Update on One Health EJP SimEx 2022 – 10th June 2022.
Diseases that are transmitted directly or indirectly between animals and humans (zoonoses) pose major risks for public and animal health. National and regional authorities need to continuously revise their policies and activities to address existing and emerging zoonotic disease threats. The One Health approach involves strengthening collaboration amongst human, animal and environment health and food safety sectors, which is essential to better understand and address zoonotic disease threats. When a zoonotic outbreak situation arises, the technologies, tools and strategies developed within a One Health framework can be applied to manage the issue. Earlier this year, the One Health EJP SimEx was launched as a way for the sectors to practice and enhance their ability to cooperate when dealing with zoonotic threats within their countries.
The SimEx provides an opportunity for all partner institutes within the One Health EJP Consortium to participate in the conduction of a table-top exercise at national level. OHEJP members will meet with experts from other sectors (animal health, public health and food safety) to deal with a disease outbreak situation using a One Health perspective, through a facilitator guided scenario.
The scenario is on an outbreak of a foodborne zoonosis and focuses on increasing mutual dialogue across the food safety and health sectors, identifying collaboration gaps, and finding new ways to cooperate. The conduction of the exercise aims to highlight the benefits of sharing relevant data and finding solutions to common issues. It has been designed to allow some opportunities to add national objectives to the conduction exercises, unique for the participating country or institute.
Preparation of the SimEx involved initial virtual workshops that were held on 21-23rd March and 5th April to train the national and local exercise leaders, and local evaluators. These were highly successful in briefing the attendees on the exercise preparations and conduction (the scenario, evaluation process and OHEJP tools) and provided them with the skills and knowledge required to run the exercise successfully in their own country. As a bonus, experts from FAO, EFSA and ECDC and members of the OHEJP consortium gave presentations relevant to both exercise and outbreak management.
The SimEx conduction exercises are currently being held in each participating country for two days between May and July 2022. During May, they were successfully conducted in Norway, Poland, Italy and Denmark. Overall, the SimEx offers a highly collaborative and progressive opportunity to advance the management of future zoonotic disease outbreaks.
To learn more about the OHEJP SimEx go to OHEJP SimEx 2022 – One Health EJP
