Establishment and implementation of the West African biorisk management network: A progress report of the West African Health Organization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction In response to persistent gaps in Biorisk Management (BRM) implementation in West Africa, a unified effort among biosafety and biosecurity (B&B) stakeholders led to the creation of the WABNet. Coordinated by WAHO, WABNet brings together representatives from all 15 ECOWAS Member States, alongside partners such as GFA, Global Affairs Canada, IFBA, Africa CDC, WHO AFRO, ASLM, Fondation Mérieux, and others. Its mission is to build and sustain regional capacities for the safe and secure handling of high-consequence pathogens. Methods WABNet’s establishment was guided by a series of stakeholder consultations, resulting in the formation of a Technical Working Group and the development of a five-year strategic plan. Regional workshops, involving representatives from all ECOWAS countries and partner institutions, were held to define strategic objectives and strengthen BRM. Training sessions and IFBA certification workshops in BRM and Biological Waste Management (BWM) were conducted in partnership with Africa CDC, aiming to develop a skilled and certified B&B workforce across the region. Results Formally launched in 2021 during an online workshop, WABNet’s five-year strategic plan and governance manual were technically validated in 2023. Since then, 70 professionals from both human and veterinary sectors across 15 countries have been trained and certified in BRM — including in eight countries that previously had no trained personnel. In BWM, the number of IFBA-certified professionals has increased from 2 to 36 across 11 countries. Furthermore, in addition to the five existing biosafety associations in the region, two new associations have recently been established. Conclusion The growing cadre of certified professionals is now positioned to cascade training and reinforce biosafety practices at national and subnational levels, supporting laboratories in aligning with international standards. The establishment and expansion of national B&B associations will also enhance advocacy, intersectoral collaboration, and policy engagement with relevant ministries across the ECOWAS region.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".