Proper collaboration seen as key to good health
CLIMATE change, access to public health, donor funding and public/ private partnerships.
These were all key points highlighted yesterday as the chief executive of the Human Sciences Research Council, Olive Shisana, chaired a high-level conversation about the issues titled “Collaboration for Public Health Advancement” at the Science Forum South Africa in Pretoria.
“Health is more than just diseases and is affected by every sector in a country,” said Professor Gueladio Cisse from the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.
“It should be the first sector where the most sizeable collaborations are done,” he said.
“If we want sustainable collaborations, we have to have research that is designed towards action and impact spanning more than 10 years instead of three years as in some cases.”
Cisse said climate change would be one of the areas warranting such collaborations between governments and civil organisation as its impact was already threatening the global environment.
“If you take issues such as water and sanitation, there are millions of people who aren’t accessing it. Sanitation is lagging in the poorer parts of the world, and wastes are also not being treated well,” he continued.
Citing the example of the recent Ebola outbreak that threatened to cripple several African countries’ health systems because of a lack of co-ordination and coherent collaboration, Dr Tim Eckmanns from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin said the continent showed it wasn’t prepared for such outbreaks.
“In many parts of the continent, there was no primary health care. Some parts of the countries were without water or electricity. We can’t do surveillance or early warnings in such cases,” he said.
However, through the partnerships that arose from that time between governments and aid organisations, most of the countries were in a better situation and would be better prepared in the event of other disease outbreaks, Eckmanns said.
Professor Quarraisha Abdool Karim from the Centre of the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa, said the country’s response to the HIV/Aids epidemic had set an “interesting and important” precedent.
Once global agencies such as the Global Fund and the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief put HIV/Aids on the global agenda, among other diseases, a series of advancements were achieved, from moving from patients taking many antiretroviral pills a day to taking just one pill a day.
“Today, the cost of Aids drugs is about a dollar a day and has gone from many tablets to one. The World Health Organisation has provided guidelines on treatment, and we now have 15 million people getting treatment, but that’s only half the number of people who need to be on treatment. A lot still needs to be done,” Karim said.