The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) has said that a total of 40 confirmed cases of MPox and zero deaths have been recording in Nigeria since the beginning of the year.
The director general of the agency, Dr Jide Idris, made the disclosure Friday in Abuja during the Joint NCDC/World Health Organization ( WHO) national Mpox briefing.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (ACDC) had both declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International and Continental Concern (PHEIC/PHECC) following an outbreak of the disease across the continent.
Dr Idris also said a total of 830 suspected cases of the disease was recorded across 13 states of the federation within the period.
“A number of them live in the South-South, South-East, some in Lagos, some in Ogun, and up north etc,” he said.
He said the federal government was targeting the affected states in other to reduce the number of cases, adding that active surveillance for detection of cases was ongoing.
He said Nigeria was not at high but moderate risk of the disease.
However, he said Nigeria needs to continue to remain vigilant because of cases reported in Europe , Asia and other places, noting that the country was not safe until other places were safe too.
He said, “So, we will continue to work with the government to strengthen public health measures that are needed to control the outbreak. Nigeria will be receiving a number of doses of vaccine through donation from the U.S. government. The need globally is huge.
“The vaccine in short supply, the capacity of the current manufacturer cannot meet the global demand unless some kind of intervention is there. So, I am sure the U.S. government will be able to inform us on the date of arrival.”
He further said that Nigeria established an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for Mpox ever since the disease was declared a public health emergency of international concern.
“And we also established our incident management system. We did our incident action plan, in terms of what and what we are going to do using the different pillars.
“We have also met with the state governments and the state commissioners of health, basically to let them know that at the sub-national level, they deserve to establish their own emergency preparedness and response teams as well as capabilities and action plans. And they are going to do that in conjunction with their various local government areas, ” he added.
The NCDC boss said the government has also beefed up laboratory services, adding that ” All the cases seen so far were confirmed using genomic sequencing in two labs, National Research Lab in Abuja and in Lagos.”
He said: “But because of the spread, we need to increase the number of laboratories we are going to use to test. So we are increasing, the number. We are including Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) and the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID).
“But more importantly, again, we need to increase all the laboratory capabilities, especially in the South-South, South-East area. We also know that in our network, quite a number of laboratories have the capacity to do polymerase chain reaction (PCR) but they may not be able to test for mPox..So we need to beef up those capabilities, either by training or by supplying them with necessary reagents and consumables. “
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