Veterinarians Without Border / Veterinarians Sans Frontiers – Canada (VWB/VSF-Canada) is a charitable, humanitarian organization whose mission is to work with those in need to foster the health of animals, people, and the environments that sustain us. It welcomes anyone with animal-health related skills, including non-veterinarians as well as veterinarians, to become members.

VWB/VSF-Canada engages in activities around the world related to the health of farm animals (aquaculture and land-based), urban domestic animals, and wildlife, as well as public and ecosystem health.

To achieve its vision and mission VWB/VSF-Canada has done many studies and activities using the ecosystem health approach. Ecosystem Health or EcoHealth itself is a discipline that focuses on changes in the ecosystem and its effect to human health. EcoHealth studies changes that happen in the environment, whether physical, biological, social, or economy change, which influences human health.

Lately, many new emerging diseases such as SARS, Ebola virus, Nipah virus, Avian Influenza, and Hanta virus have emerged due to ecosystem change resulting form the greed of humans. These new emerging diseases have even caused high mortality rates in human and not many therapies are effective to prevent and treat them. Therefore it is a threat to the health of mankind.

To comprehensively study and understand how ecosystem change could cause negative impacts to human health, therefore the ecohealth approach involves experts in physics, veterinarians, ecologists, economists, sociologists, etc. Ecohealth strives to give innovative and practical solutions to minimize or eliminate negative effects of ecosystem change in order to safeguard and improve the health of humans.

To develop ecohealth programs and broaden its information network in Southeast Asia region, VWB/VSF-Canada has invited various stakeholders from several Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Philippines to attend the “Ecosystem Health and Sustainable Livestock Agriculture” Workshop on March 8 to 10, 2008, in Bangkok, Thailand. Participants of this workshop were from various disciplines, such as veterinarians, doctors, economists, government sociologists, university academicians, NGOs, etc. In this workshop, Albertus Teguh Muljono, DVM, and Denny W Lukman, DVM, MSi, PhD from CIVAS were also invited by VWB/VSF-Canada to represent Indonesia.

In the first day of workshop, participants were given plenty of information about ecohealth from Dr. David Waltner-Toews, president of VWB/VSF-Canada. It was then followed by a presentation from Sri Lanka about their experience in implementing the ecohealth approach in their country. Another presentation was given by Dr. Jeffrey Davidson from VWB/VSF-Canada who presented about “Ecohealth and Sustainable Aquaculture”. Then Dr. David Hall ended the day by presenting “Economic Perspectives on Ecohealth Approaches”.

In the next two days, participants were asked to identify existing challenges in their own respective countries and then further discuss whether the conditions and challenges present could be solved through ecohealth approaches. Several issues such as avian influenza and other zoonotic disease, and improvement of poultry market conditions were considered as key issues that could and should be handled using ecohealth approaches.

This workshop is expected to be a starting point for further development of the ecohealth information and activity network in Southeast Asia region. And each participant, as they return to their countries, is expected to start implementing the ecohealth approach in their own work environment and build an ecohealth network within their country. (atm)