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Plague threat - Health workers, volunteers boost their capacity in contact tracing |18 October 2017

 

Although very much under control the recent plague threat has revealed certain deficiencies in communication and documentation, and has proven to be a strain on human resources.

The Minister for Health, Jean-Paul Adam, said this yesterday at the beginning of a one-day training programme for healthcare professionals and volunteers.

The training was coordinated in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and its main purpose was to strengthen the capacity of these health workers and volunteers with regard to contact tracing.

Contact tracing is the identification of people who may have come in contact with an infected person.

In the case of the plague, those identified are put under constant surveillance up to the full incubation period which is 7 days.

According to Minister Adam contact tracing on the index case - the first person to have shown symptoms of pneumonic plague - is the first occurrence in the country where any type of epidemiological contact tracing has been done on such a large scale.

Approximately 1,223 contacts were identified during this exercise, and as of yesterday all of them had passed the incubation period and were no longer under surveillance.

Nonetheless Minister Adam emphasised that the ministry needs to increase its efforts especially since the plague epidemic shows no sign of abating in Madagascar.

“We have to increase the people that are trained in contact tracing, because the biggest challenge is to ensure that we have a large pool of people who are trained to manage contact tracing,” the minister remarked.

Accordingly the training yesterday equipped those in attendance with knowledge of the principles and methodologies of contact tracing.

They also learned the roles and responsibilities of contact tracers especially with regard to collecting factual and qualitative information while working on the field.

Dr Tennin Gakurah, Dr Daniel Langat and Dr Emmanuel Musa from the WHO were present during the training to help in the training of the health professionals and volunteers.

In an interview with the press Dr Jastin Bibi, the director of the Disease Surveillance and Response Unit (DSRU), said that contact tracing is not a new concept in Seychelles and has often been applied to cases such as HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and SARS, albeit on a much lower scale.

He said that in this instance, contact tracing for the plague was a labour intensive process for the ministry and therefore a refresher course was necessary.

The training yesterday is part of a longer series of training which will include field simulation and an evaluation of the overall programme.

 

 

 

 

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