Burden of Animal Disease at a global, regional and national level: a new analytics platform providing information to guide animal health decision-makers
GBADs will build a knowledge engine that will acquire and process existing data to provide estimates of the animal disease burden based on production loss, expenditure and trade. Animal disease burden information will be disaggregated over time, by geographical region (regions and countries) and by species and production systems. Metrics will be presented to enable benchmarking between geographies and production systems using a comparable ratio (burden/economic value). Information on the burden borne by different socio-economic groups of people, in particular smallholders and women, will also be featured through linking with information generated in the livestock sector analyses. Wherever possible, GBADs will also provide the ability and technical support, to drill down into the core data and the code of the models used to generate this information. This facility will serve two purposes: transparency and flexibility for users to derive additional information.
GBADs will provide a strategic interface to key organisations that produce human health data in relevant domains, such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Such an interface will strengthen human disease burden estimation as data on animal densities, production systems and disease are key inputs into these models. From the animal health side, GBADs will draw on OIE-WAHIS and from the data being captured and collated by SEBI and GALVmed.
GBADs will provide information that will enrich a process which will include a range of political, social and economic variables in a multicriteria decision-making framework. An added value of this process will be to provide information that helps to refine and improve heuristics that decision-makers rely on and provide support in political environments. The intention will be to allow decisions to be made on a rational rather than intuitive basis. GBADs will not advocate for intervention where the greatest burdens lie, but provide the information necessary for determining which interventions will have the greatest impact to mitigate against significant disease burdens. This will result in a comprehensive and evidence-based system to allow decision-makers and investors to identify where challenges lie, where progress has been made and should increase the probability of technical and commercial success. It will also be used to track progress of new intervention programs by setting real benchmarks at the start of these initiatives.