During his visit to Palau last week before he retires in December, Ken said Pacific Island Countries like Palau need to strengthen surveillance on any suspected communicable diseases.
“Palau is doing very well in this area,” he said. “They have a good monitoring system.”
He said for communicable diseases like TB, typhoid, dengue fever, it is necessary that each country will continue improving the monitoring.
“I’ve seen improvement in Palau and many countries. I’m quite happy with these improvements,” he said.
He added that for small Pacific Island Countries, the task of monitoring is not easy. “Population- and land-wise, we are small, but the challenges are not small. We are socially unique.”
Many of the Pacific Island Countries are multi-island countries wherein large ocean isolates one country. “That means we need to have a strong capacity to deliver assistance to the people,” Ken added.
As developing countries, Pacific Island Countries still deal with communicable diseases, at the same, non-communicable diseases has become a big issue. Ken also worked with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to organize a workshop to survey on the risk effect of non-communicable diseases in the country.
For one week the MOH held a training, teaching people some methods to identify major risk effects in Palau regarding non-communicable diseases. Habits like tobacco and alcohol use, eating and physical activities, as well as betel nut chewing were among those asked in the survey.
“We already did this in other countries, and Palau is going to do it now,” Ken shared. “We need to develop certain kind of programs to deal with these issues.”
Among the programs which Ken help establish in Palau include Pandemic Influenza Preparedness, Epidemiology and Disease surveillance, Tobacco Prevention, Human Resource Development, Obesity Prevention, Climate Change, Health Systems Development, Health Information Systems and Health Finance.
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