Respiratory viruses contribute to high morbidity and mortality in Africa. In 2020, the Ohio State University's Global One Health Initiative, in collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took action to strengthen Ethiopia's existing respiratory virus surveillance system through decentralization of laboratory testing and scale-up of national and regional capacity for detecting respiratory viruses. In August 2022, four regional laboratories were established, thereby raising the number of reference laboratories conducting respiratory virus surveillance to five. This article highlights lessons learned during implementation and outlines processes undertaken for laboratory scale-up and decentralization.
Keywords: Ethiopia; global health security; influenza-like illness; laboratory capacity; sentinel surveillance; severe acute respiratory infections.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 2024.