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Development of standard guidelines and procedures
This proposal was prepared by Harm Kiezebrink, Jules Sparrey and collaborators at BFC Bird Flu Control GmbH. The purpose of the project is to bring together and standardize international best practices in a wide array of technical areas.
VISION OF BFC
In the recent past, the world focus has been on HPAI and this had a positive impact on strengthening the veterinary infrastructure, especially in countries in Asia and Africa. This focus supported not only the capacity to handle outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, it has also a positive impact on issues like strengthening the veterinary infrastructure and improvement in fields such as food safety and bio security. There is room for further improvement. In our vision there is an urgent need for better standards for guidelines and procedures on a broad range of subjects. Knowing that a lot of work already has been done on an individual/ country related basis, we think that this previously developed material should be made accessible for general use by all countries. The production, by the FAO, of a comprehensive manual of Guidelines and Standard Operational Procedures would fulfil this need, Some of the G&P’s need to be generic especially where they are related to Government and veterinary infrastructure, others need to be as specific as possible when it comes to the use of techniques for culling or decontamination for example or are related to specific controls for specific diseases .
Many of the G&P’s within the BFC outbreak response manual are focused on the situation in Armenia such as the structure of the veterinary service and those derived from the current disease control laws of Armenia. Others are generic such as animal disease control and decontamination techniques, even in these cases they have been slightly adapted to make them more appropriate for the Armenian situation. During our HPAI project in Armenia (August- November 2007) Armenia faced an outbreak of ASF. Although assigned to work on G&P’s for HPAI only, we realized the need to put our scope beyond this infectious disease and create the G&P’s so that they can be used for other animal diseases as well focussing on strengthening their capacity to deal with animal disease outbreaks in general. The report we delivered was highly appreciated and became the basis of all our projects and is the basis for the project we propose to the FAO.
Development of G&P’s is a time consuming activity, especially if they are going to be the standard for the FAO. To avoid loosing precious time, we suggest to use as much possible existing G&P’s that are developed by the FAO or others and where possible, request the original authors to assist in rewriting/ formatting the G&P’s according to the standard developed for the FAO manual.