Lessons Learned From a Large Cross-Border Field Simulation Exercise to Strengthen Emergency Preparedness in East Africa, 2019.

Field simulation exercises (FSXs) require substantial time, resources, and organizational experience to plan and implement and are less commonly undertaken than drills or tabletop exercises. Despite this, FSXs provide an opportunity to test the full scope of operational capacities, including coordination across sectors. From June 11 to 14, 2019, the East African Community Secretariat conducted a cross-border FSX at the Namanga One Stop Border Post between the Republic of Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania. The World Health Organization Department of Health Security Preparedness was the technical lead responsible for developing and coordinating the exercise. The purpose of the FSX was to assess and further enhance multisectoral outbreak preparedness and response in the East Africa Region, using a One Health approach. Participants included staff from the transport, police and customs, public health, animal health, and food inspection sectors. This was the first FSX of this scale, magnitude, and complexity to be conducted in East Africa for the purpose of strengthening emergency preparedness capacities. The FSX provided an opportunity for individual learning and national capacity strengthening in emergency management and response coordination. In this article, we describe lessons learned and propose recommendations relevant to FSX design, management, and organization to inform future field exercises.

Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) update: What we know and what is unknown

Preliminary clinical features indicated that most of the infected patients were men with underlying diseases (comorbidities) including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, malignancy and chronic liver disease[6]. Patient presented with fever, cough, myalgia, sputum production, headache, haemoptysis, diarrhea and dyspnea[6]. Person- to-person transmission and familiar association have also been confirmed[7]. To date, a diagnostic kit has been developed for 2019- nCoV[8], and efforts are ongoing to develop other protocols. Whilst several important aspects of 2019-nCoV epidemiology, virology, mode of transmission, pathogenesis, diagnosis, clinical features, have been defined, there remain many unanswered questions, including source, transmission and epidemic potential. The Wuhan outbreak is a stark reminder of the continuing threat of zoonotic diseases.