With infectious diseases widely regarded as the major constraint to agricultural and animal development as well as human health and well-being in sub-Saharan Africa, scientists have realized the need for common strategy towards managing diseases in Africa.

For the first time, experts in the three sectors; humans, animals and plants met in Kampala to plan for the establishment of the East African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (EACIDS) to facilitate cross border cooperation in the detection and response to disease outbreaks.

The meeting funded by Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) follows a report; "Infectious Diseases: Preparing for the future Africa" released by the Office of Science and Innovation, which called for a pan-African vision and strategy for the management of infectious diseases -with a three tier approach; at national, regional and continental level.

"There is low activity in general surveillance. For human and animal infectious diseases, surveillance is generally limited to activities of specific projects or targeted disease control programmes e.g. polio or rinderpest.

For plants, there is little or no regionally coordinated surveillance for pests and diseases and the quarantine system is poorly operated in many sub-Saharan African countries," the report reads.

"So the capacity for early detection, early warning and early response to changing patterns of new or old disease control strategies (whether of plant, humans or animals) are becoming late reactive emergency programmes," the report further reads.

With the formation of EACIDS, scientists are optimistic that it will increase laboratory capacities and harmonise and standardise best practices; facilitate the sharing of data and communication.

This regional centre will link medical and veterinary institutions from the five East African countries to improve their capacity to detect, identify and monitor infectious diseases.

"We need to encourage the spirit of working together, institution to institution, nation to nation. It ensures efficiency as some countries may not [afford] experts," said Mark Rweyemamu, the Executive Director Southern Africa Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS).

The formation of EACIDS comes three years after the formation of SACIDS, which was the first regional infectious disease surveillance centre to established on the Africa -bringing together five countries; Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa.

"The 'one health' collaboration between medical and veterinary sectors helps us to focus our common resources to study the shared problem of infectious diseases. The partnership will marshal the best science expertise to the study of infectious diseases in the endemic setting and to identify new and emerging diseases early," Rweyemamu said.

According to Rweyemamu, 60% of human diseases come from animals -including HIV/AIDS, Ebola and Influenza. Yet experts in these different sectors work in isolation.

It is acknowledged that Africa has the heaviest burden of infectious diseases. A number of new clinical syndromes due to new infectious agents have been identified in the last 30 years for example Marburg fever, acute haemorrhagic fevers, Ebola fever, AIDS.

This burden according to experts is likely to get worse with increasing urbanisation, intensification of agriculture, increased mobility and movement of people, animals and agricultural commodities, increasing wildlife-livestock-human contact and the impact of climate change on disease vectors.

"This initiative brings a common approach to preventing the problem [of diseases]. As you are aware, infectious diseases have no borders," said Dr. Intisar E. Elrayah, the Director Tropical Medicine Research Institute, Sudan.

Vaccines are potentially the most promising strategy for controlling infectious diseases.