Africa’s health experts using innovation to lead the fight against the coronavirus disease have asked governments across the continent to consider investment in infrastructure for medical surveillance and manufacturing capacity of medical kits as priority.
They say the challenges faced during the management of viral infections such as COVID-19 and even non-communicable diseases have shown that relying on the rest of the world for innovative solutions could constitute a setback.
Speaking during a webinar on the ‘Future of Health’ organised by Nigeria Healthwatch on Thursday, Abasi Ene-Obong, CEO of 54gene, said lack of high capacity laboratories for molecular investigations, for instance, has been responsible for the low rate of testing and detection of the coronavirus in many remote regions in Nigeria.
He highlighted having only few clinical diagnostic labs that can handle molecular diagnosis using PCRs as one of the issues affecting testing and diagnosis in Nigeria, noting that such gap leads to misdiagnosis.
By the time the crisis hit Nigeria, the most populous African country had only about 200-testing capacity for a population nearing 200 million.
The biggest lab in the country had already been sending samples that required molecular diagnosis outside the country, Ene-Obong said, noting that samples of Hepatitis B and cancers were shipped abroad for diagnosis, a situation that exposes the under-capacity in the health sector.
“How do you have a good health system when you are sending Hepatitis B, C or cancer samples out of the country?” he queried. “We need to see the value on our health systems and stop taking shortcuts. We need to invest in infrastructure and training to ensure that we can actually be the people who do this surveillance ourselves. By so doing, people will learn a lot faster on what it is that heals them.”
Lynn Morris, interim executive director at the National Institute for Communicable Disease (NCD) in South Africa, harped on the fact that Africa needs to invest in its manufacturing capacity to protect its people from the sort of fierce competition for survival that has played out with the production of medical kits seen since the coronavirus outbreak.
She hopes times of desperate shortages such as this will evoke innovation in people for better and sustainable way for treatment and vaccines.
“Just getting test kits, for example, has been very tough. I think our manufacturing capacity really needs to be invested in. I also think that when there are desperate shortages, innovation really comes. I think we are going see cheaper and better ways of doing things in the coming months,” Morris said.
Innovations shaping Africa’s COVID-19 fight
In South Africa’s fight against COVID-19, Morris said the health system that supports HIV has been used to manage the pandemic. The country has actively used a community programme to aid contact tracing, quarantine and isolation processes.
Through molecular epidemiology, it has carried out genome sequencing of the virus in real time, which result shows the virus as a stable one that is neither changing nor mutating.
It has invested in serological assessment, with a lot of efforts in developing the antibodies to be able to support a vaccine development.
Morris said the next on the agenda was to use mobile networks to track and trace infected people and really figure out where they have been to via hotspot.
Nigeria, on the other hand, has seen health startups like 54gene raise a $500,000 fund from private sector partners to equip public labs with PCRS machines low-to-high triple format.
On the low end, 40 tests can be done at once every two hours and about 400 tests in two hours on the high-end format.
The company also modified its existing lab for research into a COVID-19 lab in a quick adjustment to the priority of the country.
Upon receiving an approval to join the NCDC network of COVID-19 testing centres, it launched a mobile lab in the south-west state of Ogun, and first of two coronavirus labs in Kano, north of Nigeria.
It is expected that increased sprouting of local innovation such as these will save Africa.
