When an outbreak emerges, how quickly it is contained often depends on decisions made years earlier. This was the central lesson I took away from the Global Health Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur. As Country Director for VillageReach in the Democratic Republic of...
At 4 a.m., Julien Nyembo left home on a motorbike to collect suspected cholera samples from a remote health-zone office in Tanganyika province in the DRC. By the time he reached the central hub, it was already 3 p.m. The journey was difficult. Along the way, he rode...
Across Africa, effective disease surveillance faces a common hurdle: unreliable transport of medical samples, which often leads to delays, compromised quality and slower outbreak responses, putting public health at risk. In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, these challenges...
The battle against polio is a race against time. Prompt diagnosis is critical to halt the disease’s spread and ensure affected children receive necessary care. However, transporting samples from remote areas in South Sudan to the capital Juba, and then to the...
In June 2023, Dr. Pius Mutuku and his team were alerted of three patients whose lab samples had tested positive for polio from the Hagadera Refugee camp in Garissa County, Kenya. The samples indicated the presence of a non-wild variant of poliovirus, known as...
