Via Nature News & Comment, an op-ed by Dr. John N. Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: How Africa can quell the next disease outbreaks. Excerpt:
This week, African and global health experts and policymakers are gathering in Addis Ababa to discuss how to enable national public-health institutions (NPHIs) to keep emerging and re-emerging infectious disease in check. At the top of the agenda must be empowering local leadership to act fast.
Africa’s population is expected to double from 1.2 billion now to 2.4 billion by 2050. People are travelling greater distances, too. Last year, Ethiopian Airlines alone transported more than 10 million passengers — a 21% rise from 2017. Africa’s ambitious plans to establish free trade and travel across the continent will increase movement even more.
Although economically advantageous, these plans could set the stage for HIV, Ebola, pandemic influenza, chikungunya, plague, Lassa fever and antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections to spread farther and faster.
Waiting for emergency help from the West costs lives, health and resources. African leaders are starting to take ownership of investments in their citizens’ health, but fewer than 15 countries on the continent currently have institutions that can perform the functions of an effective NPHI, such as disease surveillance linked with a diagnostic laboratory, and the capacity to activate a rapid-response team for outbreaks and serve as an operation centre in public-health emergencies.
As head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (African CDC), I call on all 55 member states to establish or strengthen NPHIs. And I urge the private sector in Africa and worldwide, and bodies everywhere, to invest in these efforts. According to the World Bank, Africa needs between US$2 billion and $3.5 billion a year for epidemic preparedness; in 2015, 8 African nations received from various donors about $700 million for this cause.
I think that much of the gap can be filled from within Africa, where the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak cost roughly $53 billion.The African Business Coalition for Health, formed in 2017, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa are encouraging investment and coordinating efforts by African philanthropists and business leaders to support health programmes. The African Union (AU), a 55-member continental organization based in Addis Ababa, has set up a programme to tax imports of goods to Africa, designed to shift AU running costs away from donors. A fraction of these funds should go towards NPHIs.
NPHIs are a health-security imperative in a changing Africa, where rapidly expanding populations mean greater urbanization and more people in slums. Currently, not even half of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa have access to sanitation; even fewer have received the recommended suite of childhood vaccinations. Old diseases, and those once limited to rural and remote areas, are appearing in cities — plague in Antananarivo, Ebola virus in capitals across West Africa. And we have seen time and again that an outbreak in Africa is a global threat.
