Leticia Lin, Private consultant

Matty Perez, Ministery of Agriculture of the Dominican Republic

Dr. Silvia Kreindel, ASF Incident Commander USDA APHIS

Dr. Silvia Kreindel is the On –Scene Incident Commander for the U.S. African Swine Fever (ASF) response for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (DR).  Her responsibilities relate to all aspects of the ASF response including development of incident objectives and overall management of the incident.

In her previous position, Dr Kreindel worked as the APHIS Director for China and Mongolia. In this capacity, she managed one of the most important APHIS portfolios on agricultural and livestock market issues. Silvia comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)-Animal Health Division where she worked as the USDA/ Veterinary Services loan expert on risk analysis and epidemiology. In that capacity, she provided epidemiological analysis on suspect and confirmed outbreaks of transboundary animal diseases (TADs) and other high-impact diseases of uncertain nature, and their impact on food security and food safety.

Dr.  Kreindel has worked extensively throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. During her time at FAO, she led several initiatives for the control of transboundary animal diseases, including the Global Early Warning System (GLEWS). She published several TADs risk assessments, including the evaluation of the presence of new Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) serotypes in the African and Asian region; Avian Influenza (AI) H5N8 in Europe and Uganda; H5N1 in Middle East; Tilapia Virus in Africa, Asia, and America; and ASF in China. These analyses brought insights into risks and timely mitigation implementation, including predicting the appearance of ASF in a specific Chinese province, months before its first detection in Asia.

In her previous position, Silvia worked as a Senior Veterinarian for APHIS, Veterinary Services (VS), Regionalization and evaluation Services (RESI), analyzing animal disease status of exporting regions/countries to determine the risk of introducing livestock diseases into the United States. She has led many of the FMD, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), poultry, and swine diseases evaluations conducted by APHIS. Silvia has worked extensively on BSE and other prion diseases, and has played a key role in the BSE risk assessment conducted by Harvard University, as well as several other assessments on livestock products and commodities conducted by United States Government.

Dr Kreindel has been a member of the Global Framework of Transboundary Animal Diseases (GFTAs) WG on FMD, the World Health Organization (WHO/OIE/FAO) WG on Global Early Warning System (GLEWS), and the FAO Ad Hoc Group on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). She has also been a member of the Food and Drug Administration Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee between 2007 and 2012, and a member of the Canadian Prionet and Alberta Prion Institute ad hoc group on Chronic Wasting Disease. She received her Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and her Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the University of Massachusetts.

Alonso Steffani, Animal Health Officer- OIRSA DR