The Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell'Abruzzo e del Molise in Zambia

Since 21^st November till 7^th December 2012 our engineers Patrizia Colangeli and Ercole Del Negro went to Zambia, at the Central Veterinary Research Institute (CVRI) in Lusaka, in order to set up an information system called SILAB and provide relevant training activities.

The SILAB is a Laboratory Information Management System, that IZSAM has developed and distributed in several African Countries as Namibia , Botswana and Zimbabwe. Zambia is the fourth Country in chronological order ad opting this system.

During a three weeks stay at the Zambia's Institute, Italian engineers worked on the establishment of local area network (LAN) and hardware configuration, necessary for the installation of this application, uploading/ checking, concerning the basic tables, and customisation of the software. Moreover, they trained the Acceptance Department personnel, the technical and managerial staff in the pilot units (Bacteriology, Parasitology and Virology Labs), as well as the "System Administrators " and the IT expert.

After the first week of work, the use of SILAB was extended to other three Sections. All the test reports, which were automatically generated by this application, were sent to the customers. Therefore, since 1^st January 2013, this is the unique operating system, and no paper records are produced.

For the first time, the SILAB support team was supported, during the training phase, by the veterinarian who acts as "SILAB Administrator" in the Central Veterinary Laboratory in Botswana. So, a "technical network among Laboratories in South Africa" started to be developed, based on the use of a common software (SILAB), which is also producing a common language and shared semantics.

The final aim will be to make them independent in managing this application system, supporting each other in order to ease the exchange of information among Laboratories and Institutions.