Eighteen Sierra Leoneans have completed an intensive course in disease surveillance as part of the United States government’s support to the country’s preparedness against a public heath emergency.
The US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) conducted the training designed to help Sierra Leone detect and prevent a recurrence of the 2014/15 outbreak of the Ebola epidemic, the US embassy said Monday. It said the training was part of assistance in building Sierra Leone’s capacity to prevent the next Ebola outbreak.
The trainees, drawn from Sierra Leone’s public health department, were provided the necessary skills to collect, analyse, and interpret data to make decisions that can save lives.
The three-month programme specifically focused on improving disease surveillance, epidemiology, outbreak response, and communication skills among public health workers.
The training was conducted under the Field Epidemiology Training Program Frontline (FETP) of the CDC, which forms the cornerstone of the joint US-Sierra Leone efforts to build a disease surveillance capacity for the West African country, the US embassy statement says.
The severity of the 2014 Ebola outbreak was blamed on the fact that there was very little knowledge locally in handling epidemics. This translated into many deaths including of health workers, before the international community intervened.
With this capacity, Sierra Leone would be better able to prevent future cases of diseases such as Ebola, from becoming large and deadly epidemics, the funders hope.
FETP is a global programme designed to train field epidemiologists or “disease detectives” to make informed decisions on the basis of scientific approaches. It was designed to help build a trained public health workforce at the national and community levels.
As part of the package for Sierra Leone, such a training is conducted every three months, with the next one scheduled to start September 25.
There are plans to expand the programme to nine months in 2017.
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