Protecting people and animals from disease threats

The United States Agency for International Development and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are working together to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats. Their two key programmes – Global Health Security Agenda and Emerging Pandemic Threats – are building animal health capacity to prevent, detect and respond to disease threats in over 30 countries.

The Global Health Security Agenda programme develops national capacity to prevent zoonotic and non-zoonotic diseases while quickly and effectively detecting and controlling diseases when they do emerge. The Emerging Pandemic Threats programme improves national capacity to pre-empt the emergence and re-emergence of infectious zoonotic disease and to prevent the next pandemic.

Action against emerging pandemic threats is taken through projects on: Avian influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Africa Sustainable Livestock 2050 and Emergency equipment stockpile. With high-impact diseases that jump from animals to humans on the rise, these programmes are reducing the risk to lives and livelihoods from national, regional and global disease spread.