Animal health matters: improving the health of wild and domestic animals to enhance long-term development success in USAID-assisted countries

This paper addresses issues of health and disease transmission is wild animals. It offers selected examples of animal health issues in North America and applies the lessons learned to foreign assistance programs. It identifies the wildlife health hotspots (Mongolia, Bolivia, Argentina, Congo Basin, Tanzania, Southern Africa), discusses the Pilanesburg Resolution and offers a checklist for mitigating wildlife health impacts in USAID-assisted projects.Findings of the research are:domestic animals, wild animals, and humans share many diseases. Landscape fragmentation, unsustainable land-use choices, pollution, and other types of ecosystem disruption affect all three groups, often in similar waysdeveloping countries are dependent upon healthy domestic and wild animals at local as well as national levels in terms of food security and self-sufficiency, fibre needs, micronutrients, cultural norms, sustainable livelihoods, economic growth, and trademany developing countries lack functional strategies and the infrastructure needed to protect their domestic agricultural and wildlife interests from endemic or introduced diseases. Without sound vigilance systems in-place at local and national levels, the risk of diseases being accidentally exported globally through trade is also increasedprojects that incorporate animal health objectives lend themselves to quantitative short- and long-term monitoring, since disease status within and across species can be objectively measured over time. Indicators derived from an epidemiological approach can point to project success or failureby following the basic tenets of the Pilanesburg Resolution development agencies can improve the success and sustainability of their development interventions, particularly those that involve the agricultural and natural resource management sectorsby using a simple pre-implementation project checklist development agencies can avoid negative impacts on animal health and ultimately humans over time