Implementing Event-Based Surveillance in Burkina Faso: Using the “One Health” Approach

Author(s): Connolly, A.M., Sawadogo, I., Geers, E., & Eugene, M.Y.B.

Year: 2019

Abstract:

Recent outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome, avian influenza, and Ebola virus disease have put local, national, regional, and global focus on the ability of countries to effectively detect and respond to emergent public health issues. Many of the outbreaks have involved zoonotic diseases: those that spread between animals and humans.

These outbreaks led countries to develop new intervention strategies through the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) launched in 2014. The GHSA aims to strengthen both the global capacity and nations’ capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to threats from infectious diseases, facilitated by a multilateral and multisectoral approach. MEASURE Evaluation—a project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—has been working in Burkina Faso since March 2018 in partnership with the Ministry of Animal and Fisheries Resources (MRAH); the Ministry of Health (MS); and the Ministry of the Environment, Green Economy and Climate Change (MEEVCC) to strengthen the country’s ability to detect and respond to diseases with epidemic and epizootic potential using a “One Health” approach. One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, transdisciplinary approach that works at the local, regional, national and global levels to monitor and control public health threats and to learn how diseases spread among people, animals, and their shared environment (One Health).

In Burkina Faso, each of the ministries responsible for human and animal health and the environment has a system of disease monitoring. At the Ministry of Health, the integrated disease surveillance and response (IDSR) system ensures the surveillance of diseases, including those with epidemic potential. At MRAH, surveillance of and response to animal diseases are coordinated by the Epidemiological Surveillance Network of Animal Diseases (RESUREP). MEEVCC does not have a surveillance system, but for the purpose of monitoring animals in parks and protected areas, ecological monitoring forms have been implemented to collect information on wild animals, including about their health.

Starting in 2017, MEASURE Evaluation joined other partners in assisting Burkina Faso to enhance its surveillance system as part of the project’s overarching objective to support the government in strengthening its health information system (HIS). MEASURE Evaluation’s specific objectives for HIS strengthening are: (1) to aid the government in strengthening its early-warning system by developing a community-level EBS system for diseases with epidemic and epizootic potential; (2) to strengthen the collection, analysis, and use of routine health data; (3) to strengthen the country’s capacity to manage the HIS; and (4) to develop an electronic platform to aid in the identification, notification, and follow-up of all diseases under surveillance by the Ministry of Animal Resources and the Ministry of Health.

MEASURE Evaluation has assisted at the national level in developing a One Health approach to event-based surveillance (EBS) that is suited to the Burkina Faso context. To test this approach, the Center-South Region was chosen as the intervention zone. This region has three provinces: Zoundwéogo, Nahouri, and Bazèga. Nahouri, whose capital is Po, was chosen to pilot EBS activities using the One Health approach.

This report shares more on the One Health approach in Burkina Faso.

This publication is also available in the following language:
French