Don’t gloss over Ebola response shortcomings
The health minister, Dr Ruth Aceng, speaks on the floor of Parliament on November 2. PHOTO/DAVID LUBOWA
What you need to know:
The issue: Ebola response
Our view: We urge the government to reflect on why development partners are against providing direct budgetary support
It was not so long ago that Uganda’s Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response (IDSR) system received plaudits for the rigour of its approach.
The IDSR system’s salience owed to the fact that it guaranteed a seamless disease surveillance process at community (village health teams), health facility (health workers) and border point of entry (immigration and port health staff) levels.
The latest EVD outbreak has, however, asterisked this system. We join other observers in posing a simple but perilous question: Why?
Despite—or in fact because of—state actors being commendably candid about mistakes made, the current state of affairs remains a disappointing mystery to many. While mistakably deeming EVD symptoms as telltale signs of malaria contains not a lick of awkwardness, bungling the clean-up does.
Health workers protection—so often used as a barometer of the preparedness of any system—has been much more than a brooding lament. More than a smidgen of blaming creeps in at the revelation that infections of health workers long breached the double digit mark, with seven deaths for good measure.
The cumulative tally of 55 deaths and counting since September is suggestive of the fact that we are not talking about a minor scratch to the IDSR system’s paintwork. Far from it. A statistical model that has proffered a tally of 500 deaths by next April as a worst case scenario is even more worrying.
Government overtures that support from development partners has been inconsistent and at times reluctant continue to be viewed with complicated love and disdain. We urge the government to reflect on why development partners are against providing direct budgetary support. Their accountability concerns, which are neither imagined nor illusory, cannot be wished away.
We also reckon rapt introspection on what fuelled amplification of EVD cases—especially in backwaters—will be extremely valuable. One of the catalysts for Uganda’s success story in the HIV/Aids fight was a sure-footed approach to health awareness and promotion.
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Between 1990 and 2017, Uganda’s HIV/Aids death rate nosedived by an eye-watering 88 percentage points. This was hardly accidental. The drop was, among others, occasioned by a raft of communication strategies put to use in information, persuasion and dialogue-based campaigns. State actors were clear-eyed about their intentions.
Sadly, anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a scattergun execution amid the current EVD outbreak’s strong headwinds. Public service announcements, health fairs and mass media campaigns have been conspicuous by their absence. This remains the case even as locals exhume EVD corpses in hotspots like Kassanda determined to perform rituals with catastrophic consequences.
In all, the description of sections—if not vast swathes—of the country’s health system as broken has come to be chillingly accurate. It is our hope that the powers that be don’t stick plaster to deal with a broken system.
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