Towards one health disease surveillance: the Southern African centre for infectious disease surveillance approach
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Date
2012
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Abstract
Africa has the highest burden of infectious diseases in the world and yet the least capacity
for its risk management. It has therefore become increasingly important to search for ‘fit-for-
purpose’ approaches to infectious disease surveillance and thereby targeted disease control.
The fact that the majority of human infectious diseases are originally of animal origin means
we have to consider One Health (OH) approaches which require inter-sectoral collaboration
for custom-made infectious disease surveillance in the endemic settings of Africa. A baseline
survey was conducted to assess the current status and performance of human and animal
health surveillance systems and subsequently a strategy towards OH surveillance system was
developed. The strategy focused on assessing the combination of participatory epidemiological
approaches and the deployment of mobile technologies to enhance the effectiveness of disease
alerts and surveillance at the point of occurrence, which often lies in remote areas. We selected
three study sites, namely the Ngorongoro, Kagera River basin and Zambezi River basin
ecosystems. We have piloted and introduced the next-generation Android mobile phones
running the EpiCollect application developed by Imperial College to aid geo-spatial and
clinical data capture and transmission of this data from the field to the remote Information
Technology (IT) servers at the research hubs for storage, analysis, feedback and reporting. We
expect that the combination of participatory epidemiology and technology will significantly
improve OH disease surveillance in southern Africa.
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Keywords
Health disease surveillance, Southern African Centre