Pioneering the monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of communicable diseases in Gaza strip

The Communicable Diseases Surveillance Center (CDSC) seeks to develop and maintain methods for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating communicable diseases in Palestine. This can be achieved by creating an advanced research environment and directing scientific research among researchers and graduate students towards exploring new strategies for treating communicable diseases, as well as working on the synthesis of chemical compounds and conducting relevant laboratory studies. The center also seeks to research natural compounds as one of the effective alternatives in the treatment of communicable diseases.

Surely, communicable diseases in recent decades have decreased significantly and unevenly in many countries of the world. The death rates from communicable diseases are much lower than they were a century ago, thanks to a group of medical breakthroughs such as vaccines and antibiotics, improving general and personal hygiene, disinfection of drinking water and safe disposal of wastewater and waste. Recently, problems related to communicable diseases such as the resistance of microbes to multiple antimicrobials and the emergence of completely, previously unknown new viruses such as Zika, Ebola and Marburg or new strains of old known viruses such as influenza have started to emerge. The latest of which was the global pandemic of the Corona virus, which put most health systems in a major predicament and demonstrated the extent of the fragility of these systems, especially those that ignored or under estimated communicable diseases. No one could have imagined that in the twenty-first century there would be a lack of personal protective equipment for health sector workers and that there would be a need to train health personnel on infection control procedures and to have to carry out awareness-raising campaigns to wash hands and intuitive safety measures. Serious and targeted scientific research is essential for the advancement of societies. Great interest from governments, organizations, and even private sectors in developing and supporting scientific research is increasing. From this standpoint, the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences (Department of Laboratory Medical Sciences) established a laboratory for molecular biology to be the headquarters of the Communicable Disease Surveillance Center. This laboratory contributes to health services and was provided with basic equipment to have a leading role in this field that is witnessing leaps in developments. It has also become a diagnostic service center for a number of diseases and contributed in easing the suffering of citizens who had to previously travel far distances to conduct these tests. The laboratory also constitutes as a research center for both "researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students" in addition to its training role. As a continuation of this approach to serving the community, we in this proposal seek to develop this laboratory to become a scientific center that can provide new services related to communicable diseases, especially those that are not being diagnosed in the Gaza Strip. This can be done by strengthening and developing a communicable diseases diagnostic unit and developing existing units such as the Molecular Genetics Unit and the Food Safety Unit, with the aim of expanding services to both the public and researchers. In this proposal, we seek to establish a research service center specializing in Communicable diseases in order to develop research in the aforementioned areas and expand services to the general public and researchers.