Six counties account for a quarter of all the disease outbreaks reported in Kenya for the last 15 years, the Ministry of Health’s surveillance report has said. The analysis also says Kenya is battling more outbreaks every year.
In 2012 only one county reported an outbreak, but in 2022 all the 47 counties reported outbreaks, mainly the Covid-19. The analysis, which covers 2007- 2022, was published by the BMC Research Notes journal on October 15.
It says six counties – Garissa, Nairobi, Nakuru, Wajir, Mandera and Mombasa – accounted for a quarter of the 457 outbreaks reported in 15 years.
“The average number of outbreaks reported per county was four. Nairobi reported the highest number of cases and deaths of all the outbreaks, with approximately a third of the cases and a quarter of the deaths. Samburu reported the lowest number of cases,” the authors said.
They said factors such as population density, proximity to international borders and access to healthcare services contributed to these disparities.
The authors are Farida Geteri and Samuel Kadivane of the Disease Surveillance and Response Unit at the Ministry of Health. Others are Emmanuel Okunga, the head of Disease Surveillance and Response Unit at MoH; Jeanette Dawa of the Center for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, University of Nairobi; John Gachohi (Washington State University) and Felix Humwa (Africa Society for Laboratory Science, Addis Ababa).
The report says 23 diseases were responsible for the 457 outbreaks. Covid-19, cholera, malaria, kala-azar and measles were associated with a high disease burden.
Overall, 6,575 deaths were reported. Surveillance in Kenya is conducted through the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response strategy adapted from the World Health Organization.
The strategy is designed to collect health data for multiple diseases and public health events. The data is uploaded onto the Kenya Health Information System.
“We summarised the archived data from 2007 to 2022 on the annual number of diseases, outbreak reports, caseload and deaths per outbreak in each of the 47 counties. A disease outbreak is the occurrence of any priority diseases within a county in a specified year,” the authors said.
Geteri said HIV is no longer considered an outbreak in Kenya.
“A consistent decline in new HIV infections and Aids-related deaths has been observed over the years, due to effective intervention strategies, therefore, shifting HIV from being considered an outbreak to a more managed and controlled public health issue in Kenya,” she said.
The researchers said the growing number of reported outbreaks could be due to improved surveillance rather than an increase in the occurrence of diseases.
The analysis has received praise because it now forms part of an accessible body of literature related to outbreak occurrence.
“Typically, such information is relegated to country-level surveillance reports that are not easily accessible to researchers,” one reviewer for the BMC journal said.
The 23 reported diseases are Acute flaccid paralysis, aflatoxicosis, anthrax, chikungunya, cholera, Covid-19, dengue fever, influenza A, kala-azar, malaria, measles, mumps, pertussis, Q-fever, rabies, Rift Valley fever, SARI, schistosomiasis, typhoid fever, viral hepatitis and yellow fever.
The officials said the prevalence of vaccine-preventable diseases underscores the urgency to strengthen immunisation programmes.
“Additionally, the frequency of diseases prone to epidemics highlights the critical need for an early warning and response system to manage outbreaks effectively,” they said.
In 2015, three diseases –anthrax,
rabies, and Rift Valley fever – were
considered the most pressing zoonotic threats in Kenya.
