Nouvelle Approche dans l'étude su Cycle Naturel du Virus Ebola dans la Faune Sauve

## **One Health Community-Based Wildlife Mortality Surveillance for Ebola: Linking the Public Health and Conservation Sectors**

**Alain U. Ondzie1, Eeva Kuisma1, Sarah H. Olson2, K.N. Cameron2 , P.E. Reed2, Chris Walzer2 , W.B. Karesh3, M. Jeremiah Matson4, Trent Bushmaker4, Stephanie N. Seifert4, Robert J. Fischer4, Vincent J. Munster4 , Cynthia Goma-Nkoua5 , Jean-Vivien Mombouli5 , Dania M. Figueroa4, Morgane Cournarie1 , Marc-Joël Akongo1, and Serge D. Kaba1**

1Wildlife Conservation Society, Wildlife Health Program, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo 2Wildlife Conservation Society, Health Program, Bronx, NY, USA

<sup>3</sup> Health and Policy, Eco-health Alliance, New York, NY, USA

4Laboratory of Virology, Division of Intramural Research, National Institute of Allergy and

Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health, Hamilton, MT, USA

5Service d'Epidémiologie Moléculaire, Laboratoire National de Santé Publique, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo

Central Africa remains a high-risk Ebola virus (EBOV) region, but the Republic of the Congo (RoC), home to the largest remaining populations of great apes, has not had an epidemic since 2005. EBOV ecology is not fully understood, but infected wildlife and consumption of animal carcasses have been linked to human outbreaks, especially in the Congo Basin. Since 2005, our One Health community-based wildlife mortality surveillance for EBOV has partnered with the Congolese Ministry of Health to reach communities and protected areas in northern RoC where people and great apes have died from past Ebola virus disease outbreaks. The outreach and surveillance are designed as an intervention to prevent contact between humans and infected animals and as an early warning system to locate carcasses or diseased animals and enable rapid detection of EBOV epizootics. From 2008 to the present day, we visited a total of 390 villages in four departments in the north of the RoC. We delivered the educational message to a total of 10 373 villagers who frequently visit the forest to gather food. Many villages were revisited each year. We achieved specimen collection by training over 100 project staff on a safe sampling protocol and equipping geographically distributed bases with sampling kits. We established in-country diagnostics, including the recent deployment of a carcass-side EBOV testing, reduced diagnostic turnaround time to 50 minutes, and demonstrated the absence of EBOV in 90 carcasses.
