S&B orgnization contributed to the training workshop organized by the LMI PRESTO for students from the Lao Institute of Tropical Medicine and veterinarians from Laos, focusing on gastrointestinal parasites and the potential risks of their transmission between human and farm animals.
The students underwent laboratory training on coproscopic analysis methods for identifying gastrointestinal parasites. In the theoretical part of this workshop, our instructor gave lectures on the links between environmental disturbances and the emergence of zoonoses, as well as on the concepts of local etiologies in disease genesis. The students then developed a methodology for epidemiological health surveys that incorporates the participation of the communities concerned, in order to identify, among local practices involving contact with animals, those presenting potential risks of contamination between humans and animals and those that can help limit these risks.
The students put this theoretical knowledge into practice in the field at Nakai Nam Theun National Park, conducting a preliminary study based on a participatory approach with two village communities, focusing on potential transmission of parasites between farm animals (pigs, buffaloes) and humans. Health surveys were conducted and stool samples collected. Back in the laboratory, the students were then able to perform parasitological analyses of the collected samples.
These studies are being conducted in the context of a significant environmental disturbance linked to the construction of a hydroelectric dam which has drastically reduced the habitat of Laos’s largest population of wild elephants, causing these animals to move closer to inhabited areas, where they frequent the same waterholes used by domestic buffaloes, creating a risk of cross-transmission of intestinal parasites between humans, buffaloes, and elephants.