Equipping Nigeria’s health workers to respond to emergencies
Channel: Science & Development Network
Date: 2021-11-22

The need to equip African healthcare workers with the knowledge and skills for responding to public health emergencies has been brought into stark relief by the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. 

Mary Adetinuke Boyd, a paediatrician who specialises in tropical medicine and infectious diseases, is leading the Nigeria office of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to build capacity to tackle health threats and spoke to SciDev.Net about these challenges.
Boyd served as deputy associate director for programmes from 2016 to 2018 in the CDC Zambia country office and as senior medical advisor from 2018 to 2020. While in Zambia, she also led the antiretroviral treatment surge campaign and established the Zambia national HIV clinical mentorship programme. 
 
The vaccinologist joined the US Food and Drug Administration from 2013 to 2016, where she led global health vaccine efforts for Ebola. 

She says that being the country director of CDC Nigeria is a tremendous responsibility and an incredible opportunity to save lives across multiple disease areas, supporting efforts to stem major diseases affecting the region.  

According to Boyd, US CDC works with federal and state ministries of health and partners to address public health issues such as HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, and immunisation for vaccine-preventable diseases. It also focuses on improving global health security, strengthening laboratory, surveillance and workforce capacity to respond to disease outbreaks. 

“I think the most important support we provide is the replication of US skill and capacity to serve the people of Nigeria across different areas,” she says. “Whether it's through the training of field epidemiologists to respond to disease outbreaks or to develop the skills of clinicians to manage HIV patients using the latest guidelines and to implement HIV programme innovations, this support translates into our primary mission, which is to support the national health response in the application of health promotion, disease prevention and control measures to improve the health of people in Nigeria through technical expertise, effective local partnerships and systems strengthening.”

These efforts have led to routine childhood vaccine coverage in Nigeria steadily increasing from 50 per cent to about 70 per cent in the last four years. 

And in the fight against the HIV epidemic, the US government has enabled more than 1.6 million people living with HIV in Nigeria to access life-saving antiretroviral treatment, says Boyd.