Gastroenteritis: Lagos sets up emergency operation centre
Consequent upon the growing concern about the recent increase in the incidence of gastroenteritis in Lagos State, the state government has activated an Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) to coordinate responses against the outbreak of the disease as well as other infectious diseases.
According to a press statement seen by Businessday, Akin Abayomi, commissioner for health, inaugurated the centre on Wednesday, noting, “The EOC is a command and control centre headquartered in the Ministry of Health that will coordinate and fine-tune logistics and resources in response to the increase in numbers of diarrhoea and vomiting recorded in the past weeks in five local government area of Lagos State.
“The EOC is made up of sub thematic areas of surveillance and laboratory; communication, health education and social mobilization; case management and infection control as well as logistics and data management. We are going to have a complete narrative of what happened during these past weeks on lessons learned and how we going to move forward.”
Abayomi stated that the state government had been proactive in its response and management of the excess cases of vomiting and diarrhoea since the report was made and investigation commenced.
The commissioner said some samples collected during the cause of the investigation and sent to the laboratory tested positive for a type of cholera, saying, “Investigation is still ongoing to ascertain whether cholera is solely responsible for the entire cases or whether there are other pathogens involved in the excess cases recorded.”
According to Abayomi, we have been able to send some samples to our laboratories and some of those samples tested positive for a type of cholera, but we are not sure whether cholera is responsible for the entire outbreak of diarrhoea and vomiting. “But we are sending some other samples to other laboratories and we are going to do some in-depth analysis to see whether this is just a case of cholera or whether there are other pathogens or agents that are contributing to this outbreak,” he said.