Posted on: Fri 09-08-2024

The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Mohammad Ali Pate, has stressed the need to strengthen the country’s public health capabilities to be able to respond and ensure that outbreaks are stopped before they become epidemics or pandemics.

Speaking at the launch of the book, ‘‘An Imperfect Storm,” co-authored by the former Director General of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), Dr. Chikwe Ihekwazu, and his wife, Vivian Ihekweazu, yesterday, in Abuja, the minister noted that the world has been witnessing pandemics from time immemorial, adding that pandemics have always resulted in the transformation of societies.

He said: “Pandemics are here, and this is the era of the political crisis. Traditionally, pandemics have always, almost always, resulted in the transformation of societies. Right from the time immemorial, right from the ancient Greek periods, pandemics resulted in major transformations. The Greeks suffered from it. The Romans suffered from it. The plague, thousands of years ago, resulted in transformations. We had one in the 80s, HIV, and it resulted in some transformation. Now we have experienced COVID, and it is transforming the world. It’s a one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, and the transformation is already underway.

Pate observed that we are emerging into a world of greater economic upheavals, and also acceleration of new pathogens, which may lead to another encounter, noting that the next crisis could be anywhere for what we see.

“In the late 90s, we had Nipah. Then there was SARS in 2003. Then there was the pandemic flu of 2009, there was Middle East Respiratory Virus in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2017, and in 2019 we have COVID.

The minister observed that an institution like the NCDC is going to be one of the significant hallmarks in Nigeria’s effort to respond when the next storm shows up.

SOURCE: GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER

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