Within the framework of the “One Health” concept, aimed in particular at protecting public and animal health through policies to prevent and control pathogens at the human/animal/environment interface, the collaboration agreement just signed by the Institut Pasteur and the World Organisation for Animal Health seeks to strengthen cooperation in this field between the two organisations.
On 22 September, at the Headquarters of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) in Paris, Dr Bernard Vallat, Director General of the OIE, and Professor Christian Bréchot, Director General of the Institut Pasteur (IP), signed an agreement to strengthen their cooperation in the fields of animal disease and zoonosis research, education, surveillance and control, in line with the “One Health” concept.
In particular, this Agreement seeks to facilitate the creation of collaborating centres and reference laboratories around the world with the support of the Institut Pasteur International Network (RIIP) present in 32 countries.
The Agreement also deals with other critical public health issues, namely the surveillance and control of Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) and Rift Valley fever (RVF), on which collaboration already exists between the OIE and the IP through the IP network’s two Reference Laboratories for these zoonoses, both of which are recognised as Reference laboratories by the OIE.
Participation of the two organisations in global conferences on issues of shared interest will strengthen work on numerous topics, ranging from pathogen genomics to biological threat reduction, a topic that was the subject of an OIE Global Conference in July 2015, and the eradication of rabies, the theme of the forthcoming Global Conference organised by the OIE and WHO in collaboration with FAO and with the support of GARC, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, on 10 and 11 December 2015.
