Last Sunday (15), the regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Africa made a request to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz): to establish a cooperation strategy for Brazilian professionals to visit the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa to combat the new coronavirus pandemic.
Brazilian professionals will work in partnership with Portuguese technicians to disseminate information about the disease and to train local teams to respond to the new coronavirus at different levels. “We will, with Portugal, help in the efforts of countries that are much poorer and in a much more serious institutional situation than ours, and with epidemics that may perhaps acquire very tragic tones,” said health doctor Paulo Buss, director of the center for international relations and Fiocruz’s global health.
+ The Anglophone and Francophone communities are also being mobilized internationally by WHO.
Fiocruz will form a team that will include an epidemiologist, a clinician, a specialist in health systems management, a laboratory professional, as well as a communication professional.
The members of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) in Africa are Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea. Of these countries, Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde confirm cases of COVID-19, until now