… As NCDC announces 39 cases nationwide
By: Felix Ikpotor
Following announcement by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, of 39 cases of M-Pox in the country with Rivers State having two cases, the State Government has said that it is prepared to track and prevent the spread of the disease in the state.
Commissioner for Health in the state, Dr Chidinma Oreh who stated the state’s preparedness at a media briefing in Port Harcourt, said her ministry would begin tracking and surveillance of suspected cases of the disease this week in all the 23 local government areas of the state.
She stated that the state’s health facilities have been put on red alert to arrest the disease in any part of the state where it is reported.
“Our Public Health Emergency Operations Centre which has been in operation in the state since it was commissioned in 2020 which is the beating heart for health security in Rivers State as it is not just focused on M-Pox, it’s focused also on other infections of note such as cholera, Lassa fever, measles, yellow fever amongst others. So it has a membership that cuts across all the levels of the sector and that public health emergency center is in response mood with key strategic interventions that has been actively deployed for all the response pillars in primary healthcare in all the general hospitals and zonal hospital levels and all the teaching hospital levels.
“We have as at now an incident action plan for M-Pox. So we are galvanising resources to fund this incident action plan and part of this incident action plan are; we have ad-hoc staffs who have been engaged and trained to build capacity for the response across all the levels of health care.
“Active surveillance would be important for early detection of the diseases because the earlier cases are identified and put on treatment, the better the outcomes regardless of immune status. So directives have been issued to all the infections preventions and control facility focal persons across the state to ensure that their hospitals, their facilities maintain a high index of suspicion. For the World Health Organisation, WHO, to have declared this a public health emergency of international concern, it means we have to be highly vigilante as a state so that once there is a suspicion of a case, all the signals are sent and adequately escalated for prompt attention.
“This week, we’ll be commencing active searches across all the local government areas in the state so that the local government disease surveillance and notification officers would identify any cases that may have been missed within this week and the previous week.
“We have set up tracking teams to identify, manage and monitor exposed contacts to confirmed persons. So it’s not just to identify those who are suspected cases, test them and find out if indeed they are confirmed cases but to also follow up with their exposed contacts so that they can be followed up with any testing that’s available and monitoring for the occurrence of symptoms,” Oreh said.
The State Health Commissioner also disclosed that personnel have been trained to respond to the outbreak.
“For capacity building, we have recently trained key officers in various areas across surveillance, laboratory and case management so that we close any existing knowledge gaps in the chain of response.
” So we know that trainning is very important for those who would be carrying out this tracking within the communities, those who would be reporting, identifying cases and those who would be managing the cases.
We have trained community informants in all the wards to enable prompt identification and escalation of signals related to the manifestation of the diseases in various communities. So they have been trained to know what M-Pox is, to have that high index suspicion and to know what to do when a suspected case is seen,” she stated.
For case management, Oreh said home management teams and the the infectious diseases units of UPTH and RSUTH are ready to attend to patients.
“We also have home management teams because there would be people who would be placed on self isolation, so there would be a team that are on hand to provide any necessary support across the different local government areas.
“We have the infectious diseases unit at the Rivers State University Teaching Hospital, RSUTH, that is ready and available to receive cases that may require specialist level care in the facility, the infectious diseases and isolation units of the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, UPTH, is also aware and available to receive cases,” the commissioner disclosed.
She disclosed other measures taken by the state to prevent the spread of the diseases to include no-stigma screening at the ports, upgrading of the state-owned PCR laboratories in conjunction with the National Reference Laboratory to be able to detect the current variant of M-Pox, stockpiling of commodities for infection prevention and control, capacity building for all health workers in the state, dissemination of information about the disease, institution of the safe burial team to assist families bury dead cases amongst others.
Oreh used the medium to urge people who present symptoms such as rashes of varying sizes, general body weakness, fever, severe back pains to present themselves for testing and treatment at the various health facilities in the state.
