population, migration activities, challenging environment and existence of infectious diseases. He also blamed the lack of investments, over the last 30 years, in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious diseases in Nigeria.
Upon assumption of duty in 2016, the DG revealed that a workforce of about 100 people were responsible for the health and well being of almost 200 million Nigerians. The workforce, according to him, was grossly inadequate to support the work of the center in 774 local governments and 37 states including the federal capital.
“We inherited a situation where we had a young, vibrant but extremely small group of determined people [that were] completely inadequately resourced for the scale of the challenge that we had in Nigeria,” the DG said.
While NCDC led a “successful response to Ebola outbreak”, 2 years down the line, the country had not really built on that success – to build the team, the resources [and] the laboratory infrastructure to enable NCDC to really sustain the gains.
Under his leadership, Ihekweazu said NCDC undertook the digitalization of its disease surveillance architecture. He also revealed the center has setup a new reference laboratory in Abuja where experts are working to provide diagnosis that would present the center with information that will enable it to mount speedy response.
On emergency preparedness and response, the NCDC DG said the center now has an incidence control center in Abuja.
“Whenever there is a new outbreak, we bring people together – partners, donors, all the technical agencies, to set up a critical emergency operations center (EOC) to respond to that emergency,” Ihekweazu said.
He added the center is supporting every state in Nigeria to have a functional EOC from where they can mount an emergency response.
“We’ve done this in 8 states, our ambition was to get to 18 by the end of this year. We will spend the rest of 2019 ensuring that every state in Nigeria has an EOC that is connected online to the central center in Abuja where we can coordinate our response.”
You can watch the session below: