PICTURES OF THE EVENT
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The Republic of Rwanda kindly hosted the third and last in a series of OIE workshops on training of senior veterinary staff in Africa on the OIE procedures for recognition of countries or zones as free from African horse sickness (AHS), bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), classical swine fever (CSF), contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) or peste des petits ruminants (PPR); or the endorsement by the OIE of their national official control programmes (against FMD, PPR, CBPP). The first and second workshops were held in Gaborone, Botswana in March 2016 for SADC member states and in Tunis, Tunisia in March 2017 for French-speaking countries of north, west and east Africa.
The three-day training course was attended by OIE Delegates and senior epidemiologists or disease control officers from English-speaking countries in western, northern and eastern Africa, i.e. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. Only Liberia did not make it to the meeting.
Based on the animal health profile of the invited countries, the present workshop focused on the OIE procedures for the endorsement by the OIE of national official control programmes against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and/or peste des petits ruminants (PPR).
The workshop was further attended by speakers and observers from the Inter-African Bureau of Animal Resources of the African Union (AU-IBAR), the IGAD Centre for Pastoral Areas and Livestock Development (ICPALD) [ ] and a team of four OIE trainers, including two staff members of the OIE Status Department, the President of the OIE Scientific Commission for Animal Diseases (SCAD), which recommends the OIE World Assembly of Delegates on whether to grant a free status or endorsement of a national official control programme to an OIE Member Country, and the designated expert of the OIE Collaborating Centre for the Surveillance and Control of Animal Diseases in Africa at Onderstepoort Veterinary Research (ARC-OVR) in South Africa. In addition, the meeting was attended and presentation delivered by OIE regional staff from the Bamako and Nairobi offices and two representatives of countries which have successfully managed to obtain either recognitions of nation-wide or zonal disease freedom, or the endorsement by the OIE of national official control programmes in the past (Namibia and Morocco, respectively).
The meeting benefited from the financial support of the Republic of Italy and the European Union, through the OIE World Animal Health and Welfare Fund.
The meeting was officially opened by the Delegate of Rwanda to the OIE, the Director General of the Rwanda Agricultural Bureau (RAB), Dr. Theogen Rutagwenda. Other speeches were delivered by Dr. Henry Wamwayi on behalf of the Director of the Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources of the African Union (AU-IBAR) and Dr Karim Tounkara, Regional Representative for Africa, on behalf of the OIE, after which the lead-trainer, Dr. Min – Kyung Park from the OIE Status Department in Paris introduced the attendance to the objectives of the workshop.
The programme was conceived as an alternation of :
This was the third and final workshop in a series of training workshops on the drafting of documents to obtain recognition by the OIE of disease freedom or endorsement of official control programmes, primarily in respect of FMD and PPR, though the same also applies to CBPP. Whereas this first cycle focused on how to build credible cases to obtain official disease free status recognition or endorsement of a national official control programme, the next round of workshops (cycle two) will increasingly focus on the maintenance of such statuses, once these have been granted by the OIE World Assembly of Delegates
All pictures © P. Bastiaensen (oie) 2017.
All pictures © P. Bastiaensen (oie) 2017.
