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Annex A
Animal disease emergencies: their nature and potential consequences What are animal disease emergencies? Disease emergencies can occur when there are unexpected outbreaks or epidemics of serious animal diseases or the occurrence of animal health-related events which have the potential to cause serious socio-economic consequences for a country. There are two main features that differentiate animal disease emergencies from the more routine endemic disease occurrences: Animal disease emergencies cannot be effectively handled at a local level by livestock farmers and their immediate animal health advisers, be they governmental or private. They can only be resolved by a national response, coordinated by the country’s veterinary services with the support of other agencies. In the case of major epidemic livestock diseases, they may further require an international response involving a number of countries in a region, with the external assistance and possible coordination of appropriate international agencies. Animal disease emergencies require an immediate national response, so as to minimize the serious socio-economic and public health consequences that they may cause. Any delays may lead to disease outbreaks spreading over larger areas, making their control and eradication much more costly and difficult, or even impossible to achieve, leading to an endemic situation.
Their nature The most likely cause of a disease emergency is an incursion into a country of a transboundary animal disease (TAD). TADs are defined by FAO as those “infectious diseases that are of significant economic, trade and/or food-security importance for a considerable number of countries; and which can easily spread to other countries and reach epidemic proportions; and where control/management, including exclusion, requires cooperation between several countries.” Some examples of TADs are: African horse sickness, African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, bluetongue, classical swine fever, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), Newcastle disease, Nipah virus disease, peste des petits ruminants, and Rift Valley fever. Alternatively, it may even be the introduction of a new antigenic strain or biotype of an animal pathogen that is already in the country. An example of the latter might be the introduction of a new serotype of FMD into a country, for which there is no pre-existing immunity either from vaccination or past infection. The appearance of a highly infectious
