Herd Immunity: Jigawa's community-driven approach boosts immunisation coverage

For disease eradication campaigns to succeed, public health officials need to interact with the public. In Pakistan, the front line against polio is comprised of women who reach out to directly to families with young children, often at major transportation centers. The women engage in this type of public health awareness as a way to navigate around extremist violence and the adverse consequences of a US fake vaccination campaign. The women focus on building rapport with families, and then administering vaccines.

Local public health infrastructure makes monitoring and responding to epidemic outbreaks possible. In Nigeria’s Kebbi state, The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) operates Public Health Emergency Operation Centers (PHEOC), which serve as local nodes in the country’s battle against infectious disease. Each PHEOC coordinates with a local committee of leaders in identifying, isolating, and treating cases of infectious disease.

A new project uses cellphones to provide users with information about mosquitos carrying deadly viruses as well as the ability to report sightings of virus carrying mosquitos. Through this reporting system, entomologists are able to more comprehensively and quickly know where work has to be done to keep people safe from disease.

Nigeria contained its 2014 Ebola outbreak through rapid emergency response and compassionate care. In less than 10 weeks, health workers visited more than 147,000 people who may have had first or second degree contact with the index patient, tracking body temperatures and other health data while isolating themselves from their own families to prevent further exposure. Patients received psychosocial support, and a massive public awareness campaign encouraged public trust throughout the crisis.

Westerners' fear of infection of Ebola motivated a vaccine in record time, but a preventive system put in place could ensure similar results for other viruses before they reach the same magnitude.

Local agencies tasked with controlling disease-spreading organisms are releasing sterile male mosquitoes to help reduce the pest’s population and prevent the spread of dengue. This strategy has decreased the mosquito population by about 82% in parts of Southern California, marking the first time in eight years that the population has declined instead of increased.

Teams of Community Direct Distributors (CDD) are leading drug distribution campaigns to prevent and eliminate neglected tropical diseases in hard-to-reach, rural areas. These CDDs are members of the community they serve and are trained to educate the locals on disease prevention and administer the drugs themselves. With the CDDs’ help, several states have already eliminated some diseases and greatly reduced the spread of others.

In March when fewer than 100 coronavirus infections had been found in the U.K, researchers in Cambridge decided to begin sequencing coronavirus samples as part of an "unparalleled surveillance system for Covid" that could identify and track possible mutations or the virus. This effort – which involves labs sending leftover material from testing swabs to the researcher's genomics lab where they are stored and analyzed – has culminated in hundreds of thousands of genome sequences and "sounded an alarm for the world" about the new fast-spreading variant.

When a smallpox outbreak was deemed to be a likelihood in New York City in 1947, the city’s health commissioner rapidly launched a vaccination campaign that leveraged internal collaboration, consistent and transparent communication, and contact tracing. The effort culminated in more than six million people receiving vaccination in under a month, and only 12 infections and two deaths total. While this "public health triumph" hold lessons for the current COVID-19 pandemic, experts caution, “It’s almost inconceivable that we’re going to be able to do something similar as rapidly and as effectively.”

Contact tracing, the act of identifying the people that someone infected with COVID-19 has come into contact with to reduce transmission, is front and center for Salt Lake City County’s Infectious Disease and Epidemiology bureaus, which have increased staff by 100 people to adapt to rising need. As opposed to what some deem invasive technology used to do contact tracing in other countries, Salt Lake City is relying on an all-hands-on-deck surveillance effort through questioning of individuals with the goal of reducing spread as much as possible.