Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), Dr. Jide Idris has said the nation’s preparedness for a potential Ebola outbreak currently stands at 59%.
Dr. Idris, who disclosed this during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Monday, informed that a recent assessment of the country’s readiness exposed critical gaps that authorities are working to address, particularly at points of entry into the country:
“Our recent latest level of assessment puts us at about 59%. But that’s quite variable. You can’t be 100% prepared, but the essence is that we keep preparing because things change.
“We did a dynamic risk assessment for Nigeria basically to assess our level of preparedness, where we are, what gaps we need to cover, and then what we need to do. And very clearly, one area that came out was the point of entry, which is crucial. Because the essence—the objective—is that we should not allow this thing to come into this country,” he said.
The DG disclosed that the Federal Ministry of Health issued protocols to control traffic into the country, thereby minimising the risk of importing the disease:
“Luckily, a day or two after, there was a protocol released by the Federal Ministry of Health to be adhered to by different agencies of government.
“The essence of that is to control traffic into this country, especially traffic from airlines—from those airlines that were bringing patients here. That’s one. You can do the air traffic, and that’s why some states were categorized as high risk. Those states are where you have international airports, because that’s where people come in,” he said.
He however lamented that the nation’s porous borders also pose a major threat:
“But the biggest one again is our borders—porous borders. Not everybody comes in by air. You have people migrating by road and that kind of thing. These are the scares, and that’s why again it’s essential for us to prepare,” he said.
The DG recalled the 2014 Ebola incident, citing the lessons learnt as a nation.
“2014 was interesting because we had never had that experience before. But we were lucky to have the experience of the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control, who actually provided guidance. At the start, nobody knew what the problem was, but again, we learned as we were going along.
“Basically, it’s the basic things they taught us that we need to put in place:
“Ability to detect: Once you detect, you must isolate the patient. Because, you know, the mode of spread of Ebola is by contact.
“Preventing contact: Once you can prevent that contact, I think we are reasonably okay. And preventing that contact means you need to protect yourself, you need to protect the healthcare workers, and you need to put in place facilities for sanitization.
“Isolation facilities: You need to put in place facilities where you can isolate people with suspected cases.
“Rapid diagnosis: Once you suspect cases, you must be able to do the diagnosis quickly—laboratory diagnosis and that kind of thing.
“A lot of these things we put in place, and they actually guided us. So: detection, isolation, contact tracing—those are the key things”, he said.
Dr. Idris who also spoke on ongoing preparedness efforts stated, “To be frank, we are not 100% ready, but we are improving our readiness. This is a readiness that has to cover the whole country. Now, what we are doing is that we’ve done an assessment of our situation. We sent people out to do assessments—we sent advisors to State Commissioners to do an assessment of readiness, guiding them on what to do. Look at things like infrastructure, isolation centers, public health emergency operation centers, and what kind of stockpiles they have just in case they have these cases”.
