Newly published study in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal by a team of Ugandan scientists and public health leaders recommends the need to have pre – approved research protocols to enable fast implementation of clinical and vaccine trials. This will save the Ugandans and researchers, delays in conducting trials like the one Sudan Ebola Vaccine trials.
“The successful control of the (Ebola) epidemic within 113 days, without locking down the capital city, was guided by two factors: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent successes in responding to EVD epidemics in DRC” it reads in part.
It further reveals that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the weakness of over reliance on multilateral responses to global threats, because every country — high- and low-income alike — was forced to rapidly develop individual pandemic-response structures.
Courtesy photo : Ebola trial at Uganda Virus Research Institute
Diagnostic approaches to COVID-19 were extended to support contact tracing, with a combination of genomic and cellphone geo-positioning being used to link contacts to cases in real-time. In the two hotspot districts, the government — for the first time in an EVD epidemic — implemented targeted lockdowns for a period of 63 days (representing three transmission cycles), as well as institutional quarantine of contacts in the Kampala metropolis and of non-compliant contacts from the two rural districts. The government also adopted aggressive supportive care and therapeutics.
For more information contact Dr. Kyobe Henry and Prof. Misaki
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