Publication Date: 25 September 2024
- Background
Officially launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2017 as a specialized technical institution of the African Union, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) is Africa’s first continent-wide public health agency. Africa CDC envisions a safer, healthier, integrated, and stronger Africa, where the Member States can effectively respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases and other public health threats. The agency’s mission is to strengthen the capabilities of Africa’s public health institutions and systems to detect and respond quickly and effectively to disease outbreaks and other health burdens through an integrated network of continent-wide disease control and prevention, preparedness and response, surveillance, laboratory, and research programs. To achieve its mission, the Africa CDC works in all geographic regions of the African continent and has instituted technical divisions to focus on five priority areas, namely Surveillance and disease intelligence, Preparedness and response, Laboratory systems and networks, Disease Control and Prevention, and Public Health Institutes and research.
The Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want is the African Union’s (AU) strategy for the development of the continent and the Africa Health Strategy 2016-2030 aims to ensure healthy lives and promote the well-being for all in Africa in the context of “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want” and the Sustainable Development Goals. One of its objectives is to reduce morbidity and end preventable mortality from communicable and noncommunicable diseases and other health conditions in Africa by implementing several strategic priorities including “Ending AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria and Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) and combat Hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other emerging and re-emerging communicable diseases”.
To support African countries to address issues related to prevention and control of endemic diseases and NTDs on the continent, Africa CDC has established a Unit of Endemic and NTDs under the Division of Disease Control and Prevention. One of the flagship programmes of the Unit is the prevention and control of viral hepatitis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 82 million people are living with HBV and 9 million with HCV on the continent. Furthermore, HBV and HCV infections are responsible for more than 50% of primary liver cancer on the African continent. However, detailed epidemiology and understanding of the disease burden in Africa are absent due to the scarcity of reliable prevalence data and population-based estimates. Therefore, for any continental viral hepatitis prevention and control program to be effective, this major gap needs to be urgently addressed, and surveillance systems implemented to obtain reliable estimates of the burden of the disease in all countries on the continent.
Cognizant of this critical public health issue, Africa CDC has recently signed a grant agreement with the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) for the implementation of a continental four-year viral hepatitis prevention and control program aiming to build sustainable systems and capacities to support AU Member States with viral hepatitis elimination efforts. In the first phase of this four-year project, a situational assessment will be conducted to evaluate viral hepatitis prevention and control programmes of 55 AU Member States (MS).