The Nigerian Institute of Medical Research and other stakeholders in the country have launched the Canada-Africa Mpox Partnership.
The event was aimed at curbing the spread of Mpox and studying the dynamics of its transmission from human to human.
The other institutions in the project are the University of Ilorin, the Slum and Rural Health Initiative Network, the Institute Of Human Virology In Nigeria and the Maryland Global Initiative Corporation.
The project is in partnership with the Canadian Institute of Health Research and the International Development Research Centre.
During the event, Prof. Babatunde Salako, the Director-General of NIMR, said the Nigeria consortium would work with their Canadian partners to help inform the clinical and public health response to local and global epidemics of Mpox.
Salako said 68 researchers with multi-disciplinary expertise from Canada, Nigeria, the U.S. and the United Kingdom would work on the project that would involve community engagements from inception.
“The good thing about this project is that it will provide the needed information for stakeholders in the project to understand transmission dynamics and evaluate medical countermeasures of Mpox in Nigeria and Canada.
“The stakeholders include not just researchers but also the communities who will be participating in the project.
“If at the end of the project, there is a very useful result, this can be translated in the communities to improve their health status,” he said.
The D-G, however, reiterated the need for a medical research council to fund research works peculiar to Nigeria.
He said, “Many nations have agencies that fund health research directly but we don’t have that here in Nigeria and that is why health research appears to have been funded poorly.
