Reinforcing epidemiological surveillance

Over the last five decades the world has seen an explosion of emerging diseases in human populations. Numerous emerging infectious diseases of animal origin have reached humans including AIDS Ebola SARS avian flu chikungunya Zika and COVID 19. The emergence of known parasites and bacterial or fungal pathogens is leading to the emergence of synergistic epidemics on all continents including Africa.To this end in Mali the Ministry of Health has decided to involve the community in the fight against public health threats by using mobile telephony to report such threats while respecting the method of notifiable disease surveillance as defined by the WHO. Thus every day with the support of health agents CHWs send a coded message to health centers and districts with a view to detecting any public health threats in real time. These messages are then confirmed or invalidated by the health agents through investigation and the collection of samples for forwarding to the lab.