Johannesburg - The South African Ministry of Health has congratulated one of the globally acclaimed bio-informatics scientist, Professor Tulio de Oliveira, on his continued recognition and praise for his genomic sequencing work that led to the discovery of the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
This comes after de Oliveira was praised by speaker after speaker at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany.
Deputy Health Minister Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo, who led the country's delegation to the 2022 Summit, said the country was fortunate to have scientists like de Oliveira, whose hard scientific work continues to break new grounds and put the country on the map.
“We are so thrilled to have such globally recognised scientists like Tulio, whose work greatly helped our country and the World Health Organization to detect new variants and also understand their circulation in order to adapt our response strategies accordingly and to anticipate the new waves,” said Dhlomo.
The Deputy Minister said the successful management of the pandemic in South Africa was attributed to strong collaboration between government, scientific community, private sector and other stakeholders.
Dhlomo further expressed his gratitude to another local scientist from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, Dr Natalie Mayet, for a great presentation during the summit, which summarised the role and excellent work by Ministerial Advisory Committees during the peak of the pandemic.
The World Health Summit is the unique international strategic forum for global health, which strengthens exchange, stimulates innovative solutions to health challenges, fosters global health as a key political issue and promotes the global health debate in the spirit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Star