A Versatile Emerging infectious disease Observatory (VEO) will be created for the generation and distribution of high-quality actionable information for evidence-based early warning, risk assessment and monitoring of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
This is an iterative process between data science and technology experts, disease experts, social scientists, and citizen scientists. The platform will support mining, sharing, integration, presentation and analysis of traditional and novel data sources, integrating both publicly available and confidential data.
VEO will be (co)designed and tested through five scenarios, reflecting main pathways of disease emergence, to attune developments to the needs of its intended users, and obtain proof-of-principle of utility, including ethical, legal and social implications.
The digital revolution coupled with data science, and the use of breakthrough multi-analyte technologies, offers great opportunities for infectious disease detection.
EIDs and AMR are increasing due to global changes that have a fundamental impact on the dynamics of infectious diseases, challenging the existing global health infrastructure and organization. Rapid identification is essential to reduce the impact and costs of outbreaks.
As a major part of EID and AMR comes from animals, a true shift in ability to detect would come from a deep understanding of the factors that drive their emergence, focusing on the complex interplay of environmental and human factors that drive disease dynamics, and using those insights to develop early warning systems.
- VEO will work from the vision that the detection and prediction of human and animal health threats arising from current and predicted global changes can be revolutionized.
- VEO will be truly interdisciplinary.
- VEO will be versatile.
- VEO will build on established infrastructures.
- VEO will be developed using FAIR principles for data re-use, open code, open data, in agreement with the Nagoya Protocol, GDPR and IHR.
- VEO will work with highly diverse data types.
- VEO will be built by an iterative process combining inputs from complementary perspectives from data science and technology, disease experts from public health and academia, and social science and society.