Speaking to the press Friday morning, WHO country representative Dr. Jack Abdonlie together with Rwandan health officials unveiled the country’s preparedness and response to now a global pandemic.
“We are prepared and we have the capacity to carry out diagnosis, and there is no immediate threat as of now,” Dr. Abdonlie said.
WHO on Thursday declared the first global flu epidemic in four decades. With 28,774 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection and 144 deaths worldwide Africa is the less affected continent, Egypt this week had been the only country with a reported case, however Morocco reported this morning a case of an 18-year-old woman with a swine flu.
The outbreak originally in Mexico this April, Rwanda’s Health Ministry announced establishment of sentinel surveillance systems for the Avian Influenza in national referral laboratories through out the country.
With more reported cases from other parts of the world now the country has made available through WHO, more than 14,000 treatment doses of tamiflue, a drug used to treat the virus. More sentinel surveillance sites were also increased to ensure that there is at least one sentinel per province, and the national reference laboratory has been equipped with reagents and supplies for diagnosis of influenza A(H1N1).
Prof. Michael Kramer, the Director General of TRAC [Treatment and Research on AIDS Plus] underlined that, the population needs to know so as to raise vigilance and in case of an outbreak people could notice the symptoms of the disease.
According to Dr Abdonlie, influenza A(H1N1) in most cases is mild, because most of the patients of this disease are not fatal except in some few cases.
People aged 30-50, pregnant women or people suffering from chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes or obesity are at highest risk, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said on Thursday.
The development to raise the pandemic to the highest WHO alert level was expected by many experts, and it is based on the fact that the spread of the virus in several countries can longer be traced to clearly defined chains of human-to-human transmission and that further spread is considered inevitable. (End)