Belize is the first country in the Americas to host an IHR-PVS National Bridging Workshop (NBW) with the finalized method and material, a milestone in strengthening collaboration between the public and animal health sectors.

A total of 31 NBWs have been conducted to date, mainly in Africa, Asia and Europe. The success of the exercise has triggered many requests from countries, and WHO and the OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) are now actively working on handing over the tool to the Americas region as well. The exercise in Belize from 20 November to 22 November 2019 was the first in the Americas outside of an early 2014 pilot in Costa Rica.

WHO, in partnership with the OIE, developed the workshops in recognition of the shared responsibility and synergic potential for collaboration between public and animal health sectors to deal with threats at the animal-human interface. As 75% of recently emerging infectious pathogens are of zoonotic nature, the health of humans and animals is vitally interlinked. Such agents threaten health security and can cause disastrous damage to a country’s economy and to people’s livelihoods. The main objective of the NBWs is to provide an opportunity for human and animal health services in countries to review their collaboration gaps in key technical areas required for the management of health events at the animal-human interface and to develop a joint roadmap of corrective measures and strategic investments to improve their coordination.

The exercise in Belize also provided an opportunity for regional staff from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and from OIE’s regional office for the Americas to further enhance their skills in the preparation and facilitation of this type of exercise. A larger roster of regional NBW facilitators, combined with the ongoing translation of the material in Spanish, should pave the way for many more successful NBWs to be conducted in the Americas region.

The Belize workshop was attended by 45 national participants, representing the Ministry of Health (MoH), the Belize Agricultural Health Authority (BAHA), the National Emergency Management Emergency Organization (NEMO) and other relevant sectors such as Police, Customs and Military. The resulting roadmap contains 18 operational activities that the public and animal health sectors have pledged to jointly implement to improve collaboration and enhance Belize’s preparedness and response capacities against natural, accidental and deliberate zoonotic disease outbreaks.