CFE-DM alumnus receives US Ambassador honor award
ABUJA, Nigeria
11.04.2020
Story by Theanne Herrmann
ABUJA, Nigeria - U.S. Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Nigeria Mary Beth Leonard recognized Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (CFE-DM) alumnus with a U.S. Mission Nigeria Honor Award for his work in mitigating infectious diseases.
The award presented to Dr. Muhammad Saleh, a senior public health specialist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognizes his dedication and support in responding to Lassa Fever, Yellow Fever, Monkeypox, and COVID-19.
"Who could have imagined a disease detected initially as pneumonia of unknown origin (PUO) reported to World Health Organization (WHO) 31 December 2019, would turn out to be a Global Pandemic now termed as COVID-19," said Saleh.
Eight weeks later, Nigeria reported their first case of COVID-19 on February 28, 2020. The Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) then activated a level 3 emergency operations center (EOC) for full scale outbreak response. Saleh was identified as an expert in emergency response to support coordination and strategic planning for the overall response. Leading him to design the first containment strategy that identified nine points of exposure to the index case in Nigeria, which later became the basis for targeted contact identification and management. He also supported the development of the initial Incident Action Plan (IAP), a key document that guided response objectives, high impact activities, resource mobilization and enhanced coordination among multi-partner and multi-agency teams.
To keep Nigerians and the world abreast of outbreak status, he devoted his time in working with colleagues at the NCDC to develop and produce daily situation reports, which facilitated and guided setting direction and decision making for response.
Saleh attended the two-week Health Emergencies in Large Populations (H.E.L.P.) workshop, in 2019, hosted by CFE-DM and in partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and University of Hawaii's Office of Public Health Studies.
H.E.L.P. is designed to provide top medical and public health professionals, from the military and civilian sector, with an understanding of the major public health issues and decision-making skills necessary to effectively plan for and respond to the needs of populations affected by humanitarian crises.
“I have applied two lessons that have stood out to me from the H.E.L.P. course while responding to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak response in Nigeria,” said Saleh.
Saleh was able to use information learned from the Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination module. “Like in every crisis being it a disaster, humanitarian event or public health disease outbreak, the role played by the military cannot be over emphasized, as the experiences I acquired through discussions about civil-military coordination assisted me in deepening my professional relationship with the Nigerian Ministry of Defense (MOD), which thus enabled me to design, orient and activate an EOC for their Health Implementation Program (HIP) to coordinate COVID-19 outbreak response from the military wing," said Saleh.
As the scope of the pandemic outbreak expanded in Nigeria, the need to increase testing for more people became evident. Saleh sought the collaboration of colleagues from Africa CDC and World Bank to expand a strategy for improved sample collection which resulted in the establishment of a sample collection center within the country's capital city, Abuja. This model was adopted and replicated nationwide in many Nigerian States. Additionally, this initiative was buffered by a mechanism that transmitted results to clients electronically and thus, reduced the long waiting time for individuals to access their COVID-19 results.
At the peak of the pandemic outbreak in Nigeria, the need to enforce and implement several Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) grew in the country. The Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 was burdened with that responsibility and this necessitated Saleh to act in the capacity of an acting chief of secretariat to provide technical assistance to the national coordinator of the PTF.
The other module he found valuable was "Communications with the Media and through the Media."
"The COVID-19 outbreak globally came with a lot of mixed reactions ranging from denials, theories and likes of deliberate rumors which magnified as 'infodemic' said Saleh. “H.E.L.P. assisted me in managing information among the public interest group on COVID-19 on my various social media handles - Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. Specifically, I had always remembered the clause 'what we do know?' emphasized during H.E.L.P discussions in opening my conversations or responding to official enquiries to the public stakeholders."
In addition, Saleh contributed to enhancing the capacity of stakeholders in the EOC by convening a training program and sessions which brought experts from WHO, CDC and other organizations to provide technical support across thematic areas of case management, infection prevention and control (IPC) and laboratory diagnosis. He was also a key stakeholder that designed and developed training modules of the NiCaDe project in Nigeria that has trained over 1,000 frontline healthcare workers on IPC strategies.
All products related to Nigeria's COVID-19 outbreak situation including response efforts can be accessed via an official microsite of NCDC at: http://covid19.ncdc.gov.ng
