Good emergency management practice: a guide to preparing for animal health emergencies

A disease emergency is one of the most challenging situations that a veterinary service can confront (Annex A discusses many of the aspects of disease emergencies). Recent experience in various countries has shown that veterinary services must be well-prepared to deal with such an emergency in order to achieve rapid, cost-efficient control. To do this, the veterinary services must have a well-developed plan, the capacity to implement it, and it must practise implementing its plan.

The aim of this manual is to set out in a systematic way the elements required to achieve that level of preparedness for any emergency disease in animals. In particular, but not exclusively, this manual focuses on the control of transboundary animal diseases (TADs). Some of these principles may also be helpful in preparing for food safety, zoonotic and even non-infectious disease emergencies.

Emergency management preparedness programmes should provide the key to identifying and prioritizing disease incursion threats. The basic components of these programmes to be considered are preventing the entry of TADs and other disease threats, rapidly detecting disease and taking early effective action in the face of an emergency. Learning from outbreaks and reviewing the response sequence are critical to better performance in future emergencies.

Preparedness planning, including the development and approval of contingency plans for identified high-threat diseases, enables animal health services to be better equipped technically to cope with a disease emergency. There are other benefits. Prior negotiation and approval of plans will allow decisions to be made by politicians and senior civil servants more rapidly. This should allow the government to release required funds more quickly for the control campaign and facilitate the provision of any necessary assistance from other government agencies and the private sector.

Farming communities are more likely to cooperate in an emergency disease-control programme if they see that quick, decisive action is being taken that will ultimately benefit them and if they are actively involved in preparing emergency plans. They will then share “ownership” of some of the plans.

This document includes a simple assessment tool that may assist managers in gauging their state of preparedness. This tool, however, is not intended to be a full evaluation. Conducting more rigorous evaluations of preparations also will be extremely valuable.