By Raixa Llauger and Eva Bravo *
Contributors from Prensa Latina
This leads to a wide range of actors and work related to sustainable agriculture, animal, plant, forestry and aquaculture health, food safety, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), food security, nutrition and livelihoods.
Ensuring the One Health approach is critical to achieve progress in predicting, preventing, detecting, containing and controlling diseases that spread between animals and humans, ensuring food safety, addressing human and animal health threats connection with the environment and to overcome many other challenges.
One of these challenges is African swine fever (ASF).
Origins and preventive measures
In August 2021, after a 40-year absence, the renewed outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) was reported in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, triggering the promotion of containment programs in both countries to mitigate the impact and prevent its spread to the continent of Hispaniola .
In order to prevent an expansion to the entire Caribbean and the American continent, the focus of the work was on strengthening border controls and risk communication with a preventive approach, as well as strengthening surveillance and emergency preparedness programs in the remaining countries of the region.
In today’s globalized world, there is a greater risk of the spread of animal diseases due to cross-border movements of people, animals and products. Added to this is climate change, which is changing the distribution of vectors and production systems.
STRENGTHEN CAPACITIES
Diseases prioritized in America, such as ASF, require not only the commitment of people to avoid the transfer of animals or products, but also the strengthening of the capacity of national veterinary services in emergency preparedness and containment, as well as in identifying opportunities. Improving control systems throughout the animal production chain and strengthening biosecurity as part of the One Health approach.
Aware of this, FAO organized a workshop in Panama City for experts from the Health Protection Unit and the Ministry of Agriculture to support the Haitian government in strengthening its response capacity.
At this meeting, several of the tools available to FAO were presented, based on a critical analysis of strengths and identification of opportunities for improvement in the areas of biosecurity, health management, surveillance and notification, early warning and response, information management, mitigation and containment, among others.
At FAO, we promote a regional approach as the only way to combat this type of disease, which does not respect borders, and we reiterate the importance of coordinated action between different sectors to protect health and prevent threats to our agricultural and food systems . .
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*The authors are an agricultural official and an agricultural health specialist, respectively, both from FAO Mesoamerica.