How Kenya is dangerously connected to disease outbreaks in the West

A woman receives yellow fever vaccination. Health Cabinet Secretary Cleopa Mailu says Kenya has beefed up national surveillance of yellow fever at points of entry such as airports and border towns. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • Planetary health is an emerging discipline in science where various experts explore the interdisciplinary link between human health, social, physical and political environment.
  • Given the rigorous scientific research that goes into epidemiology — you know, trying to isolate what pathogen that was, where it came from and the medium through which it got to people — reporters can only inform the public of the magnitude of a disease way much later.

With Kenya becoming one of the latest African nations to bear a series of pandemics such as Chikungunya, there couldn’t have been a better time for a Kenyan scientist to join globally acclaimed experts in a major scientific conference to discuss planetary health.

Thumbi Mwangi, a Kenyan veterinary epidemiologist, sat alongside four scientists and one executive at the Aspen Ideas Festival to discuss planetary health.

The four are Sam Myers (senior research scientist at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health), Donna Shalala (president and chief executive officer at Clinton Foundation), Steve Osofsky (executive director, Wildlife Health and Health Policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Renzo Guinto (director and co-founder of Reimagine Global Health from Philippines).

Aspen Ideas Festival, which started on June 23 and ended on July 2, is an annual event in America that gathers professionals from all over the world to discuss, among other things, development and how it affects human health.

Planetary health is an emerging discipline in science where various experts explore the interdisciplinary link between human health, social, physical and political environment.

Pandemics, in the context of planetary health, is hardly anything newsworthy.

As journalists, we report on disease outbreaks and the shock factor is always the number of casualties.

RIGOROUS RESEARCH

Given the rigorous scientific research that goes into epidemiology— you know, trying to isolate what pathogen that was, where it came from and the medium through which it got to people — reporters can only inform the public of the magnitude of a disease way much later.

Avian and Swine flu, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome(MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), were viruses so lethal they left a trail of bodies faster than doctors could figure out how to tame them.

Journalists all over the world reported of the horror of deaths, the resilience of often ill-prepared public health systems.

Later, we made follow ups and scientists told us these are diseases that have come hard on man after he tampered with the complex yet delicate ecological balance.

Man was logging trees to create space for construction, farming or the extractive industries and the interaction between him and animals in their natural habitat increased.

And diseases like Ebola were born.

Ebola, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), had left a trail of pain and suffering, claiming more than 4,000 lives by end of 2015 in Sierra Leone, a number which is more than a third of the deaths in West Africa.

The closest Kenya got to the raging Ebola scourge in West Africa was suspending flights to the affected countries and the Ministry of Health sending their health workers there.

USA-based public health organisation Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said yellow fever killed about 328 people in Angola by April this year. One of those who had been infected, travelled to Kenya and died here.

While appreciating that planetary health is “a new field and we are still trying to understand it”, Mr Thumbi said there is a greater need for collaboration between different fields such as the veterinarian and medical doctors.

APPORTION BLAME

Listening to the conversation between the scientists, we could justifiably apportion blame on a number of issues in these sudden disease outbreaks.

We could start by us, the victims. Steve Osofsky said that with the growing population and human activities, “health can no longer be defined so narrowly”.

He marshals examples in elaborating his point: a direct line could be drawn between the cardio-pulmonary diseases and the logging and slash-and-burn methods of farming in South East Asia.

“These logging and extraction companies are creating exacerbated risks but not bearing the costs we are fooling ourselves in what the metrics need to be”, Osofsky said.

Yet, the Kenya Forestry Services reports on the depletion of tree cover in certain counties, and Mau Forest evictions have always taken a political angle.

Yet damaging forests threaten “ecosystem services” — as Mr Thumbi and his colleagues termed it — which are the benefits we get from nature such as clean air from trees, the buffer against diseases, and water.

Even our food security — and nutrition, as a big component of health — is being threatened.

The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) raised the alarm in their report in April this year of declining bee population because of use of pesticides and poor farming techniques.

Without bees, there is no pollination.  Without pollination, there is no food.

Without food, we starve.

Already, the 2015 Kenya Economic Report indicated that Homa Bay County’s honey production dropped from being the highest in Kenya at 2.7 million kilogrammes in 2012 to a mere 133,168kgs in 2014.

Apart from disease, there are other tragedies that have threatened human existence such as floods whose humanitarian and economic cost cannot be overlooked.

Yet the government as well as institutions that train health care workers, environmentalists and other professionals in Kenya have viewed this discipline as an “externality”.

We are a country driven by economics in its development and completely ignores the ethics of it.

The question about the transport system is “How much money was lost in traffic today?” or “how many people will lose or gain jobs with these imports?”

Can we ask the aforementioned questions with “How much are you losing to taxes as the Ministry of Health treats pulmonary diseases, asthma and cancers from the toxic fumes in those vehicles? How many die?”

Then there is housing: a business tycoon has built his apartment complex on riparian land and he cannot vacate because we do not want to add to the housing crisis, right?

In May 2016, the viral and mosquito-transmitted Chikungunya affected more than 500 people in Mandera County including the governor.

Last year, just before the launch of the Sustainable Goals during the 70th General Assembly, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lancet published a report on planetary health.

Human health, the report said, is anchored in human systems.

That is, the threat that an unstable ecology poses to human survival is just as great as the opportunity.

So what do we do so that we have a win-win situation?

Thumbi offered three solutions in his contributions on the platform.

One, we need policy makers’ support and for them to make monetary decisions like budgetary allocations for research. They need data.

Something like “Hey cabinet secretary, last year we took care of Nairobi River’s pollution, see how the tremendous reduction on waterborne diseases in areas that depend on that river, and we have saved a lot of money”.

Two, show communities why the government does what it does sometimes...like evicting them from forests. Show them through education, right from primary school.

Tell children why it is wrong to litter.

Lastly, give alternatives.

Ms Okeyo covers environment and health for the Daily Nation