Early Detection, Reporting and Surveillance for Avian Influenza in Africa (EDRSAIA)

This project involves the use of research to evaluate and apply participatory risk-based approaches to bird flu surveillance, and to document lessons learned. One of the key personnel involved in the project explains that "[p]articipatory epidemiologists understand the importance of tapping into local knowledge and encouraging the participation of people affected. By involving local livestock keepers, we can gather valuable data on how disease is spreading and kept in circulation."

Organisers pursue this participatory strategy by going out into local communities and talking to villagers, with the goal of helping to establish livestock disease prevalence, symptoms, recent outbreaks, and also the impacts of different animal diseases from their perspectives. Multi-disciplinarity and collaboration are key; the perceived need for veterinary and public health to work more closely together shapes these interactions. This research is designed to create integrated regional disease investigation teams capable of carrying out active field investigations for HPAI and other emerging infectious diseases. Participatory disease surveillance (PDS) manuals focused on HPAI intended for practitioners and trainers are being created to help sustain the capacity-building effort.

Health, Natural Resource Management.

Organisers explain that, "[i]n poor countries there is often a lack of detailed information on disease outbreaks and prevalence. This is largely due to a lack of veterinary infrastructure, and also because there are typically many remote and isolated communities that are hard to reach. Even when there is some infrastructure in place, many authorities assume that farmers will come to their offices to report diseases. However, farmers would have to travel long distances to reach veterinary posts and incur significant costs when reporting disease problems. Thus it is very difficult to assess the real disease situation and the impacts of animal diseases on livelihoods." This PDS project is designed to fill that gap.