Description
In the framework of the global health security agenda, most countries are increasingly being equipped with the capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to endemic and emerging health threats. Collaborations bring together various global, regional, and local public and private health sectors to develop strategies for controlling priority zoonosis. In most African countries have prioritised zoonotic diseases as a public health economic significance threat. In Côte d'Ivoire, brucellosis has been prioritized as one the five zoonotic diseases to be controlled and eliminated in a One Health approach". Therefore, its control should involve stakeholders from various sectors including communities. However, observation highlights in Côte d’Ivoire as well as in other developing countries that the knowledge on brucellosis is fragmented and unequally distributed between animal and human healthcare workers as well as in pastoral communities with a strong gender divide. Thus the mechanisms of knowledge production and transfer on brucellosis within pastoral communities and among healthcare agents from animals and human sectors have been assessed. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in the pastoral zone in the north-west Côte d’Ivoire engaging transhumant pastoralists, sedentary livestock owners, shepherds and their wives. Furthermore, veterinarians, animal health technicians and public health workers were interviewed using mixed methods with 30 semi-structured interviews and 320 questionnaires. Results revealed that gender influences access to information on brucellosis and its knowledge transfer appeared gender-biased, mainly from the veterinarians towards men. The social labour division of livestock husbandry and interventions of veterinarians through awareness reinforce the brucellosis knowledge gap between men and women. Moreover, brucellosis is found to be under-known zoonotic disease among the public health workers posing the differential diagnosis with malaria and endemic disease. The public health specialists perceived brucellosis as a disease only in animals. Thus, it urges to adopt a One Health approach, a holistic and integrative perspective that will involve, at local and district levels, environmental agents, human and animal healthcare personnel and various segment of the community in a process of participatory production and transfer of knowledge on brucellosis in order to design coordinated interventions for its control. During routine activities and awareness campaign, vets can work with all part of the household with a role in animal and their products managements (men/herding, women/milk, children/kidding young animals…). Vets can also talk to the medics in the region about the circulating zoonotic pathogen for differential diagnosis and the medics to inform about the unknown diseases or failure of treatments.
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