WHO calls for African emergency centre
14 July 2015
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for a central national emergency
operations centre to be established that will be on stand-by to deal with future
disease outbreaks and related emergencies.
Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO's regional director for Africa, made the call when
addressing a meeting of about 200 high-level experts from governments,
development agencies, civil society and international organisations at the Building
Health Security Beyond Ebola conference at the Westin Hotel in Cape Town
yesterday.
The meeting comes a few months after the Ebola outbreak claimed thousands of
lives in West Africa and posed a health risk to countries around the world.
Moeti said it was important to stop outbreaks before they became catastrophic. The
Ebola outbreak showed the need for countries to be prepared and have the capacity
to rapidly respond to outbreaks and emergencies to maintain national and global
health
security.
"Transborder, transnational and intercontinental co-operation remains a high
priority for WHO considering the frequency and magnitude of health crises before
us. To prepare and respond to these crises, we have no margin for error and timing
is essential," she said.
Ability to deal with outbreaks
As a minimum requirement, the WHO wanted to ensure that all countries on the
continent had several capacities in place to deal with future outbreaks. These would
include:
- A surveillance system that would cover the country from community to national
level and be adapted to relevant conditions and that would use well-trained staff
and proven information management systems;
- A central national emergency operation centre with capabilities and resources
to function as a central hub for national surveillance at all times, and as the central
operational hub to be activated during health
emergencies;
- Sustainable community engagement and risk communication strategies and
resourced plans; and,
- Critical laboratory diagnostic capacities with associated quality assessment
processes.
The director-general in the South African Department of Health, Malebona Matsoso,
said the aim of the meeting was to establish a partnership between African
countries and the rest of the world in order to deal with health risk emergencies in
the future.
"The aim of this meeting is to establish a common framework for common action
that takes into account the roles of different stakeholders. It is also going to help us
understand what were those lessons that we learned from the Ebola experience and
what we could take forward."
Global strategy
She said that a couple of years ago, the WHO passed a resolution and came up with
a global strategy and plan of action on public health innovation and intellectual
property rights.
"The strategy has eight elements and the first three elements deal with investment
in research and development as well as promoting research and development, and
building innovative capacities in developing countries.
"The other elements deal with access. The Ebola experience shows that there has
been a market failure particularly for diseases that disproportionately affect
developing countries. There is no effort to make investment in research and
development and we have seen this with Ebola."
Matsoso said the proposals covered in the resolution pointed to a need for countries
to build mechanisms for financing incentive schemes that could reward innovation
that would help to develop products that would deal with specific diseases that
affected poor countries.
"We can use the Ebola example to address these market failures."
Source: SAnews.gov
A laboratory worker examines samples to help diagnose suspected Ebola patients during an outbreak in the Congo in 2012 (Image: WHO)
