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Environmental and Community Health Information

Community entry
CCPZ is dedicated to improving postgraduate training through organized community-academic partnerships, enabling community entry, assessing disease burden and preparing pilot study programme for zoonosis control and prevention. CCPZ uses the “adopt-a-community” approach in establishing team for surveillance and control of zoonoses to improve the quality of environment and life in West Africa.
 
Zoonoses Identification and Intervention Studies
CCPZ identifies systems of reporting zoonosis among humans and animals in a community.  Outbreak notice is carefully investigated by a team. The team summarizes and reports on the extent of an outbreak and its impact. Intervention plan is then formulated. Outbreak sites are identified, while cases are confirmed through laboratory tests. In most cases, the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is the gold standard confirmatory test at CCPZ.  By policy, zoonosis surveillance and control team is established within  a local government area, comprising human and animal health officials and the private sector.  Where the disease is vaccine preventable, vaccination team is composed, its members are trained and vaccinated, essential facilities are provided, including biosafety kits, human and animal vaccines, vaccination and record keeping materials. Means of recognizing vaccinated animals are supplied.  Unvaccinated animals and humans that remain vulnerable to infection and disease are identified. Community members that are at risk, including the elderly and children are trained on basic facts and actions to take about zoonoses. CCPZ thus builds West African capacity for achieving locally relevant, more effective and efficient approach to control and eradication of zoonoses in adopted communities.

 

Promoting Community Hygiene and Herd Immunity
CCPZ works at community planning level to answer the question of achieving sustainable environmental hygiene for animals and humans and it also works at achieving 90-95% coverage threshold needed for protective herd immunity in adopted communities. The centre aims at actualizing roll-back agenda on zoonotic diseases in West Africa that have been reported as neglected by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Mindful of periodic accumulation of susceptible population in a community where there is no effective vaccination programme, the centre works through its team to ensure vaccination of humans and animals, observing compliance with local peculiarities for sustainable programming.

 

Educational Documentaries on Zoonoses Containment Promotion
Starting from community entry, through identification and intervention studies, up to promoting community hygiene and herd immunity against zoonoses, CCPZ focuses its attention on getting the local and global communities engaged in a network that learns together to solve the peculiar issues in the practice of surveillance and control of animal-to-human diseases and environmental health protection in West Africa. Opportunity for online participation is available at https://ccpzui.maps.arcgis.com/ . CCPZ documentations include journal publications, audio-visual aids circulated for educational use in schools, town or city libraries, on the news, public training and association meetings.