COVID-19

Who are the people behind SAFOSO? What inspires them and how do they contribute to solving animal health challenges? Carla Stoffel shares her story.

SAFOSO organized a webinar on AMR for the insurance company CSS Health Insurance. The webinar helped attendees understand how antimicrobials, and the resistance they can induce in bacteria, impacts both their work and their daily lives. An important goal of the webinar is that participants are enabled to form their own opinion on this important health-threatening topic.

How can trade be maintained when a country or region is facing transboundary diseases, such as African swine fever (ASF)? In the recent workshop at the European College of Veterinary Public Health (ECVPH) online annual conference, SAFOSO provided an overview on compartmentalization as an emerging business strategy in integrated food systems and emphasized the role of private industry and veterinary authorities in its implementation. The implementation of compartments is an initiative mainly driven by the industry that requires a close private-public partnership with the veterinary authorities.

SAFOSO has organized a workshop on COVID-19/ SARS-CoV-2 for Fenaco, a large Swiss agriculture cooperative. The crisis management team set up by the Fenaco’s management is constantly monitoring developments relating to the coronavirus. Measures have been implemented based on the one hand on the official regulations and recommendations and on the other hand on the specific conditions in the company. Various emergency concepts for the event of an epidemic or pandemic have been prepared.

SAFOSO works in partnership with the FAO regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) on developing a series of trainings to build capacities on detection and response to African swine fever in the South East Asia region. The second phase of African swine fever (ASF) capacity building activities started with a training on ASF Detection and Emergency Response organised on September 7-10 in the province of Battambang, Cambodia. National-level veterinarians eagerly joined the activity and trained around 25provincial and district level veterinarians.

Who are the people behind SAFOSO? What inspires them and how do they contribute to solving animal health challenges? Patrik Buholzer shares his story.

The risk of transmission of antimicrobial resistance via raw poultry meat and the interaction with pets is underestimated by the general public, a new study co-authored by SAFOSO suggests.

Agriculture has traditionally been one of the most important sectors of the Ukrainian economy, given the high quality and availability of fertile land. But Ukraine’s agriculture potential has not been realized fully. An initiative to strengthen the dairy sector and the organic agriculture sector in Ukraine, is the Swiss-Ukrainian Program “Higher Value Added Trade from the Organic and Dairy Sector in Ukraine”. The Program started in August 2019 and will last until June 2023.

Most of the turnover (54%) veterinarians generate with the veal calf sector, comes from antimicrobial prescriptions a new studyco-authored by Isabel Lechner, Anaïs Léger and Katharina Stärk shows.

SAFOSO developed and conducted a regional training on African swine fever with veterinarians in South East Asia in partnership with the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific and was supported by USAID.

The news is being flooded with perhaps unfamiliar epidemiological terms and concepts in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are not an epidemiologist, this can be really confusing and prevent you from truly understanding the key messages. But it is not only because of COVID-19 that we have an understanding of epidemiology, think of all the other animal and human diseases that are affecting us today. Building on our expertise in epidemiology, SAFOSO now offers an e-Learning course Epidemiology for Non-Epidemiologists.

Who are the people behind SAFOSO? What inspires them and how do they contribute to solving animal health challenges? Isabel Lechner shares her story.