Pages: (1-7 )
Abstract
The first 10 years of the Rabies in West Africa (RIWA) forum, 2012-2022 was devoted to the goal of fostering One Health collaboration to improve the surveillance and control of rabies in animals and humans within the countries of the West African sub-region. With a focus on building sustainable communication between academia, governments and the private sector, the workforce from animal health, human health and environmental health specialties were convened through annual international conference on Rabies in West Africa. The generated meta-data on rabies detection and burden estimation across Anglophone and Francophone West Africa fostered the emergence of spatial and spatio-temporal analyses of dog bite victims, review of human exposure records and estimation of annual human deaths due to rabies in the sub-region. The findings support commensurate administrative oversight by RIWA forum, towards a deeper strength of collaboration for sustainable monitoring and evaluation of progress towards zero human death due to rabies by the year 2030.
Keywords: Communication, Country chapter, Rabies elimination, Team-work, West Africa,