HARARE — The United States government has started a program to
strengthen Zimbabwe’s health information management system. The
program is meant to strengthen surveillance and reporting of
disease outbreaks and epidemics. Those are health personnel -
who include doctors and nurses from Zimbabwe’s eastern region of
Manicaland - clapping after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) handed over laptop computers and
accessories. The computers will be used to store data about
patients they treat in the region. The donation is part of a
$2.1 million annual grant Zimbabwe gets from the U.S.
President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, to
strengthen its health information management system. Paula
Morgan the deputy director of the CDC in Zimbabwe explains the
importance of Zimbabwe’s health information management system:
“Although our contribution although health wise [is] across the
board particularly disease detection and surveillance, its
important to us to capture all of them, because w