This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101000494.
Farmers, veterinarians and other animal health managers in the livestock and aquaculture sectors are currently missing information on the prevalence and burden of contagious animal diseases that are not regulated by the European Union.
The diseases are estimated to cause 10-15% reduction in performance efficiency of livestock farming, resulting in large financial losses and lower sustainability as well as affect animal welfare.
DECIDE, a five-year Horizon 2020 project, will develop data-driven decision support tools that offer robust and early signals of disease emergence and options for diagnostic confirmation. Moreover, options will be provided for controlling the disease along with their implications in terms of disease spread, economic burden and animal welfare.
This partnership garners expertise in veterinary epidemiology and diagnostics, data science, mechanistic and predictive modelling, economics, animal welfare and social sciences. The consortium can also count on ample access to data from national animal health agencies, providers of veterinary services or farm equipment suppliers. This multidisciplinary consortium brings together 19 partners from 11 European countries.
It has been a while since the DECIDE project team was able to meet fellow scientists and stakeholders in person – but with life picking back up, on-site meetings & conferences did too. Accordingly, members of the DECIDE consortium started to present the project at events in front of real people instead of computer screens.
In a virtual meeting that took place in April, a webinar organised by the COST Action SOUND control (Standardizing Output-based surveillance to control Non-regulated Diseases of cattle in the EU), Gerdien van Schaik (UU) presented the DECIDE project under the title: “The DECIDE project: a data-driven approach for decision support to better manage endemic diseases
