A senior field epidemiologist, Dr Peter Adewuyi, has urged the Federal Government to rely on Nigeria’s trained epidemiologists to contain the confirmed Ebola case and prevent further spread of the disease. Recall that Adewuyi coordinated contact tracing during Nigeria’s 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Stressing that the nation has sufficient expertise to manage the response without bringing in foreign specialists, he urged the Federal Government to trust Nigeria’s epidemiologists to do their jobs right.
Admitting that the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention initiated response measures early, he expressed concern that the latest case was detected later than the recommended period.
His words, “We have about 500 epidemiologists in the country and the government should just allow the epidemiologists to do their work.
We have this thing called 717, which is a key performance indicator that we use in surveillance to be able to know whether we are detecting early.
We are supposed to detect within seven days, report within a day and then respond within seven days.
Response is okay, reporting is okay, but the detection took for this about eight to nine days and that is the fear as far as the response that we are given right now.
Nigeria does not need people to come from outside.
I think, for example, now, AFINET is supporting the NCDC to get more epidemiologists on ground.
The IDSR is the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response System whereby we are able to track diseases in all the local governments of Nigeria, starting from the government to the health facilities to the local government to the state and then to the national. This is part of the system that works.
So in this case, all the people that treated this person from day one till the time she was diagnosed, all of these people are contacts.
Whether the person that came to sweep the room, whether the person that came to make the bed, every one of them.”
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