23 July 2018 – The WHO country office for Egypt, in collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, have been supporting the Ministry of Health and Population in Egypt to conduct regional training on snail control.
The training programme aimed at exchanging experiences and ideas, as well as conducting capacity-building of team members from 3 countries on schistosomiasis elimination. Participants from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen joined a 10-day condensed training programme at the national schistosomiasis training centre in Ismailia, Egypt.
The hands-on training included schistosomiais elimination, laboratory skills and snail control field work. As part of their training trainees visited mass drug administration activities at the central administration of the schistosoma control department in the Ministry.
The training provided the technical teams with the necessary knowledge based on successful experiences and good practices, as well as the optimistic plan for eliminating schistosomiasis from Egypt.
WHO supported the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population to develop, operationalize and launch its national schistosomiasis elimination action plan. The national plan aims at eliminating schistosomiasis by 2020.