Veterinary Services Division Protecting Human And Animal Health

The Veterinary Services Division (VSD) in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is committed to its mandate to safeguard human and animal health by ensuring that animals for consumption are free of disease and contaminants.

Speaking in a recent interview with JIS News, Chief Veterinarian, Dr. Osbil Watson, said that a lot of the division’s activities are focused on disease surveillance.

 “We are ensuring that we keep our animal population as disease-free as possible and that products of animal origin for human consumption meet our high standards, are safe for consumers, free of residue of antibiotic pesticide and of course, free of contamination that could harm persons,” he said.

Dr. Watson told JIS News that the division works collaboratively with other agencies, groups, and organisations to carry out its mandate. “We work with the Ministry of Health [and Wellness], public health departments, the Bureau of Standards Jamaica and with the Plant Quarantine Division. We also work with our farmers, and with all the regulatory authorities that are engaged in ensuring that our people get safe food to eat, and that our people are kept as safe as possible from infectious diseases, particularly zoonotic diseases,” he pointed out.

Zoonotic diseases are those spread between animals and people and are a growing concern globally because of their new and unpredictable nature. These diseases also have the ability to emerge anywhere and spread rapidly.

Dr. Watson said the division has always stressed the importance of safeguarding health at the level of the animal-human-environment interface.

“The phenomenon then, of emerging and re-emerging diseases is real. When you talk about Ebola, chikungunya, Zika, tuberculosis, rabies, these are diseases which existed a long time ago, albeit a lot of them existed in the wild, among wild animals. What seemed to transpire over the years is that the level of human activity in relation to access to forest and wildlife [increased],” he pointed out.

Dr. Watson contended that the existing global, illegal trade in exotic animals has contributed to the spread of these diseases.

 “That would then expose our human populations to some of these devastating diseases. This is why it is important that we take the necessary steps to safeguard, as much as possible, our human population. This means, at the level of the human animal interface, to do the necessary diagnostics and disease surveillance,” he said. 

“This is so that we can have early warning systems to pick up any disease or evidence of disease that could harm our human population or get into our domestic animal production to actually destroy our livelihood and to cause loss of life among humans and animals,” he added.

Jamaica has not had many incidents of fatal or aggressive zoonotic diseases, and Dr. Watson said that deadly viral diseases, like rabies, have not been seen in the island.