WHO cares! 500,000 cattle under treatment by RIU-backed SOS-Uganda
26 November 2010

At the 3rd WHO International Conference on Neglected Zoonotic Diseases in Geneva in November 2010 Professor Sue Welburn told RIUtv about the continued success of SOS.

Professor Welburn said:

"SOS-Uganda has been remarkably successful and actually without huge amounts of funding and support. It is a very low-cost technology that the farmers are willing to adopt themselves. They are controlling sleeping sickness (in humans) by controlling infection and disease in their animals, but they are doing it not because of sleeping sickness - but because they want to get rid of ticks in their animals. So it is the indirect benefit which is the driving force for this technology."

She explains that SOS-Uganda has vets in place in the very poor communities of north-west Uganda and this means that around half a million cattle are now under treatment.

At the same event we caught up with Professor Anthony Mbonye, Ugandan Health Commissioner. We asked him what lessons he thought Uganda had learned from SOS.

Professor Mboyne said that in Uganda in the period 2005-2009 they have seen the number of cases of trypanosomiasis coming down. This is the result of many activities of which SOS-Uganda played a part. He explained the programme in Uganda has two areas of focus - one in the east and central area and the other in the north-west. However they have an integrated programme involving the community (community involvement was one of the themes of the WHO conference). Out of this he says they have made communities aware, improved treatment, made drugs available and ensured cooperation between the Ministry of Health and the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Makerere.

In his reflection on the broader scope of the conference, Professor Mboyne said this integrated approach is a model that could be applied in other countries. He feels, however, that many diseases are still neglected - especially the diseases of poverty and there needs to be advocacy to create a political will to address them.