Vets trained to prevent the next global pandemic
The program was rolled out for one year and intended to strengthen the capacity of developing countries to manage outbreaks of diseases in farm animals.
The FAO-provided technical training covered a gamut of key competencies, including disease surveillance and forecasting, laboratory operations, biosafety and biosecurity, prevention and control methods and outbreak response strategies.
All told, 3,266 vets in Asia, 619 in West Africa, 459 in East Africa, and 363 in the Middle East benefitted. They are on the front line of the effort to stop new diseases at their source.
"Over the course of this relationship we've learned that there are many mutually beneficial areas of interest between the food and agricultural community and the human health community," said Dennis Carroll, head of Global Health Security and Development Unit at US Agency for International Development (USAID).
"A partnership with FAO not only enables us to protect human populations from future viral threats but also to protect animal populations from viruses that could decimate food supplies. It's not just a global health, infectious disease issue, but also a food security, food safety, and economic growth issue," Carroll added.
Population growth, agricultural expansion and environmental encroachment, and the rise of inter-continental food supply chains in recent decades have dramatically altered how diseases emerge, jump species boundaries, and spread, FAO studies have shown.
A new study just published by USAID's Dennis Carroll and experts from several institutions including FAO suggests that just 0.01 percent of the viruses behind zoonotic disease outbreaks are known to science. The authors have proposed an international partnership, The Global Virome Project, aimed at characterizing the riskiest of these. Doing so would allow more proactive responses to disease threats, with benefits not only for public health but also for the livelihoods of poor, livestock-depending farming communities.
Beyond the risks posed to human health, animal diseases can cost billions of dollars and hamstring economic growth. For example, the H5N1 outbreak of the mid-2000s caused an estimated $30 billion in economic losses, globally; a few years later, H1N1 racked up as much as $55 billion in damages.
The countries where the training took place were: Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Laos People's Democratic Republic , Liberia, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, Senegal, Sierra Leone, United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam.
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