Key result
Increasing available human resources by including appointed private veterinarians allowed the completion of emergency FMD vaccination in 4 months or less in 23 of 24 governorates, especially when targeted at cattle.
Why the study?
The effectiveness of foot and mouth disease control depends on human resources, and Tunisia aimed to determine and compare necessary versus available resources for emergency vaccination.
Increasing available human resources by including appointed private veterinarians significantly reduces the time required to complete emergency vaccination campaigns for foot and mouth disease in Tunisia.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
May inform FMD emergency planning in similar settings; modeling supports but leaves generalizability and real-world impact open.
Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious viral disease that affects domestic and wild artiodactyl animals and causes considerable economic losses related to outbreak management, production losses and trade impacts. In Tunisia, the last FMD outbreak took place in 2018-2019. The effectiveness of control measures implemented to control FMD depends, in particular, on the human resources used to implement them. Tunisia has the ultimate objective of obtaining OIE status as 'FMD-free with vaccination'. The aim of this study was to determine and compare the necessary and available human resources to control FMD outbreaks in Tunisia using emergency vaccination and to assess the gaps that would play a role in the implementation of the strategy. We developed a resources-requirement grid of necessary human resources for the management of the emergency vaccination campaign launched after the identification of a FMD-infected premises in Tunisia. Field surveys, conducted in the 24 governorates of Tunisia, allowed quantifying the available human resources for several categories of skills considered in the resources-requirement grid. For each governorate, we then compared available and necessary human resources to implement vaccination according to eight scenarios mixing generalised or cattle-targeted vaccination and different levels of human resources. The resources-requirement grid included 11 tasks in three groups: management of FMD-infected premises, organisational tasks and vaccination implementation. The available human resources for vaccination-related tasks included veterinarians and technicians from the public sector and appointed private veterinarians. The comparison of available and necessary human resources showed vaccination-related tasks to be the most time-consuming in terms of managing a FMD outbreak. Increasing the available human resources using appointed private veterinarians allowed performing the emergency vaccination of animals in the governorate in due time, especially if vaccination was targeted on cattle. The overall approach was validated by comparing the predicted and observed durations of a vaccination campaign conducted under the same conditions as during the 2014 Tunisian outbreak. This study could provide support to the Tunisian Veterinary Services or to other countries to optimise the management of a FMD outbreak.
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Marsot et al. (2020) studied Foot and mouth disease (FMD). Inclusion of appointed private veterinarians in emergency vaccination teams vs. Standard or maximum level of public resources alone was evaluated on Time needed to complete the emergency vaccination campaign. Increasing available human resources by including appointed private veterinarians allowed the completion of emergency FMD vaccination in 4 months or less in 23 of 24 governorates, especially when targeted at cattle.
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