The Ministry of Health and Sanitation is currently struggling to contain a measles outbreak in Koinadugu and Falaba Districts in the North of Sierra Leone. The number of confirmed cases as at Friday 21 June, 2018 are thirty (30) and the outbreak has spread from two to 23 chiefdoms in the two districts .There are still no reports of deaths.
The outbreak which was officially declared on the 14th June, 2018 by the country’s Health Ministry emanated from unvaccinated children in neighbouring Guinea who came into Sierra Leone to access nearby health facilities.
The response according to the Ministry of Health is being coordinated by the District Health Management team in Koinadugu where Community case surveillance is being done in partnership with their counterparts in Guinea. The Ministry, we are told, is also putting modalities in place to conduct an emergency vaccination campaign across Koinadugu and it’s neighbouring districts commencing 24 June,2018.
Despite these efforts we still continue to register more cases while the disease continues to spread to more difficult access terrains. This has been largely attributed to the movement of cattle rearers and miners together with their families to and from Guinean communities to Sierra Leone .
This according to Health Officials poses further high risk to the spread of the disease to neighbouring districts like Kono, Tonkolili, and Bombali which many believe would pose difficulties for the response .
The Ministry has complained of a lot of issues ranging from the lateness on their side in producing test results on time largely because test samples have to be taken to Freetown from the affected areas for confirmation and these according to Health sources will last for at least ten days.
The Ministry is also grappling with mobilizing the required resources to conduct mass measles campaigns and undertake other activities that would fight the outbreak in all 23 chiefdoms.
Victor Lansana a Civil society activist working in the health sector has criticized the government on the grounds that a number of health personnel are still parading the country as health volunteers and have still not been factored into the health system while government on the other hand continues to complain about lack of health personnel to conduct massive vaccination campaigns especially during such outbreaks.
Mr. Lansana has also accused the government of still not having seed money, personnel and resources to respond to outbreaks and heavily relying on Partner-Led interventions.
All these lapses from the point of view of the Ministry clearly exposed the unpreparedness of the country to handle emergency disease outbreaks with all the lessons we should have learned from the Ebola Disease. The once highly trumpeted Health infrastructures developed by local and international efforts are completely down and largely unsustainable to fight back and contain the measles outbreak.
If the reasons currently advanced by the Ministry of Health stating that the movement of people will definitely not complement their vaccinations campaigns why not stop the movement now rather than stopping it later when the epidemic would have spread across the country killing thousands of children? This was the same situation that had prevailed in the early days of the Ebola scourge when we failed to take a number of radical actions that would have nipped the disease in the bud in Kailahun where it started.
The President can immediately invoke certain legal provisions that would necessitate this action. Don’t tell me it is earlier to invoke such a provision.If we can have Executive Orders restricting people’s movement on the last Saturday of every month for at least seven hours to clean the country why not use the same orders to stop the deaths of thousands of children.