Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention

• Secure your spot and register today to attend MWC Kigali, 17-19 October 2023
  LONDON, Oct. 9, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The GSMA is delighted to announce that His Excellency Paul Kagame, the President of the Republic of Rwanda, will formally open MWC Kigali on 17 October at the Kigali Convention Centre, Kigali, Rwanda.
• "It is a great honour for His Excellency Paul Kagame to open MWC Kigali 2023; his participation is a mark of how Africa's digital transformation journey is gaining momentum and empowering communities, government and businesses.
• MWC Kigali, the African continent's largest and most influential connectivity event is taking place on the 17 – 19 October.
• Aligned with MWC Kigali's four core themes – Accelerate Africa, FinTech, HealthTech, and Powering Digital – these sessions aim to propel the digital era forward.

• The expansion of the dental practice management software market share is anticipated to be fueled by the increase in the geriatric population suffering from dental illness.
• Additionally, dentists in dental clinics primarily use dental practice management software for appointment scheduling, payment processing, patient communication, and insurance management.
• Due to a shortage of trained specialists, the dental practice management software market will expand slowly throughout the projection period.
• ACE Dental Software, Carestream Dental, LLC, CD Nevco, LLC (Curve Dental), Datacon Dental Systems, Inc., DentiMax, Good Methods Global Inc. (CareStack), Henry Schein, Inc., Nextgen Healthcare, Inc., Planet DDS, and Practice-Web, Inc.

• So it’s essential that scientists in Africa are able to generate and share critical data on the pathogens in time to inform public-health decisions.
• They enable scientists to decode the genetic material of diseases and create biological “fingerprints” to investigate and track the pathogens that cause those diseases.
• It also helps public health authorities to guide and prepare their public health systems for effective outbreak detection and response.
• One of those is a common repository where countries, public health authorities and their scientists can share information about diseases and the pathogens that cause them.

Human and economic costs

• Read more:
  Investing in health systems is the only way to stop the next Ebola outbreak

  There are some green shoots.

• The Africa Centres for Disease Control (Africa CDC), through the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative, oversaw the training of hundreds of laboratory staff.
• DNA sequencing machines and essential laboratory consumables – like reagents, the chemical cocktails that make testing possible – have been put in place.
• Today, public health laboratories in many African countries, with varying levels of capacity, can generate their own genomic sequences of pathogens.

Collaboration and consistency

• Third, we need data services and products to facilitate the sharing of data and information with decision-makers who are not scientists or geneticists.
• Fourth, standardised and consistent data management processes, practices, tools and controls for how data is processed, stored, shared and deployed are needed across countries and contexts.

A global imperative

• As we argue in our journal article, data management and analytics to support data-driven decision making in public health is a global imperative.
• It requires continuous engagement with international disease surveillance stakeholders and technology platform developers.
• It will also be a critical step towards an equitable mechanism to maximise the value and utility of pathogen genetic data for national, regional and global health security.

• The GSMA will work closely with Africa CDC on HealthConnekt Africa, a bold new initiative to connect all health facilities and workforce in Africa to the internet by 2030.
• The partnership between GSMA and Africa CDC is expected to contribute to realising this vision.
• "We look forward to working with members of the GSMA to bridge the digital divide that still limits the reach and impact of our health workforce."
• "While mobile growth across the region has been phenomenal over the past two decades, more needs to be done to harness the power of the technology across Africa's healthcare sector."