Garba Shehu, Abuja: President Muhammadu Buhari Wednesday approved the appointment of Dr. Faisal Shuaib as the Executive Secretary of National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA).

Dr. Shuaib, a medical doctor, and public health specialist, is currently a Senior Program Officer (Africa) for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) at Seattle, USA.

At the BMGF, Dr. Shuaib is responsible for developing and implementing strategies on polio outbreak response activities in Africa. Prior to joining the foundation, Dr. Shuaib coordinated Nigeria’s successful response to the outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) as the Incident Manager of the Ebola Emergency Operations Centre in 2014.

He was also a member of the six-man panel established to assess the response of the World Health Organization (WHO) to the global Ebola outbreak in 2014 and provided technical advice to the Federal Ministry of Health and NPHCDA in areas of immunization and polio eradication activities between 2012 and 2015.

Dr. Shuaib had in the past also worked as a research associate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.