Nigeria will fully digitise disease reporting systems, deliver a laboratory network that can support surveillance and maintain uniform standards across every local government area in the country, says the disease control agency.
Chikwe Ihekweazu, CEO of Nigeria Disease Control Agency (NCDC) disclosed this at the agency’s Annual Surveillance meeting held in Enugu on March 15 where practitioners say more needed to be done.
“This year we want to define surveillance standards and have Disease Surveillance and Notification Officers (DSNO) at every State and LGA,” says Ihekweazu.
He said the goal is to bring surveillance under one roof in Nigeria, a project that may take up to 10 years, saying the NCDC is committed to delivering a lab network that can truly support surveillance in Nigeria
“If we don’t have skilled DSNOs at the LG level, we will never have good data at the national level.
“We can’t make decisions if we can’t confirm our cases so we will work to achieve 80% confirmation of priority diseases in Nigeria.”
Health practitioners have held that there is a need to strengthen the existing notifiable disease surveillance and notification system with increased clinicians’ involvement in timely reporting of notifiable diseases to designated public health authorities for prompt public health action.
According to a research by Elvis Isere, Akinola Fatiregun and Ikeoluwapo Ajayi published in Nigerian Medical Journal, disease surveillance and notification (DSN) have been recognized as an effective strategy for the prevention and control of diseases most especially epidemic prone diseases.
“Presently in Nigeria, the collection, collation, analysis and interpretation of disease-related data in public health institutions are often incomplete and untimely partly because of poor awareness among clinicians of the importance of their role in disease surveillance and notification activities for the prevention of infectious disease outbreaks,” say the researchers.
To combat this issue, Ihekweazu said that the agency will define standards for every state and LGS DSNO in the country, full digitisation of all Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) reporting and feedback and deliver a laboratory network that can support surveillance to achieve 80% confirmation of priority diseases.
Nigeria already has a national policy on integrated disease surveillance and response approved in 2005 and public experts at the forum say it should be in line with current realities in the face of diseases like Ebola and Tuberculosis which can be pandemic.
Kabir Yussuf of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency who spoke at the forum said that polio surveillance in Borno offers lessons for a national programme for disease surveillance as accountability framework formed the cornerstone of the action.
Experts say many outbreaks which have occurred in Nigeria over the years have been attributed to clinicians either not reporting or reporting late when the index cases of epidemic prone diseases present in the various health institutions across the country
“It is crucial to note that disease outbreak do not give notice before its occurrence neither do they respect the borders of nations,” says Isere et al.
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