Nigeria’s health emergency capacity swells as US injects $2m in seven years

Nigeria is enhancing its ability to manage and coordinate public health emergencies, with over $2 million in knowledge transfer from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the past eight years.

Muhammad Saleh, a senior emergency management specialist with the US CDC in Nigeria, revealed that the programme, implemented jointly with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), has successfully graduated 55 certified public health officials from its third and fourth cohorts of the Nigeria Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) intermediate program.

“The overall aim is to control the spread of infectious diseases and other public health threats,” Saleh said “The capacity and the ability to protect the country must be used such that the state of readiness for these stakeholders in the public health space does not just improve under when these emergencies come. They are better prepared and ready to respond to them.”

Since 2017, over 200 public health staff have received basic training, with, 60 advancing to the PHEM intermediate certification.

These experts currently use their enhanced skills to bolster preparedness and response for disease outbreaks across 37 states and the West Africa region, U.S. CDC said.

Graduates have served as incident managers, leading and coordinating the response for eight Lassa fever outbreaks, three meningitis outbreaks, a major diphtheria outbreak, mpox, and two outbreaks of unknown cause in Nigeria.

The previous and current mpox incident managers have used what they learned in PHEM training to coordinate the multi-disciplinary, multi-agency response that detected 1,134 cases in Nigeria.

Also, three PHEM-trained COVID-19 incident managers provided leadership and coordinated the robust response that saw more than 250,000 confirmed cases in Nigeria.

Saleh stated that the objective is to enhance the skills of disease surveillance experts, incident managers, public health emergency operation centre staff, clinicians from private health facilities, and laboratory technicians in effective and efficient emergency management.

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He added that PHEM’s top skills involve predicting, preventing, and preparing for public health threats. It also includes detecting, responding to, and controlling these threats to minimize their health and socioeconomic consequences.

Participants also learn about situational awareness, vigilance, incident management systems, stakeholder identification, logistics, resource management, and effective resource utilization.

Regarding regulations, they address essential aspects of public health law, crisis management, and public information management, including strategies to combat misinformation and effectively communicate during emergencies.

Since 2017, about 200 public health staff have graduated from the PHEM basic level course, giving them the capacity to perform watch staff functions, maintaining continuous vigilance and preparedness for disease outbreaks across 37 states.

John Oladejo, director of Special Duties, office of the director-general, Nigeria Centre for Disease and Control said efforts are afoot to ensure that the initiative cascades from the national to the state level.

According to him, there is a plan to cite at least one emergency operation centre in each senatorial district. One will be the hub while two others will work with it to avert any outbreak.

“Prevention is cheaper than responding…That is why we are training all these professionals including doctors and nurses under interprofessional collaboration,” Oladejo said.

Farah Husain, program director, Division of Global Health Protection, US CDC Nigeria urged that continuous efforts must be made to strengthen the country’s systems to achieve robust surveillance and laboratory diagnostics.

She said the resources to achieve broad coverage in disease monitoring, detection, and response are minimal.

“We are not there yet. That is where we are going. We don’t have the bandwidth to be everywhere we need to be. That’s why we are trying to develop the systems in the country so that we are not always chasing the wind, we are in front of it,” Husain said.