After 3 assignments to our beloved Salone since July 2014 for a total of 120 days, I am eternally grateful to be home for New Year with my family. Thanks to all my family and friends for your prayers, goodwill, and sustained support throughout this ordeal. The fight against Ebola is going to require every asset in our arsenal from Sierra Leoneans at home and in the diaspora, our friends, and our international partners; strategy, management and operations, funding, brains, determination, energy, technical know how, commitment, and most importantly not relenting till the last case is managed. I remain cautiously optimistic that with the recent aggressive approach of the surges, especially the Western Area surge, that involves active case finding, the Rapid Response Teams (early aggressive response when new flare-ups occur), improved quantity and quality of holding and treatment centers, increased trained medical staff, aggressive use of ORS to initiate treatment while suspect patients wait for help, improved call center 117 services and ambulance response times, increased lab services (targeting 24 hours for lab results to be returned), better data for decision making, improved targeted communications, messaging, and social mobilization, we are in a much better position than we were in July, November or early December. My only worry is that we look at the daily numbers and become complacent. This war is not going to be over till the WHO declares Sierra Leone is Ebola free i.e. 42 days after the last case is seen. We should ovoid the mistakes of others who start celebrating early and take their eyes off the ball. I know we will win this war soon. The next challenge obviously is how we establish early warning systems, incident management systems, and robust response programs post Ebola. We are proposing a National Public Health Institute (SL-CDC), re-activation of a version of the District-level Endemic Diseases Control Unit (EDCU), and a massive training program, the Field Epidemiology and laboratory Training Program (FELTP). We have an opportunity to expand the Medical and Nursing training programs in Sierra Leone through an equivalent of what we have been doing in 15 African countries through the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI). There are opportunities for improved research capacity building with a focus on vaccine work, diagnostics, and understanding some of the key questions around epidemics of this nature. I remain very optimistic for Sierra Leone. For now though, I have to pay attention to my day job ending HIV/AIDS around the world.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:08:01 +0000
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