No fewer than 17 public health officers from Nigeria and other West African region graduated from the United States health training programme.
The first cohort of the Regional Health Emergency Management Training graduated on Saturday in Abuja.
The intermediate level training was hosted by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. CDC) in collaboration with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.
The other countries that participated in the two-week training are Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Liberia, and Mali.
They learned and strengthened the skills needed to effectively operate incident management systems for outbreak preparedness and response.
The region is therefore said to have been better off in the area of preparing and responding to epidemics and pandemics given the type of skill acquired.
In her remarks at the graduation ceremony, the U.S. CDC Division of Global Health Protection Acting Program Director Asmau Aminu-Alhaji thanked the graduates for their dedication to public health both at home and across the region and highlighted the importance of public health collaboration and communication across borders.
The Public Health Emergency Management Professional Certification Program is part of the U.S. Government’s support for global health Security in Nigeria and globally. It provides emergency operations staff and other public health experts with specialized training in public health emergency management, operations, and other critical preparedness and response skills.
