Maputo — Mozambique's National Health Institute (INS) has warned of the risk that new pandemics may appear before the Covid-19 respiratory disease has been brought fully under control.
The alert was launched last week in Maputo, by the INS deputy director-general, Eduardo Samo Gudo. He believed that the next pandemic would, like Covid-19, have an animal origin.
He said the occurrence of zoonotic diseases is on the rise, because of humans themselves, who invade the wildlife environment and carry pathogens from their animal hosts, where they do little harm, to human societies.
"If this situation prevails, we will enter a new paradigm of global health, in which we will have more than one pandemic at the same time since currently, the occurrence of zoonoses has increased worldwide, through the fault of humans themselves,", Samo Gudo explained.
On the same occasion, the National Director of Livestock Development, Américo Conceição, said that over 80 percent of diseases that humans suffer from originated in animals and that, in recent times, there has been the emergence, resurgence and spread of numerous zoonotic diseases.
"This workshop is an important and pertinent milestone in establishing robust epidemiological surveillance in the scope of prevention and control of the propagation of emerging and re-emerging endemic diseases, focusing on zoonotic diseases", he said.
For his part, the director of the Biotechnology Center at Maputo's Eduardo Mondlane University, Joaquim Saíde, encouraged the need to develop, strengthen and implement a system focused on the "single health approach", to face the challenges that the country has been going through in recent years.
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The Workshop on the Single Health Platform in Mozambique aimed, among other matters, to identify zoonotic diseases of greatest national concern for Mozambique, using contributions from representatives of human health, livestock services, environment, wildlife, research, development partners, and higher education.
During the workshop, representatives identified a list of zoonotic diseases relevant to Mozambique, defined the criteria for prioritization, and determined relevant questions and weighting for each criterion. Seven zoonotic diseases were identified as priorities by the participants using the OHZDP, a semi-quantitative screening tool developed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
These are rabies, zoonotic tuberculosis, salmonella, the zoonotic avian influenza virus, trypanosomiasis, brucellosis, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
