Recent viral outbreaks in many areas of the World is an important reminder of the difficulties of predicting when and where the next outbreak will occur. These also highlight the need to greatly expand our ability to rapidly identify and stop these threats. The 2013-16 Ebola outbreak took many months to detect, and it expanded in part due to the lack of local diagnosis. Similarly, despite regular disease outbreaks by known agents in many places in the world, many more viruses (known and unknown) are cryptically circulating and undetected. Infectious diseases are often characterized by fever, and are among the most common causes of morbidity and mortality in tropical developing countries. They have devastating burden on the African continent, because differentiating the causative agents of fevers are challenging. Advances in genomic technologies have revolutionized biomedical research, and created the potential to transform the clinical care, surveillance, and understanding of infectious diseases. Researchers at the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), Redeemer’s university, Ede, Nigeria, are translating microbial genomics knowledge and technologies into new field deployable diagnostics tools that can rapidly test for a wide array of known and novel microbes simultaneously. These tools are helping local health workers to perform diagnosis and treatment of patients by the patients’ bedsides and prevent outbreaks from escalating. These new developments lay the groundwork to pursue key scientific questions about the pathophysiology, epidemiology, transmission, evolution, and biology of the microbes causing disease. In this presentation, we provide insights into how we are using new genomic knowledge and technologies to:

build Africa capacity and leadership toward preparedness and containment of future infectious diseases outbreaks;
promote state-of-the-art genome sequencing and field-deployable genetic tools for microbial infections detection in West Africa, and
enable a surveillance network for some of the world’s greatest global health threats.

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