Public healthU.S. training developing world's docs to detect outbreaks earlier
U.S.-funded program helps health workers in developing countries track disease and speed response to outbreaks; the CDC has established 35 programs since 1980, mostly in developing countries, with funding from several U.S. government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and has 11 more in the works. Participants investigated 216 outbreaks in 2009
Nigeria, Vietnam, and dozens of other countries are stepping up efforts to respond to disease threats, as epidemics add to the burden on their health-care systems and new pathogens spread around the globe.
To fight Nigeria’s worst cholera epidemic in nearly two decades, an outbreak of lead poisoning that has killed more than 160 children, and an eruption of measles, officials are turning to public-health experts like Suleiman Haladu.
A veterinarian from northwestern Nigeria, Dr. Haladu is training to become an epidemiologist — a disease detective who probes the source of outbreaks and determines how widespread they are. The Wall Street Journal’s Betsy McKay writes that he is in an on-the-job program partly funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and modeled on the Epidemic Intelligence Service, the CDC’s two-year program whose officers helped to eradicate smallpox, identify HIV/AIDS, and pinpoint a deadly strain of E. coli.
Last spring, Nigeria’s federal Ministry of Health dispatched Dr. Haladu and other budding epidemiologists to two remote villages to crack the case of how gold-mining practices had poisoned homes with lead. Now, four more officers are tracking down cholera cases, treating patients, and teaching villagers how to avoid contaminated water to stem an epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 people.
McKay notes that countries are now required by international law to report certain outbreaks or public-health events and to upgrade their disease surveillance and response capabilities.
“We need to have more people on the ground so if we have outbreaks we have an immediate investigation,” said Henry Akpan, the Nigerian health ministry’s chief of epidemiology and health emergencies and response. He estimates that each of Nigeria’s states now has only one trained epidemiologist; he aims to double that figure over the next three years.
The Nigerian program, launched in 2008 with funding from the CDC and other organizations, also aims to strengthen laboratories and improve veterinary epidemiology, as new pathogens frequently jump from animals to humans. When a death from avian flu in 2007 showed the virus had been spreading in Nigeria undetected, “there was no capacity to address the problem; we had little understanding of the situation,” recalled Dr. Haladu.
The CDC has established 35 programs since 1980, mostly in developing countries, with funding from several U.S. government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, and has 11 more in the works. Participants investigated 216 outbreaks in 2009, from H1N1 flu outbreaks in Thai schools, prisons, and
