South Africa makes progress in disease detection, but gaps remain

JOHANNESBURG – South Africa has made significant progress in detecting infectious diseases entering the country.

But experts have identified that there is still room to strengthen the early warning systems.

CSIR Senior Researcher Dr Kelvin Mpofu said machine learning can help identify disease patterns faster and improve the country’s preparedness for future outbreaks.

“South Africa has fared quite well in detecting diseases that are coming from neighbouring countries and across our borders. Of course, we still have a long way to go in improving our technologies because sometimes we have cases where a particular infection crosses over and it takes a bit of time to pick up. 

“Machine learning is a very fast-developing field across the world. Machine learning is broadly defined as a subclass of artificial intelligence. So it’s just basically a field where researchers take large amounts of data and they feed it into different models or algorithms and they use these models or algorithms to sort of like look for patterns in the data that typically a normal person or an average person would not be able to sort of pick up.”