Symposium on Ebola brings out ICT tools in Ebola fight

Mike Schmoker  said “In a research-poor context, isolated experience replaces professional knowledge as the dominant influence on how teachers teach.”

UbuntuNet Alliance carries the vision of becoming a facilitator  of innovative solutions to the health challenges facing the African continent through promotion of telemedicine.

Building on collaborative remote telemedicine initiatives on research and education networks such as the Dengue Symposiums in the Caribbean and in Asia, the Alliance, against all  organisational and technological challenges.

held a Symposium on Ebola as a pre-conference event to UbuntuNet-Connect 2014 held on 12^th November with an impressive audience of conference participants.

Mali’s Doctor Ousman Ly, General Director of National Agency of Tele-health and Medical Informatics in the country’s Ministry of Health, despite being called to attend to a case of Ebola that Mali reported earlier that month and a break in the data link,  availed his presentation that offered insight into a new e-health strategy  of using ICT tools in Mali to create awareness  but also track Ebola in real time.

The electronic alert system for Ebola is an application developed for mobile phones that allows real-time trace data for Ebola and all diseases of epidemic potential. This application is a digital display interface called Digital Integrated Health Information System (SNISI) and is installed on phones responsible for Health Information System at the District [Mali]. 

Representing the Ministry of Health in Zambia, Dr Constantine Malama,  Virologist and Public Health Specialist indicated that Zambia was currently conducting research on Ebola and allayed fears of the virus spreading to Zambia directly from the fruit bat  indicating that a recent study had shown that the country’s climate does not support the fruit bat which is a natural career of Ebola. 

The Doctor further indicated that Zambia had instituted professional health checks at its airports to screen all entrants into the country and had already created Ebola isolation facilities in a remote location. 

Another global Telemedicine event is slated for December 2014 at Asia Telemedicine Symposium (ATS2014) to be held on December 13, 2014 at the Telemedicine Development Center of Asia (TEMDEC) of Kyushu University Hospital in Japan.

According to Yasuichi Kitamura, the board of director of Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN), the  regional research and education network of Asia Pacific area the symposium brings together doctors to tackle emerging medical issues.

“One of the working groups of APAN is the medical working group. This WG is very active for having the collaboration about the telemedicine.  And this is the special thing but this working group is organized by the medical doctors not by the network engineers and the WG's scope is the real medical matters.
UbuntuNet Alliance’s Joe Kimaili will present remotely from Uganda's renown Makerere  University. According to Kitamura there is a strong collaborative partnership in between Uganda’s Makerere University and Japanese and university hospitals that have previously facilitated collaborative initiatives in orthopedics. Interested Ugandan researchers can enlist to participate in the Telemedicine Symposium by emailing info@ubuntunet.net