Assessing One Health biosecurity legislation: developing and piloting an assessment tool in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Strong whole-of-government biosecurity systems, including national legislative and regulatory frameworks, are essential components of a state’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to biological events that have the potential to harm human, animal, plant, and environmental health. These frameworks support biosecurity systems by ensuring successful implementation, sustainability, and alignment of diverse treaties and regulations that span the health security spectrum, encompassing all forms of threats. However, the extent to which countries have met their legislative obligations to these frameworks varies. Legislative assessments, therefore, provide an opportunity to assess and support compliance efforts, and can help prioritize the development and/or amendment of new legislation, regulations, and/or policies to improve compliance and in turn, strengthen biosecurity systems. While assessments on health security legislation and policies have been conducted, none have specifically focused on biosecurity legislation and regulatory frameworks from a One Health approach. Our team developed a tool to map existing national public, animal, plant, and environmental health biosecurity legislation, capacities and gaps to enable targeted efforts to strengthen national biosecurity systems. This paper describes the development of the tool and summarizes key observations and findings from its pilot implementation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in collaboration with in-country health and legal experts.