Empowering collaborations: highlights from West Nile Virus outbreaks regional workshop

One of the awarded activities of our call for Leadership Initiative has concluded! The "Regional Workshop on Multidisciplinary Field Outbreak Investigation," led by Dr. Wasfi Fares, biologist assistant at Institut Pasteur de Tunis, took place from September 11th to 15th, 2023. This workshop brought together professionals from various sectors in human virology and medical entomology from Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya.

The primary focus of this event was to collectively enhance our understanding of arboviruses outbreaks to establish standardized surveillance mechanisms. Utilizing the West Nile Virus model, the initiative aimed to strengthen regional monitoring network encompassing entomological surveillance and human case tracking. The workshop featured demonstrations of diagnostic tools deployed in the field. These included the Loop-Lamp isothermal amplification technique, and Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) with Nanopore MinION technology, along with automated data analysis tools.

This workshop also offered a unique opportunity of "Training by the trainees"; Wasfi, along with two other participants applied the knowledge gained from previous MediLabSecure training sessions, including the Mobile Lab training in Dakar and the Metagenomics Workshop in Paris, to impart these insights to their colleagues. Through this collaborative effort, the workshop fostered the adoption of best practices and worked toward enhanced regional capacity to address West Nile Virus outbreaks.