Theme 7 “Risk Assessment”

Theme leaders: Dr Louise Kelly, Veterinary Laboratories Agency, United Kingdom.
                          Dr Franz Conraths, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institute, Germany.

Assessing the risk of introduction of an epizootic disease in Europe, and its potential consequences, should be an integral part of any surveillance programme. Despite the availability of the OIE guidelines, there remain differences in the approaches used by organisations, and different countries within Europe, when undertaking risk assessments. In addition, criteria for determining whether or not data are appropriate for risk assessments do not exist. EPIZONE focuses on advancing the discipline of risk assessment through the standardisation of methods and the collection of appropriate data.

Work Package 7.1: Standardisation of import risk assessment
Work Package 7.2: European online database on epizootic diseases as an early warning system
Work Package 7.3: Decision support system for CSF
Work Package 7.4: Impact of environmental effects on the risk of introduction of epizootic diseases in Europe:Identification and Prioritisation

What is going on in the EPIZONE network in the field of Risk Assessment

·          To assess the need for standardization of animal and animal product import risk assessments, existing assessments are reviewed and characterized using a template that was jointly developed by the EPIZONE participants. The quality of the risk assessments was quantitatively rated based on risk assessment peer review and quality audit guidelines.
The results will help to improve and standardize the format of risk assessments and to bring the guidelines for preparing risk assessments into accord with the needs of the authorities that ask for risk assessments (WP 7. 1).

·          A European Online Data Base on Epizootic Diseases is build using a standard data set defined by the partners of the work package. The partners succeeded in developing a way to retrieve surveillance data (diagnostic results) for diseased and non-diseased animals from existing national data bases and to  link the information on the pathogens isolated from cases to sequence data bases. They will incorporate all data into a geographic information system (WP 7. 2).

·          A technical aid is evaluated that helps to assess the risk that classical swine fever is present in a herd. The results represent a big step forward towards to feeding an electronic tool with the field data required to detect classical swine fever in affected farms in different countries (WP 7. 3).

·          Experts are consulted to identify and prioritize potential disease threats to Europe as a result of changing environments. An expert opinion workshop was held where a questionnaire based on a qualitative risk assessment framework was used to obtain data to assess the impact of climate change on the risks of incursion of vector-borne livestock viruses into the EU. The results of the expert opinion workshop allow predictions on emerging animal diseases in the next decades (WP 7. 4).