The project is being carried out by  OPERA Srl.

The purpose of the project is to provide EU Member States and non-EU countries with technical training on preparedness and management of food-borne outbreaks.

The training programme includes 10 workshops  addressed to participants from Competent Authorities from EU Member States, Candidate Countries, EFTA and EEAS countries and potential candidate countries.

Main topics to be addressed in the workshops, as clearly outlined in the TS, are:

• Outbreak/crisis preparedness and investigation: organisation of intersectoral preparedness exercises, development of outbreak management plan and crisis networks, setting up tracing investigation in practice;
• Organisation of rapid outbreak assessment;
• Outbreak and crisis management: standard operational procedures, use of EWRS, EPIS and RASFF and similar alert and reporting systems at national level, coordination, contingency plans;
• Elements of food- and waterborne disease (FWD) outbreaks: epidemiology, case definition, microbiology and food safety aspects;
• Practical application of analytical epidemiological methods and other tools for food-borne investigation: surveillance systems, tracing back and forward investigations, cohort studies, case-control studies, role of molecular typing;
• Crisis communication, including communication during the uncertainty phase of an event and to major trade partners;
• The organisation of simulation exercises, including a complex tracing investigation of food and feed multinational incidents.

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Target participants

The workshop is intended for staff of competent authorities of the Member States and non-EU countries coming both from the public health and food safety area.

To facilitate the multidisciplinary collaboration, the Contractor will invite on each session a team of two participants coming from the public health authorities and the veterinary/food safety authorities of the same invited country.

Dissemination

The BTSF programme is based on the “train the trainers” approach, and for this reason dissemination of the received knowledge is fundamental for the trainings to have a greater impact.

Participants will be requested to commit themselves to disseminate the information received via different methods, i.e. informing colleagues about the information received at the training, distributing the training materials, preparing informative articles in the professional national or, if possible, in international journals, preparing presentations based on the training materials for the staff of national Competent Authorities or other disseminating methods which could be appropriate to share the information received via the BTSF training. During the course participants will be provided with a training package to be used as supporting dissemination material.