Kick-off for a new one health community empowerment project in Nigeria

Members of the COPE core team after a day of fruitful discussions. Source: NCDC

In early July 2023, colleagues from Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI), Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), National Veterinary Research Institute of Nigeria (NVRI) and RKI (Centre for International Health Protection) gathered in Abuja, Nigeria, to kick off COPE. COPE stands for “Community-based One Health Participatory and Empowerment Strategy”. It is a 3-year project under the German Ministry of Health’s Global Health Protection Programme (GHPP). The aim is to reduce the burden of one health challenges in resource-limited rural communities in Nigeria. Backed by scientific data, public health experts will support a selected community in Nigeria to identify and prioritise their one health risks and develop local interventions to reduce such risks. An example could be to make food storage places rodent-proof, as rodents are major transmitters of diseases such as Lassa fever.

During the kick-off meeting in Abuja, the COPE team – with the support of other invited experts – developed details of the project workplan and study protocol. In particular, the expertise and project planning of human epidemiology, veterinary and environmental health, laboratory diagnostics, and anthropology needed to be linked and tightly interwoven. The local project activities will start with a first visit to the selected community in autumn 2023, during which the team will introduce themselves and the project and will collect first information on the local perceptions and needs regarding one health risks.

The project team also used the time in Abuja to jointly participate in a community discussion, in which results of the predecessor project “Burden of COVID-19 Among Health Care Workers” (BCHW) were presented and discussed. This project had been conducted in an abattoir and adjacent primary health care facility in Abuja. The team members discussed with local officials, abattoir workers and health care workers, how to reduce disease risks for people and animals. Feeding back and discussing research results was not only an acknowledgement and appreciation of the contributions of the community where the research took place, it was also a critical check of the practical usefulness of the research results to improve public health.

Impressions from the community discussion in an abattoir in Abuja. Source: FLI (top), RKI (below left and right)

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