Senegal sits in Africa’s meningitis belt, a region stretching across 26 countries, where the disease has claimed countless lives for over a century.
Meningitis—a serious infection of the thin lining surrounding the brain and spinal cord—has many causes, usually viruses or bacteria. The bacterial form of meningococcal meningitis can be fatal and can cause death within hours. Even with timely antibiotic treatment, one in ten infected people die within two days of the onset of symptoms. Those who survive often face devastating consequences, including brain damage, hearing loss, or limb amputation.
In 2018, Senegal introduced MenAfriVac® through a preventive vaccination campaign throughout the country’s highest-risk regions. Since the launch of this campaign, Senegal has experienced no further outbreaks of meningococcal meningitis A, marking a significant victory. However, other meningococcal serogroups—C, W, and X—continue to pose health risks, causing sporadic outbreaks across the meningitis belt.
In response to this evolving threat, PATH collaborated with the Serum Institute of India, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the UK government for over thirteen years to develop the pentavalent meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MenFive®), which protects against five strains of meningococcus bacteria: A, C, W, Y, and X.
The vaccine received WHO prequalification in July 2023 and has already been introduced in Niger and Nigeria in 2024, with Burkina Faso, Chad, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, and Togo planning rollouts throughout 2025–2027.
Vaccines alone cannot eliminate the disease. For a vaccine campaign to succeed, health officials must know exactly where cases are occurring, which strains are circulating, and how quickly the disease is spreading.
For years, health workers across Senegal faced this critical challenge in disease surveillance. A health care worker might suspect a meningitis case and send samples to the laboratory, but by the time the results came back days later, more people in the community could already be infected. Laboratory results were stored in one system, while surveillance data were stored in a separate system.
By the time officials pieced together fragmented information to recognize an emerging outbreak pattern, precious days had been lost—days that could have been the difference between containing a cluster and facing a full epidemic.
This fragmentation in data storage meant that even when health workers suspected meningitis cases and collected specimens, the laboratory results often returned too late or failed to connect with the clinical data. Without real-time data, health officials were fighting blind: unable to deploy vaccines, antibiotics, or medical teams to the right places at the right time.
Through the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Enhancing Global Health Security (EGHS) project, led by FHI360 and implemented in partnership with PATH, the Senegal Ministry of Health and Social Action has transformed the country's approach to detecting and responding to meningitis threats. While the EGHS project formally concluded in 2024, the integrated surveillance system remains fully operational under the leadership of the ministry of health, demonstrating the program’s sustainable impact.
The EGHS provided technical support to the government to strengthen routine health management information system reporting for meningitis through a DHIS2 tracker module. This digital platform functions like an early warning system, instantly connecting laboratory results with surveillance data from various districts, enabling officials to identify patterns in hours rather than weeks.
Dr. Jean Pierre Diallo from the Ministry of Health and Social Action’s Surveillance and Vaccination Response division praised EGHS’s contribution, noting, “for meningitis data in DHIS2, we now have real-time availability with quality control and linear lists that include laboratory results.”
A key innovation of the EGHS project is the use of dashboards to facilitate data comparison and quality reviews. A pilot program in four regions led to the successful integration of clinical and laboratory data in nineteen districts. Following positive results, the pilot was expanded nationwide, with all regions in Senegal actively using the integrated DHIS2 tracker system for meningitis surveillance. The project trained 100 health professionals from 16 regions, equipping them to effectively integrate meningitis data into the DHIS2 system.
The transformation has been dramatic. Before the system was implemented, the ministry of health lacked comprehensive information on meningitis cases across districts; officials were making critical public health decisions based on incomplete and outdated data. Now, when a suspected case appears anywhere in Senegal, it immediately appears on the national dashboard. Laboratory results automatically link to patient data. Outbreak patterns that once took weeks to identify now emerge within hours.
This speed matters. When health officials can see that multiple confirmed cases in neighboring villages involve the same meningococcal strain, they can immediately dispatch vaccination teams, distribute antibiotics prophylactically to close contacts, and alert nearby health facilities—potentially preventing hundreds of infections.
Additionally, the coordination fostered among stakeholders via a dedicated WhatsApp group has enabled real-time collaboration, connecting laboratory technicians, epidemiologists, and field teams across the country in instant communication that breaks down the silos that once delayed response efforts.
These improvements have strengthened the ability to collect, integrate, and act on meningitis data across all regions of Senegal. The integrated surveillance system enables health officials nationwide to track cases in real-time, facilitating early detection of outbreak patterns and triggering informed action rather than delayed guesswork.
As Senegal prepares for the introduction of the MenFive® vaccine, this robust surveillance infrastructure means the country will be able to strategically deploy the new vaccine where it is needed most, monitor its effectiveness in real-time, and rapidly respond to any remaining threats—bringing the nation closer to the WHO’s goal of defeating meningitis by 2030.
