The federal government has urged states to establish their own emergency preparedness and response teams, capabilities, and action plans, with the assistance of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
This comes as the number of verified cases has grown to 40 from the 830 suspected cases reported thus far.
Concerned about the disease’s mounting instances, the US government has announced plans to deliver doses of Mpox vaccines to Nigeria to help manage the rapidly spreading disease.
Dr. Jide Idris, Director General of the NCDC, stated Friday at the Joint NCDC/WHO National Mpox Briefing with Stakeholders and Partners meeting in Abuja that the NCDC has already met with state governors and their respective health commissioners to discuss the need for the facilities.
” Looking at the number of cases we have in the country, which is about 40, quite a number of them are in about 12 or 13 states. A number of the cases are in the South-South, South-East, some in Lagos, Ogun, and up north there and looking at the distribution, our plans now are to target those states so that we can reduce the number of cases through active surveillance to detect more cases”.
“We have to beef up our laboratory services, all the cases we have seen so far were confirmed using genomic sequencing in two labs, the National Research Lab in Abuja and in Lagos. But because of the spread, of what is happening, we need to increase the number of laboratories we’re going to use to test. So we are including LUTH and the African Center for Genomics (ACG).
“More importantly, we need to increase all the laboratory capabilities, especially in the South-South, South-East area. We also know that in our network, quite several laboratories can do PCR, but they may not be able to test for Mpox.So we need to beef up those capabilities, either by training or by supplying them with necessary reagents and consumables. We’ve identified several laboratories who are looking into that”
