Research

CIRAD has considerable experience of studying, monitoring and managing diseases with a complex aetiology in tropical environments. For several years now, it has been working on the risks of the emergence of animal diseases that are transmissible to humans and are linked to environmental and climate change, and on the risks of disease transmission between wildlife and domestic species. It thus has a useful contribution to make to understanding and managing the risks of the occurrence of bird flu.

Surveillance

On an international level, the International Office of Epizootics (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) are in charge of organizing the control of the animal diseases, in conjunction with national, public and private veterinary services. CIRAD aim is to help them set up epidemiological surveillance networks backed up by producer organizations and the farmers themselves, and encourage them to organize control and prevention campaigns based on a regional and global strategy. CIRAD is an OIE collaborating laboratory for epidemiology and an OIE and FAO reference laboratory for several animal diseases, and as such has been involved since the start of the epizootic in missions to assess the sanitary situation and the control methods implemented in Vietnam and Cambodia. It has also organized epidemiology training workshops in China and Thailand, with participants from 21 Southeast and South Asian countries.