On the 16th June 2010 a meeting was held at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie, Legnaro, Italy to discuss international cooperation and assistance in the management of transboundary infectious diseases of animals. A list of recommendations for consideration when planning or implementing future training activities were drawn up.

A copy of these recommendations is available here.

In February 2010, Dr Sead Hadziabdic of the Veterinary Faculty of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina was hosted at the Dutch National Reference Laboratory in Leylstad for a two week training course in Avian influenza diagnostics.

A workshop on Avian influenza was held at the National Veterinary Research Institute (NVRI), Vom, Plateau State, Nigeria from the 2nd to 5th of November, 2009. Participants from Benin (1), Burkina faso (1), Burundi (1), Cameroon (1), DR Congo (1), Ethiopia(1), Kenya (2), Mali (1), Mozambique (1), Namibia (1), Nigeria (5), Senegal (1), Sudan (2), Zambia (1) and two FAO representatives attended. Lectures were given by experts from FLUTRAIN Consortium Institutes (e.g. IZSVe, VLA, CVI, VAR, DTU and SVA)

A workshop on AIV sequencing, phylogeny and bioinformatics was held at the OIE Collaborating Centre for biotechnology-based diagnosis of infectious diseases in veterinary medicine (http://www.sva.se/oie-cc) at the National Veterinary Institute (SVA) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden, between May 26th-29th.

The workshop was organized as part of the EU funded project ConFluTech and was co-financed by FLUTRAIN. Fifteen colleagues from 12 countries including Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Macedonia, Namibia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and Rumania participated in this very focused and hands-on workshop.

Between April 19th-29th 2009, a group of Swedish experts, within the FLUTRAIN consortium, conducted a laboratory training at the Central Veterinary Laboratory (CVL) in Teko, Sierra Leone, financed by the Swedish Reference Group for Animal Health in collaboration with FLUTRAIN, FAO and IAEA. The training, with participants from the CVL and from Njala University focused on the diagnosis of avian influenza, Newcastle disease and PPR, as well as basic bacteriological techniques, and included lectures and practical hands-on exercises.



The group of participants together with the head of the CVL in Teko, Dr M. Barrie, in front of the main laboratory building.

Following a request to FLUTRAIN, an expert in Real-Time PCR is being sent by P1 to the Laboratoire National Delevage et de Recherches Veterinaire (LNERV), Dakar, Senegal from the 26th to the 30th of January, 2009.

From the 26th to the 28th of January 2009 FLUTRAIN partners IZSVe and UNIPD will be hosting the second Workshop on "Laboratory Training in Diagnosis of Avian influenza" funded by the EU Directorate General for Health and Consumers (DG-SANCO).

Four participants each from Bangladesh, India, Morocco, Egypt and the Philippines attended the Workshop.

In December 2008, IZSVe hosted Mamoona Chaudry, a Pakistani veterinarian and PhD student at the School of Veterinary Studies, Edinburgh, Scotland for a two week training course in classical and molecular diagnostic techniques for AI.

In collaboration with FAO, four experts from FLUTRAIN partner institutes (IZSVe, CVI, VAR and SVA) undertook assessments of AI diagnostic laboratories in Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia during the first week of December, 2008. The information gathered will help in the the selection of a second AI diagnostic laboratory for the region and will also allow FLUTRAIN to provide ad hoc training to these laboratories.

In collaboration with the EU Network of Excellence (EPIZONE) a Workshop on "Sequencing of the Avian influenza genomes" was held on the 27th to the 31st of October, 2008 at IZSVe. Two particpants from NVRI, Pulawy, Poland and one from the National Diagnostic and Research Veterinary Medical Institute, Varna, BULGARIA attended.