WHO chief backs Irish moves on virus
THE Irish director at the World Health Organization’s emergencies programme has welcomed Ireland’s introduction of more stringent requirements before testing people for coronavirus.
Dr Mike Ryan said testing is a finite resource and it needs to be focused on the people most likely to have the disease.
During the week, it was announced that patients seeking a coronavirus test would need to display two symptoms which include a fever and a cough or shortness of breath.
He said: ‘My understanding is that the health authorities in Ireland have moved the case definition to actually be in line with WHO case definition.
‘The purpose is to ensure that we’re focused on detecting and testing these suspect cases – the people most likely to have this disease.’
Dr Ryan said that testing as many people as possible is good but you also need to catch those most likely to have the disease because they need rapid testing and rapid results and will need to be isolated.
Dr Ryan, born in Curry, Co. Sligo, and raised in Charlestown in Mayo, said there are approximately 1,500 confirmed cases in Africa and that he is sure there is under-detection and under-reporting in the number of cases there.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke, when asked about the situation in Africa, Dr Ryan said: ‘I think what is clear is that the epidemic has not developed and accelerated fully in many developing countries, and that’s a great concern for us, especially amongst fragile states and in refugee populations.’
Dr Ryan said the WHO has distributed over 1.5million test kits to 122 countries with every country in Africa having tests available weeks ago and trained technicians able to analyse them. However, he added that while the infrastructure in low-income countries and in fragile states is not as great as elsewhere, Africa in particular has been responding to epidemics for years.
‘They have good systems in place for Ebola, for cholera surveillance, for polio surveillance. So there are systems in place that will pick up suspect cases. Maybe not in the same way we would in Europe, but the systems are there.’
Dr Ryan said that Singapore and China are examples of how to deal with the aftermath of the infection, where now the only new infections recorded are imported cases.