Infectious Diseases Surveillance System in Nigeria: Lesson From COVID‐19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Nigeria has experienced outbreaks of multiple infectious diseases, a major public health concern, in the last 10 years, including the Ebola virus in 2014, monkeypox in 2017, COVID‐19 in 2020, Lassa fever in 2022, measles in 2023, diphtheria in 2023, and the cholera outbreak in 2024. This emphasizes the importance of implementing a robust infectious disease surveillance system for illness response, prevention, and control. This review examines the current status of infectious disease surveillance system in Nigeria and its usefulness in preparing for future outbreaks. A network of laboratories, community health workers, health facilities, and epidemiology units was established during the COVID‐19 epidemic by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), which is essential to disease surveillance. One of the surveillance system's tiers, state epidemiology units, was in charge of overseeing the gathering and reporting of regional data. Community health workers also carried out contact tracing and public health education as a grassroots method of disease surveillance. The NCDC adopted the Surveillance Outbreak Response Management and Analysis Systems as a primary digital surveillance platform for implementing the Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system, which is specifically tailored for the surveillance of priority diseases of public health importance in Nigeria. This was done to effectively improve the surveillance capacity and data management. It is critical to enhance the current surveillance system's ability to monitor, anticipate, and quickly respond to disease outbreaks. The COVID‐19 outbreak highlighted the need for surveillance system improvement, particularly gaps that need to be closed to monitor future outbreaks or resurgences. To fortify the surveillance system for infectious diseases, it is imperative to continue utilizing the knowledge gained from prior outbreaks, enhance data collection, enhance national and subnational surveillance systems, and enhance laboratory surveillance systems with precise data gathering and dissemination.