Dr Alex Riolexus Ario, the Director of the Uganda National Institute of Public Health says Uganda needs to have at least one field epidemiologist at the district level to identify problems faster and handle public health emergencies better.
Uganda will need to train more field epidemiologists in order to make major strides in disease surveillance and
handling outbreaks before spiralling out of control.
This was revealed by Dr Alex Riolexus Ario, the Director of
the Uganda National Institute of Public Health as a batch of 13 specialists were graduating as field epidemiologists on Thursday.
Ario said the new fellows bring the total of post-masters students trained under the two year specialist programme to just 65 yet it was
started more than five years ago. The country, he says, needs to have at least one of such specialists
at the district level to help identify problems faster and handle
public health emergencies better.
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The highest cohort they have admitted ever for the
programme is 15 fellows who are enrolled for the year 2022. This is partly
due to the fact that the course is tedious and requires one to either resign
from their job or take unpaid leave to be deployed in the Ministry of Health
for two years.
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He says they are doing a curriculum review to add other
critical aspects in public health like informatics. Howeber, they are impeded by lack of
funds since the course is money intensive considering that the fellow has to be
in the field and establish systems that would help tackle specific health
challenges.
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The course is entirely donor-funded by the US Centers for
Disease Control and Ario says they have been looking for more funding such that
the number of trainees can increase but also add other units that are critical
for disease prevention and control.
On his part, Dr Daniel Kyabayinze, the Director of Public
Health in the Ministry of Health said this graduation is timely when the
Ministry of Health is grappling with COVID-19 vaccine uptake. With more than 20 million doses of the vaccine in stores but
just four million people fully vaccinated, he said these can be helpful in establishing
what exactly is keeping people away from the jab.
While deployed at the Ministry of Health, some of the graduating
fellows got involved in investigating the COVID-19 outbreak in Moroto prison in
September 2020, an outbreak at a secondary school in Kampala and how to handle
home-based COVID-19 care in western Uganda.
Other work was done on suspected anthrax outbreaks in
Kapchorwa and surveillance of Acute Flaccid paralysis as a symptom of polio.
