Handling animal health issues with inadequate equipment and personnel
Mohamed Tommy Koroma rears livestock in Moindu Wandor in Kenema, East of Sierra Leone. He has been in the trade for over 15 years, but this year is a miserable time for him because he has already lost 13 out of the 15 livestock he owned. His livestock are dying from an unknown disease outbreak in his community.
Koroma is an auto mechanic and a farmer as well. He has seven dependents and five of them are school going children.
It was in April 2018 that he started observing that some of his livestock were not active as usual and could not go for grazing. He started fetching grass for them but they could not eat as well. In June, the goats started dying. “I first saw four laid dead near my house. Few days later, I saw another two dead. The situation worried me so much because I know how my goats were so valuable to me,” he lamented.
According to him, within two weeks, he saw three out of his 15 goats alive. He then concluded that the others might have died in bushes. Before we completed interview with him, one of his dependents came and reported to him that one of the remaining three goats was dead.
Koroma is very sad now that his goats are dead, and he has no money at the moment to restock. He referred to them as his savings because he sold them whenever he was urgently in need of money, especially for paying school fees and solving other pressing problems. “I am very worried that even my remaining two goats will die because they might have been infected by the sick ones as well. It is very difficult to find someone in our community to urgently borrow USD20 from. My goats were my savings,” he mourned.
Koroma like many livestock owners in the Moindu community are very much discouraged about the way they are losing their livestock. The last time similar plague occurred to them was few months before the Ebola disease outbreak in 2014, but the impact was not severe as the current. The price of a goat – buck and doe – in their community is USD30 and it will be more attractive when they are taken to the cities.
Farmers in the Moindu community rear their livestock on free range and most of them as social assets. They do not vaccinate their livestock regularly. They only hire the service of a community animal health worker when they notice some signs that their livestock were sick.
Government and partners’ response to the outbreak
Upon receiving report about the disease outbreak in Moindu Wandor in Kenema district, in the East and Gbangbama Kwelu in Moyamba district in the South, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) and Njala University with fund from the United States Agency for International Development visited the affected communities, from 20 to 23 June 2018, to collect information on the cause of the outbreak and its impact on the people.
The team interviewed community stakeholders, livestock owners, collected blood, nasal and mouth swab from 61 goats and sheep - 50 from Moindu and 11 from Kwelu - for laboratory investigation.
In Moindu alone, there were more than 253 heads of small ruminants. A total of 124 were accounted dead and 129 were at high risk. The residents were not able to figure out how many dead animals are abandoned in the bush. Residents of Gbangbama Kwelu Chiefdom in Moyamba District could not account for the number of dead animals because most of them were abandoned in the bush.
The same clinical signs - mouth, eyes, and nasal discharges, diarrhoea, loss of weight were confirmed in both communities. Therefore, the team instructed the communities to impose quarantine on sick animals and restrict movement of healthy animals between communities until the investigation report was out. Communities were advised to use protective gear when handling sick animals, and they were strictly warned not to eat dead animals.
In a press conference on Friday, 29 June, FAO and MAF updated stakeholders and the media on the status of the outbreak and cautioned the public on the preventive measures and channels of reporting whenever similar signs are noticed among animals anywhere in the country.
Capacity of the livestock and veterinary sector in the country
After the end of the civil war, the country’s livestock and veterinary sector deteriorated and remained with few trained and qualified personnel that cannot efficiently handle the caseload in the country. Currently, the country cannot boast of a dozen veterinary doctors, and majority of the available are either in their prime to retirement or in the research institutions. There are Livestock Officers assigned to each district, who are expected to conduct surveillance and report to headquarters monthly, but they lack the capacity and necessary equipment like vehicle, laptop, smartphone and internet services to do so.
The country requires robust enhancement in the surveillance and laboratory systems to efficiently handle livestock related matters.
Contact:
Keifa Jaward
Communication Consultant