By Juliette Jabkhiro and Kate Kelland
DAKAR/LONDON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - An isolation ward stands
ready at a hospital in Khartoum, Sudan. Laboratories in Senegal
and Madagascar have the testing equipment they need. Passengers
arriving at airports in Gambia, Cameroon and Guinea are being
screened for fever and other viral symptoms.
Africa's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says it
has activated its emergency operation centre in the face of what
global health officials say is a high risk the coronavirus
disease epidemic that began in China will spread to its borders.
On a poor continent where healthcare capacity is limited,
early detection of any outbreak will be crucial. The fear is great that a spreading epidemic of coronavirus
infections will be hard to contain in countries where health
systems are already overburdened with cases of Ebola, measles,
malaria and other deadly infectious diseases.
"The key point is to limit transmission from affected
countries and the second point is to ensure that we have the
capacity to isolate and also to provide appropriate treatment to
people that may be infected," said Michel Yao, emergency
operations program manager at the World Health Organization's
regional office for Africa in Brazzaville, Congo.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is barring its citizens
from flying to China. Burkina Faso has asked Chinese citizens to
delay travelling to Burkina, and is warning that they face
quarantine if they do. Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda have all
suspended flights to China.
"What we are emphasising to all countries is that they
should at least have early detection," Yao said.
"We know how fragile the health system is on the African
continent and these systems are already overwhelmed by many
ongoing disease outbreaks, so for us it is critical to detect
earlier to that we can prevent the spread."
John Nkengasong, Africa's CDC director, told a briefing in
the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa this week that the activation
of the emergency operation centre would create a single incident
system to manage the outbreak across the continent.
The Africa CDC will also hold a training workshop in Senegal
for 15 African countries on laboratory diagnosis, he said.
The continent has more than doubled the number of
laboratories now equipped to diagnose the viral infection, this
week adding facilities in Ghana, Madagascar and Nigeria and to
established testing labs in South Africa and Sierra Leone.
"By the end of the week we expect that an additional 24
countries (in Africa) will receive the reagents needed to
conduct the tests and will have the test running," a spokeswoman
for the WHO's Africa Region told Reuters.