A pharmaceutical microbiologist and professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ibadan, Iruka Okeke, has emphasised that diarrhoea can be life-threatening for children.
“For young children, diarrhoea can be life-threatening,” the don said in an article titled ‘Prof Iruka Okeke: Pioneering Genomic Approaches for Better and Faster Disease Surveillance in Africa,’ obtained on Sunday.
According to the professor, almost half a million children under age five die from diarrheal diseases every year.
“Even when they have access to treatment, children may suffer repeated bouts, which can lead to malnutrition and longer-term health and development problems,” the article stated.
Okeke says diarrhoea is often caused by bacterial infection, but identifying the specific pathogen that leads to an individual case or outbreak can be challenging.
“Bacteria cause a range of other infections as well. When they infect the bloodstream or central nervous system, infections can be even more deadly than diarrhoea and indistinguishable from a range of infections caused by viruses, malaria and other parasites.
“Some infections are caused by E. coli bacteria, for example, however, most E. coli are harmless, it’s just a small proportion that cause disease,” the professor noted.
The article also stated that identifying the specific strain that has led to an infection or an outbreak is hard enough without the structural weaknesses of health systems in many parts of Africa.
It adds that healthcare facilities typically lack the capacity and resources to do comprehensive culture-based testing of blood or stool samples that would enable the identification of the specific cause of disease.
“This means that a core piece of the surveillance system that can prevent outbreaks is missing. Additionally, even in routine cases, health professionals across the continent are denied the information, they need to intervene with effective treatments and vaccines.”
The piece notes that Okeke, a 2022 Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellow, is using cutting-edge genomics techniques to develop and deploy quicker, more targeted, and more precise tools that will allow health workers in tropical settings to rapidly identify and understand the bacteria that cause serious diseases, thus speeding the development of vaccines that can lower the burden of these diseases on lives, wellbeing, livelihoods and economies.
It stated, “Prior to the genomic revolution, we were using time-consuming, and, in some cases, imprecise ways to determine whether a particular pathogen was present and what exactly it was. Now we can confirm bacteria that we isolate from infections very precisely.”
On developing a national genomics surveillance system, the article notes that such a system consists of “sentinel labs,” which collect samples from patients and analyse them to support patient care.
