Representatives from seven member countries of SAARC are attending a regional One Health symposium. The five-day meeting is being held in Paro.
The South Asia Regional One Health symposium aims to strengthen institutional capacities in managing zoonotic diseases in the region through One Health concept.
The Programme Director of the National Centre for Animal Health, Dr. Kinzang Dukpa, said it is concept that derives it meaning from sharing of resources and expertise. “For instance, for the control of zoonotic diseases that is transmissible between human and animals, each sector used to work in isolation in the past. But now through this concept the main idea is to put our ideas and resources together.”
The symposium is the end phase of the two-phase regional training program in animal and human health epidemiology and bio security. It was initiated by Massey University in New Zealand in 2009.
The Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology of Massey University, Dr. Eric Neumann, said various things have happened during the course of the project. He said one group of activities of the first half of the project was formal postgraduate level training in epidemiology and bio-security. “So we involved about 70 students from across the region in that training programme.”
Dr. Eric Neumann said it was reasonably unique because they elected to train the veterinarians and public health doctors in that post graduate program jointly.
“So they sat side-by-side learning identical skills but that being just part of the objective of the training.” The underlying important principal behind the training, Dr. Eric Neumann, said was simply to start building a professional network of veterinarians and medical doctors so that they knew each other on a first name basis across those health sectors and also across country borders.
Over a 100 participants including health and livestock experts from SAARC countries and representatives from international organisations are taking part in the symposium.
