Animal health and emerging diseases
Increased global trade, climate change, urbanization, the weakness of many public health systems, and increasingly intensified animal production are all factors in the emergence of animal and zoonotic diseases. Such diseases have major economic and sanitary consequences. They affect farmers' incomes and may have serious repercussions on human health.
How can diseases such as avian influenza, bluetongue or trypanosomiasis appear, be transmitted, and spread?
- Assessing the genetic diversity of pathogens, vectors and hosts; developing new vaccination strategies.
- Understanding the functional determinism of the genetic variability of protective immune responses.
- Identifying genetic and genomic, biological and ecological components and host-vector-pathogen relations for certain model diseases: bluetongue, heartwater, African swine fever, and human and animal African trypanosomiases.
- Studying populations so as to define and quantify risk and emergence factors, by combining quantitative epidemiology, ecology and health geography.
What models can we use to build disease surveillance and control strategies?
- Developing dynamic models of disease occurrence and spread.
- Assessing surveillance and control strategies and their ecological, economic and social consequences.
Update date: 24/11/2009