The increasing threats from biological agents arising from emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases have become a global concern. This has required every continent to develop an effective method of controlling any outbreaks in their regions. This, perhaps, was what informed the Lagos State Government’s decision to formulate a multi-institutional approach to protect the lives of Lagosians from any future biological insecurity.
This was disclosed at a conference organised by the state government, in partnership with Global Emerging Pathogens Treatment Consortium. The event, which was the fourth in a series of conferences by the state in partnership with GET, was part of efforts to ensure that the African Continent braces up for the challenges posed by emerging infectious diseases and biosecurity threats. The theme of the conference was, “Strengthening Health Security and Mitigating Biological Threats in Africa.”
During his presentation titled, ‘Critical imperatives to protect Lagos State from the next infectious diseases outbreak,’ Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu said his administration has put structures in place to curtain future infectious diseases outbreaks. The governor, represented by the Commissioner for Health, Prof Akin Abayomi, said his elaborate plans to protect the state from an infectious disease outbreak rest on three major pillars, which will be driven by a policy, including health systems strengthening, genomic sequencing and infectious diseases research.
“We have continuously invested in the capacity of the Lagos State Biobank to sequence variants of infectious diseases. We believe that genomic sequencing will determine the future pace of healthcare, continuing to improve conditions for health workers and implementing a robust research agenda for the state as we are building the Lagos State Infectious Diseases Research Institute.
“After the COVID-19 outbreak, we put together a research team, which comprised several leading professors from the medical and scientific fraternities and the outcome of the research was we quickly learnt and understood that COVID-19 in Lagos was different from the ones in London, New York or Brazil. We were able to define in-house COVID-19 response to our indigenous population and that enables us to define our treatment strategies and policies and save resources instead of squandering money on things that we didn’t need. We are able to divert our resources to manage our COVID effects on the indigenous population of Lagos State.
“As a result of that, we are able to define, very clearly the natural history of COVID in Lagos and Nigeria. Ultimately, all these led to the development of Lagos State bio-risk, framework and roadmap, which is a continuous process. So, now that we are in a peace period, we’ve come out of our fifth wave and there are some speculations that we might go through subsequence waves and a return of people from Europe and America for Christmas but we are getting ready for the sixth wave.”
Preparing for future crises, which might arise as a result of pathogens of high consequence, Sanwo-Olu noted that the pandemic can be triggered by anything and could erupt in our environment as a significant consequence, economically and security-wise. “We, as a government, know that we need to take this situation very seriously because they can collapse the economy. So, I am re-assuring that Lagos is not resting; we are in peacetime at the moment and it is this time we do most of the work in preparation for a future pandemic.”
Sanwo-Olu submitted that repetitive or continuous communication is key to prevent, detect and respond and recover from any disease outbreaks, saying that his team will stay proactive with the residents of Lagos regularly to disseminate information and be honest with any situation reports.
Delivering his keynote speech on the topic, ‘Climate change and its Biosecurity implications for Africa,’ Abayomi described biosecurity as the implementation of measures that reduce the risk of damaging the biosphere that we depend on for survival. It requires the adoption of a set of attitudes and behaviours by people to reduce risk and disruption of our ecosystems either intentionally or unintentionally, he said.
He pointed out that as the African population quadruples in the next 50 years, and will be a continent of Mega Cities with major health, toxicity and biosecurity threats: “We have a situation where the population of the continent of Africa is increasing exponentially and the modeller says that in another 50 years, the population of Africa will double and treble. We have about a 1.2 billion at the moment and in another 50 years, we might probably have close to about a 2.5billion people and escalating. The problem with that is that most of the population in the continent will be residing in the cities and therefore the cities will be crowded and congested and we’ll have a situation where the footprint of humanity is creating ecological destruction.
“So, Lagos is a city that won’t stop growing because it attracts a lot of people on a daily basis. Therefore, we as a government have to cater for this influx of people; we have to prepare for the footprint that is large numbers of people are going to exact on the ecosystem of this great city. The population of people in Lagos is approaching 30 million and that is not entirely due to fertility but predominantly due to inbound migration. We have a commercial activity that drives the city and it’s got a lot of people moving around hustling and bustling and so we have a situation where as a government we have to make sure that we protect from biological sharks because any contagion whether it is airborne or waterborne contact one is going to spread very quickly and we saw this happen during COVID-19.”
On how can Lagos cope with its spiralling population, the commissioner said each country has the moral responsibility to protect its people within the social contract from biological crises threats and protect the integrity of its ecosystem it depends on. “Governor Sanwo-Olu administrator has put together the Lagos State Bioeconomy Governance Council. It’s made up of very eminent academics. We have members of the legal fraternity, biosecurity experts, and members of the community and it is anchored by the Ministry of Health and Governance Council to ensure that Lagos State is constantly preparing for biological shocks and doing what it needs to do to drive its bioeconomy. It is our responsibility as a government to pre-empt and prevent biosecurity threats, predict, mitigate and adapt, find and clearly identify a threat when it emerges, stop it promptly, restore calm and civil disruption and avoid economic collapse, require operational systems, policies and regulations and Legislation to deter threats as well as trained workforce.”
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the estimated remaining carbon budget from 2020 onwards to limit the global average temperature increase to 1·5°C above pre-industrial levels with a probability of 67 per cent is about 400 Gt carbon dioxide or 1150 Gt carbon dioxide for limiting this global heating to 2°C.
While speaking on climate change and its implications for Biosecurity, Abayomi expressed that climate change leads to changes in the suitability of environmental conditions that affect existing threats, saying that changes to the climate could allow new threats to emerge as conditions become more suitable for some hostile pathogens to flourish.
On his part, the Chief Operating Officer of GET, Ayodotun Bobadoye said a team of modellers shared their estimates that there is a 47-57 per cent chance of another global pandemic as deadly as COVID-19 occurring in the next 25 years. According to him, they estimate that the probability of a future zoonotic spill-over event resulting in a pandemic of COVID-19 magnitude or larger is between 2.5-3.3% annually and there is a 2.2-28% chance that another outbreak on the magnitude of COVID-19 will occur within the next 10 years and a 47-57% that it will occur within the next 25 years.
Bobadoye revealed that every three days, an acute public health event is reported to WHO in the African Region and 80 per cent of these are of zoonotic origin. He listed factors enhancing biosecurity threats as environmental destruction, emerging biotechnologies, improper handling and storage of biological specimens as well as increased terrorist activities.
