Global Health speakers address Ebola crisis, surgical shortages
By Lin Lofley
Experts in the study of African health issues headlined the 4th Annual UT Southwestern Medical Center Office of Global Health Symposium, a two-day event designed to survey and encourage the expansion of understanding and education in the study of treatment and prevention around the world.
Dr. Jide Idris, Honourable Commissioner for Health in the Lagos State Government of Nigeria, provided a look at how his nation came to be on the front lines of last summer’s Ebola crisis, and Dr. Miliard Derbew, Associate Professor of Surgery at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, discussed the importance of surgical training in the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.
The second day of the January conference was divided between lectures and a Student Global Health Conference, the second year that UT Southwestern students have had direct participation in the event.
Dr. Idris, whose appearances in global media became common during the Ebola crisis of western Africa, said that Nigeria continues to survey the lessons learned during the events of the summer of 2014.
“This crisis taught us a lesson,” he said, “and that is that any sensible government must be ready to mobilize infrastructure to address something like this. We can’t prevent something like the Ebola crisis, so we must be ready and able to respond to it.
“That’s why our health system in Nigeria, and in the other affected countries in western Africa – Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea – had to work together. It’s important to understand that our understanding of infectious disease tells us that it is not new. Today it’s Ebola, tomorrow it could be something else. A hundred years ago it was influenza.”
Dr. Idris pointed out that cholera and measles are problems that regularly affect people across the world, “and globalization, for all the good that it has brought, means that diseases can also spread much faster.”
At the height of the Ebola crisis, Dr. Idris said, Nigeria was seeing 20 cases a week, while neighboring Liberia was seeing 20 cases a day. But in Lagos, the Nigerian capital and a city of about 10 million people, an established health infrastructure supported the medical community’s response.
Specifically, when Ebola appeared in the country, health professions designated response teams, and a plan of action to meet the threat to Nigeria and its neighbors.
While Dr. Idris and his colleagues in western Africa have been focused on infectious disease, Dr. Derbew spoke about the pressing need across the continent for trained surgeons.
He discussed the importance of the expansion of surgical training and retention of surgeons, not just in Ethiopia, but in the nations between the Sahara to the north and South Africa to the south.
“When I talk about surgery and global health, I mean that roughly 250 million operations are performed each year in the world, but just 1.5 percent of them are performed in low-income countries such as those in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Dr. Derbew, a pediatric surgeon by training.
“Further, in most of the area the population is below the age of 18. In a population of roughly 303 million there are 33 pediatric surgeons. I know most of them by name.”
Calling surgery the most important component of any country’s health system, he said the importance of education is both the most important and most overlooked area.
