A workshop was held in a suburb of Windhoek from 22 November to 3 December 2004 under the FAO Technical Cooperation Programme project TCP/RAF/3006A, “Strengthening disease control through the improved Transboundary Animal Disease Information System (TADinfo)”. This was the first training course on the Java version of TADinfo. Fifteen veterinarians and technicians from Burkina Faso , Ghana , Lesotho , Morocco , Mozambique , Namibia , Nigeria , Tunisia , Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania attended the ten-day workshop. The objectives of the workshop were to familiarize epidemiologists from the participating countries with the network use of the TADinfo Java version and to train participants so that they, in turn, could train their national staff.
The workshop was opened by Mr M.F. Mokati, FAO Representative to Namibia . Dr O. Huebschle, Chief Veterinary Officer of Namibia , encouraged participants to maximize this training opportunity. Dr F. Musisi, FAO Regional Emergency Livestock Officer, gave a talk on FAO emergency projects, their outlines and functions.
During the training course, FAO staff gave lectures on the overall basic structure of TADinfo and its Serosurveillance, Census and Vaccination modules, and discussed system configurations, installation of the programme, and data back-up. Many of the lectures were followed by intensive exercises. Dr C. Bamhare, Namibia , and Dr F. Sudi, United Republic of Tanzania, gave an introductory lecture on the Field Observations, Abattoir Observations and Farm Visit modules. Dr Sudi presented the advanced functions of a GPS (global positioning system) and further data analysis in ArcView. Dr Bamhare organized a discussion on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional epidemiological data reporting system and its future coordination within the region.
A 15-minute country presentation was made every day featuring: current disease problems and distribution; the country's top ten priority diseases in terms of importance, economic loss and food insecurity; diseases of which the country is at risk; routine surveillance and disease reporting systems in the country; methods of information capture for the country's databases and reporting format; the approximate number of data acquired per month; and the country's expectations of TADinfo.
All participants received a certificate for the completion of the training course.
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