Haftom Taame

Mr Haftom Taame is an epidemiologist with more than 12 years of work experience in public health surveillance, outbreak investigation, health system designs, strategic planning, incident management, emergency operations center, and mentorship. He currently serves as Epidemiologist at Africa CDC, where he is responsible for supporting the establishment and strengthening of National Public Health Institutes (NPHIs) in Africa through the development of standard tools, workforce capacity, collaboration, coordination, and networking, and supporting the establishment and operationalization of Africa CDC research unit. Since he has joined Africa CDC in January 2016, he has contributed significantly to event-based and routine surveillance (EBS), operationalization of the Africa CDC Emergency Operation Centre, and training of national and subnational public health officers. He has been involved in supporting field-level emergency response in Mozambique and Cameroon and several international conferences. Before joining Africa CDC, Mr Taame served as a public health emergency surveillance and response officer for the Ethiopian Public Health Institute where he was responsible for surveillance, outbreak investigation and disaster responses. He led several outbreak investigations for malaria, measles, meningitis and polio in different parts of the country. He participated in the development of guidelines and standard operating procedures for surveillance, strategic plans, training of public health workers, supervised surveillance and contact tracing for Ebola in Ethiopia, and coordinated emergency nutrition responses in drought affected regions (Afar region). He served as a member of the working group that designed the Center for Public Health Emergency Management in Ethiopia. Mr Taame holds a master’s degree in public health epidemiology from Addis Ababa University and speaks fluent English, Amharic and Tigrigna.