CDC Collaborates with South Africa to Strengthen Border Health During Pandemic

CDC Collaborates with South Africa to Strengthen Border Health During Pandemic (3-minute video)

Title: CDC Collaborates with South Africa to Strengthen Border Health During Pandemic

CDC logo

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(soft music underneath voice over throughout)

Joslyn Walker, Program Manager, Health Systems Trust: When COVID first hit, most countries were very unprepared for the scale of the pandemic. A common response was to close our borders and quarantine people. Obviously, when in a place like Southern Africa, where we have people moving across borders all the time, this created a number of challenges. And then you’ve also got challenges related to trade and industry, even aid transporting across borders. People come across the border to access health services, education, etc. In a time of a pandemic outbreak such as COVID, we needed to have better emergency responses at that border. We needed to build the capacity of all stakeholders, immigration, peace services, etc., to identify people who might be coming into the country with a communicable disease such as COVID.

Sadie Ward, Border Health Technical Advisor U.S. CDC: The Global Border Health Team has what we call our master training program, which is a curriculum that’s two weeks long, if it were completed in its entirety. However, we worked with the South African National Department of Health to identify which pieces or topics from that curriculum that they were most interested in training their own staff on.

Antoinette Hargreaves, Regional Director, Port Health Authority: And you as CDC coming to the National Department of Health and saying, we want to partner with you and we want to roll out training in your space regarding border health, which would also ensure that your port health officials are part of this training, assisted us that we were then able to confidently go ahead and then engage with the various stakeholders who worked outside of the points of entry and sign our various MOUs and even to assist us to enhance our public health emergency response plans.

Sadie Ward, Border Health Technical Advisor U.S. CDC: So while the training only targeted port health officials, it armed them with the ability or capacity to be able to train others at their points of entry on how to help with preparedness for and response to a public health event. Because they serve as kind of the first line of defense for a country in terms of being able to identify potentially ill passengers that are passing through the point of entry in order to ensure that those people can get care as they need it, to then also prevent the further spread of disease within their own borders or externally outside of their borders.

Joslyn Walker, Program Manager, Health Systems Trust: And because this was an emergency response, because of the way that we approached COVID, we ended up with a lot of people just static in one place. And the SOPs now enabled that movement and enable people to safely cross borders, to safely travel, and for groups to move across borders safely in a controlled manner that didn’t contribute to the further spread of COVID.

Text on slate: To learn more about CDC’s global health work visit www.cdc.gov/globalheatlh/.

Follow @CDCGlobal on social media.

[music ends]

[end]