The ministers, who attended the landmark West African Regional Conference on ‘’One Health’’ in Dakar, Senegal, on November 11, 2016, noted that over 75 per cent of the emerging diseases that had affected humans over the past decade originated from animals or animal products. Many of such diseases have a potential to spread widely and become global security risks.

The conference was hosted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Office for Africa and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Commission in collaboration with other regional and international partners.

Ebola

The ministers, particularly, noted with concern the recent unprecedented Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in West Africa which infected over 28, 000 people and caused more than 11, 000 deaths. It also devastated national economies with losses in gross domestic product estimated at US$ 219 million in Sierra Leone, US$ 188 million in Liberia and US$ 184 million in Guinea.

Currently, West Africa is tackling outbreaks of several zoonotic diseases such as Avian Influenza in poultry in Cameroon and Nigeria and Rift Valley fever in Niger, as well as vector-borne public health threats such as the recent emergence of the Zika virus strain from Brazil in Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

Communique

In a communiqué endorsed by 38 ministers from 16 countries in West Africa, they pledged to  create a framework to ensure effective integration of human, animal and environmental health efforts in accordance with the required One Health approach.

 Ultimately, this will provide the basis for countries in the subregion to conduct joint preparedness and response planning at the country and subregional levels to help manage outbreaks before they become national and international crises.

One Health is an approach that calls on policymakers and health practitioners to consider the inextricable link between human, animal and environmental health when designing public health systems, research and programmes.   

Specifically, member states which are party to the agreement pledged to carry out national risk assessments and set up alert mechanisms for both common and emerging disease outbreaks within their territories.

 Governments will be tasked with integrating laboratories for human and animal samples to improve the timely diagnosis of diseases and to track the spread of drug-resistant pathogens at the national level.

The ministers also expressed concern over the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in animals and crops, resulting in the emergence of antibiotic-resistant disease pathogens, which is rendering common infectious diseases and bacterial infections more difficult and expensive to treat, and said incorporating human, animal and environmental health would help to keep these medicines effective by more carefully and diligently managing their use.

Commitment

The ministers further resolved to commit their governments to support the institutionalisation and ownership of the One Health approach at all levels through a dedicated domestic budgetary provision for One Health activities.

They called upon the subregional, regional institutions and other partners to jointly mobilise resources to operationalise  the ECOWAS Regional Centre for Disease Surveillance and Control (RCDSC) and the ECOWAS Regional Animal Health Centre (RAHC).

The partners, they added, should also advocate and conduct domestic and external resource mobilisation for the implementation of the regional and national frameworks for One Health.

These commitments, they hoped, would not only generate renewed momentum for West African countries to prioritise health security and pandemic preparedness, but also help drive progress towards existing commitments and initiatives, such as WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR), a legal tool that helps to ensure countries were better equipped to prevent, report and respond to public health risks that could cross borders and threaten people worldwide.