In an address to open the ‘Third African Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity,’ on Wednesday in Accra, the First Lady, Mrs Rebecca Akufo-Addo, noted that Africa had brilliant minds who could help to solve the challenges of existing diseases and emerging ones.

The conference being organised by the Global Emerging Pathologens Treatment Consortium, in collaboration with the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, has brought together researchers, policymakers and experts who work around Ebola and other emerging diseases from Africa and Europe.

Innovation

Mrs Akufo-Addo emphasised that Africa needed to be innovative, stressing that “innovation is one way of breaking new ground, breaking barriers and doing business away from the beaten path. We must ensure that effective technologies, products and services do indeed reach the millions of people who need them.”

She observed that the continent was faced with increasing incidences of emerging infectious diseases, inadequate health care facilities and shortage of human capacity in medical and allied sciences.

In addition, it is grappling with perennial political instability, food security, nutrition, health care, economic performance and energy, among others.

 Obviously, she said, those dynamics posed a challenge to the continent’s capacity to deal with infectious diseases such as Ebola, yellow fever, meningitis and Lassa fever.

“It is even more worrying when, infectious diseases have increasingly become unusual in their magnitude, in the way they spread and in the way they combine with other problems in the environment to present even bigger challenges,” the First Lady said.

African voices

Speaking at the opening session, a former Director of Noguchi, Professor Kwadwo Koram, said: “The loud silence of African voices during the Ebola crises led to the creation of the Global Emerging Pathologens Treatment Consortium, which aimed at bringing health experts on the continent and beyond together to share ideas and find solutions to emerging infectious diseases.

He said the conference would provide the platform for the participants to share experiences and challenges in addressing biosecurity in the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak and also to present latest breaking research and collaboration on Ebola diseases and other emerging and infectious diseases in Africa.

A Principal Investigator of the Consortium, Prof. Akin Abayomi, in a presentation, said the world was currently in an era of emerging infectious diseases, which required coordinated international response.

He said a multitude of factors were leading to increasing incidence of infectious diseases and mentioned some as change in demographics and pressure on the environment.

Prof. Abayomi said Africa was expanding at an alarming rate, saying by the end of the century, 40 per cent of the world’s population would be leaving in Africa.

With such a population boom, he stated that inhabitants of major cities in Africa would be faced with biosecurity threats; a situation which he said needed to be addressed before the next 50 years when the African population was estimated to hit 4.2 billion.