Challenges to Precision Public Health in Nigeria

Abstract

With the waves of evolution in genomics and genomics technology, the 21st century has experienced a surge in human and pathogen genome sequencing both at the clinical and public health care levels. These latest efforts have led to what is commonly referred to as "precision public health," which is a multidisciplinary field that incorporates genomics, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data to help predict the healthcare outcomes of an individual and improve the general population's health. To individualize healthcare at the clinical and public health levels, research efforts have seen the emergence and utilization of technology in the management of healthcare. Despite precision public health being ascribed as a highly promising tool that could help provide solutions to many public health problems in developed societies, how this turns out in developing nations is yet to be established. This study applied an analytical cross-sectional study design and aimed at assessing challenges and enablers of PPH in Nigeria using genomic surveillance with an objective of understanding the challenges, establishing the influence of data integration methods on the attainment of PPH, the influence of health equity on the attainment of PPH and identifying the influence of health policies. The empirical literature review and cross-sectional study design were used with SPSS 23, and the visualization of data was done using the Microsoft Excel 2019 software. The study findings illustrated that more than 52% of the respondents have heard about precision public health, with 56.4% of the respondents disagreeing with the equitable distribution of technological infrastructure to support data management. A high proportion of the respondents agree that the government can implement PPH in Nigeria. However, a slightly higher proportion of the respondents (46.2%) disagreed on the role of the private sector in establishing PPH across private health facilities and the need for political goodwill to support the implementation of PPH in Nigeria. In conclusion, PPH can help improve disease prevention strategies, treatment, and control efforts if appropriately implemented, and the study recommends a need for African studies to aggregate, analyze, visualize, and make available high quality for PPH to be more effective than traditional public health.