Location: Foreign Animal Disease Research
Project Number: 3022-32000-063-033-I
Project Type: Interagency Reimbursable Agreement
Start Date: Jul 1, 2022
End Date: Jun 30, 2027
Objective:
The current African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) outbreak on Hispaniola has increased the urgency for ASF preparedness which includes disease modeling, risk assessments and surveillance design to support emergency planning efforts. The CEAH Transboundary Animal Disease Analytics group has extensive experience in designing and implementing targeted epidemiologic studies during outbreaks to provide scientific support for policy decisions. ARS, PIADC will provide subject matter expertise on ASFV, filling knowledge gaps in basic and applied research, to develop high priorty research needs to support ASF prevention, control or eradication. Data collected during the project will expand epidemiological analytical capacity at ARS, PIADC further supporting project goals.
Specific objectives include:
1. Development of cost/benefit matrix for identified research needs.
2. Preliminary data collection of relevant epidemiologic data.
Approach:
1. A series of initial meetings will lay out the goals and expectations for this work. Participants will become familiar with the global gap analysis and research summary completed by the Global African Swine Fever Research Alliance (GARA), to develop a list of high priority research needs to support ASF prevention, control, or eradication activities within their purview.
Subsequent meetings will allow participants to share their list of high-priority research needs with the group (or relevant sub-group), and using the framework established by GARA, participants will work together to aggregate and organize research needs, articulate benefits, and estimate costs/feasibility for completing the work.
Research prioritizations will then be established and a final report produced.
2. CEAH and ARS, PIADC will acquire preliminary epidemiologic data from ASF-affected Caribbean countries in order to assess data quality and availability for future studies. Examples of possible source data to collect include daily mortality records on healthy and ASF-affected farms of various sizes, dates of onset of clinical signs, dates of disease reporting or diagnosis, and location of affected farms.
