Epidemics are all in a day’s work for Moeti
South Africa-born Dr Matshidiso Moeti has seen her fair share of epidemics and pandemics over the course of her decades-long career in public health, and is now the face of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Africa, bringing information to hundreds of millions of people as Covid-19 sweeps across the continent.
As a young doctor working in public health in Botswana, Moeti was tasked with one of the two biggest challenges in her career. One was the HIV/Aids pandemic, which at that stage faced enormous challenges, not just in terms of access to treatment but also the stigma attached.
“In those very early days when it [HIV/Aids] was very stigmatised, you had to keep absolutely secret who was infected,” she told Business Day in an interview.
“I remember the register of who was infected in Botswana used to be kept under lock and key in a drawer in my desk in the office that I had as a programme manager [for HIV/Aids in Botswana],” she said.
In those days, the reality was that people she would see at an
HIV/Aids conference who visibly had the infection would just not return when the next conference was held.
Decades later Moeti faced her second big public health challenge, in part as the new and first female regional director of the WHO in Africa at the time.
The deadly Ebola epidemic hit countries in West and Central Africa hardest and led to violence in reaction to attempts to combat the virus, which required of people to change one of their most sacred rituals — burying the dead.
This year added another public health-care crisis to her tally as the novel coronavirus does the unthinkable — bringing the global economy to a halt while people are confined to their homes in order to prevent them infecting each other.
While its spread in Africa, which has more than 47,000 cases, has been far less rapid than in Europe, the US and China, where it originated, the continent faces extreme challenges in its response. Even developed economies have taken a beating as they try to contain and mitigate the devastation caused by the pandemic. In addition, the politics involved in public health at this scale is no small challenge either.
Asked about the response to Covid-19, the 66-year-old Moeti says she often tells her colleagues she has not worked this hard since she was the programme manager for HIV/Aids in Botswana.
Maybe, she says, this is just the result of her being older.
“But I feel the intensity more than I did when I was 40 years old. It has really, really been relentlessly intense, and it’s meant that I have stopped virtually everything else, which is a worry at the back of my head.
“There’s things that should not stop. You are running an institution that does more than outbreak control,” Moeti says.
She relies heavily on her team to ensure that the rest of the WHO’s tasks and projects in Africa get done while the world comes to grips with the reality of Covid-19.
While public health has consumed her adult life, it was “by accident” that she ended up working in it. As a young high school girl she wanted to be a physicist, but then went on to study medicine, dreaming of specialising as a paediatrician.
Her decision to go into public health was in no small measure influenced by her parents, who both worked in the sector, most notably in Botswana, which became their home after the family left Springs in Gauteng when she was 11. The decision to move countries was in part to get away from the apartheid security forces but also to ensure the children received a better education than what was available under Bantu education in SA, Moeti says.
On how her country of birth is dealing with the outbreak, Moeti says the approach taken by the government, which includes data-based interventions and economic and social support packages to help mitigate the effects of the pandemic, is a “strong combination” the WHO in Africa would recommend to other countries, but in their own context.
With five years left of her term as director of the WHO in Africa, it can be assumed that Moeti will continue at the coalface of public health on the continent as the world ponders how to come to terms with life after Covid-19.
Her own dream of what will happen after these five years is a bit more whimsical than her unending workdays.
“I want to rear ostriches and grow olives in Botswana,” she says, adding that the climate is ideal for it.
But for now, dreams of farming, attending jazz festivals and spending time with her family are a far cry from reality. There is, after all, an invisible enemy on the loose, and she is helping to call the shots in Africa’s first line of defence.
IN THOSE VERY EARLY DAYS WHEN IT [HIV/AIDS] WAS VERY STIGMATISED, YOU HAD TO KEEP ABSOLUTELY SECRET WHO WAS INFECTED