Risk assessment of exotic disease incursion and spread

Abstract

This Technical Report describes the activities developed in the scope of the EU‐FORA Fellowship, within the work programme of risk assessment (RA) of exotic disease incursion and spread, developed at Wageningen Bioveterinary Research (WBVR). The programme focused on the work carried out in the Generic risk assessment for introduction of animal diseases (G‐RAID) project, which brings together a number of different generic RA tools from multiple European partners. The aim of the fellowship was to gain understanding of veterinary import risk assessment by using different RA tools and to learn how different algorithms can be used to calculate disease incursion risks. G‐RAID's tools cover a wide range of RA methodologies; from purely qualitative, to semi‐quantitative and fully stochastic quantitative methods, which allowed the fellow to understand a variety of algorithms used to produce the final risk estimate. The fellowship programme provided the fellow with the chance to learn in detail about how generic RAs are performed across Europe, understanding how to deal with the uncertainty and variability involved in RAs and the potential problems of data availability and reliability. The fellow made an inventory of publicly available databases on disease occurrence and international trade that could be used for import RA and assessed their quality and usefulness for the different generic RA tools. The programme also provided the fellow the opportunity to perform several import risk assessments using the RA tools of G‐RAID. She completed a RA on African swine fever using the MINTRISK model developed by WBVR. Furthermore, she assessed the risk of foot and mouth disease introduction using the Rapid Risk Assessment Tool (RRAT) model developed by WBVR and the COMPARE model developed by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). To this end, the fellow completed a short‐term visit to APHA, enabling her to have additional training in quantitative RA and to expand her professional network in this area.

A review of qualitative risk assessment in animal health: Suggestions for best practice

“…de Vos et al ( 58 ) compared generic risk models that can be applied to assess the incursion risk for multiple animal diseases. Of the seven tools assessed, four were semi-quantitative [RRAT ( 59 ), MINTRISK ( 60 ), IDM ( 61 ), and NORA ( 57 )] and one was qualitative [SVARRA ( 62 )]. All the tools were primarily based on the WOAH import RA framework ( 8 ).…”

“…They may also be used in cases where data of sufficient quantity or quality are limited, as they are less demanding in terms of resources and data ( 10 ). In situations when rapid decisions are required, such as in an outbreak situation, the speed of conducting a qualitative RA compared to a quantitative counterpart can also be advantageous ( 11 ).…”