Preventing, detecting and responding to transboundary animal diseases

What is ECTAD? Founded in 2004, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) currently represents one of the world’s largest animal health capacity development programmes, which helps the most vulnerable and economically challenged Member Nations to prevent, detect and respond to transboundary animal diseases (TADs).

What are TADs? TADs are highly contagious or transmissible, epidemic diseases, with the potential to spread rapidly across the globe and to have substantial socioeconomic consequences.

Why do animal diseases pose a threat to public health? Each year there are 2.5 billion estimated cases of human illness and approximately 2.7 million human deaths worldwide due to zoonotic diseases.

How does ECTAD contribute to global health security? In late 2004, FAO ECTAD joined forces with its partners to forecast, prevent, detect and respond to disease emergence, and more recently to the challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Over the past 20 years, ECTAD has cooperated with more than 40 partners from the private and public sector globally to address animal health threats.

FAO ECTAD cooperates with over 45 Member Nations to enhance their capacity to manage animal diseases, including high-impact diseases. By helping to avoid national, regional and global spread, the work of ECTAD contributes to the protection of people and animals from diseases and other health threats.

The programme works to increase animal health system capacities to enable countries and regions to prepare for, detect, prevent and control emerging infectious, zoonotic and transboundary diseases, and to tackle AMR.

Through the work of ECTAD, FAO forecasts outbreaks by conducting studies and analysis to better understand viruses and how human and animal behaviour can affect disease spread. The Organization also supports early disease detection by providing essential diagnostic equipment and improving the infrastructure of national laboratories. These actions help to reduce the time taken from field sampling to accurate diagnosis of priority TADs, thereby leading to faster and more effective response.

TADs can spread rapidly irrespective of national borders. They can also result in high incidence of disease and death in animals, thereby having serious socioeconomic and sometimes public health consequences while constituting a constant threat to the livelihoods of livestock farmers and the food security of the communities they serve. 

The One Health approach is embedded in the work of ECTAD as zoonotic transmission occurs at the human–animal–environment interface, and cross–disciplinary work at all levels is enhanced by ECTAD’s multidisciplinary global network.

The programme’s international network comprises over 400 experts who are directly involved in operations that focus on zoonoses in different regions across the globe, including Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Near East.

In 2023 ECTAD supported more than:

• 250 disease outbreak investigations and responses
• 7 000 professional trainees
• 130 laboratories globally
• 45 countries around the world
  

Related links

ECTAD global website

Emergency Management Centre (EMC)

Ongoing projects

ECTAD Member Nations

Key publications

20 Years of the FAO Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) Programme

Supporting the development of stronger animal health systems: Achievements in 2023