Item 6. Review of support required to FMD laboratories for quality assurance

Item 9. Developments in FMD control decision support systems

Mark Bronsvoort presented a paper on decision support systems (Appendix 21). Decision making is becoming more difficult and complex with increasing availability of information and increasing demands from stakeholders and the general public to get every decision right. Decision support systems (DSS), which are usually computer based, offer the ability to manage large amounts of data and produce descriptive summary reports. Incorporation of mathematical models, GIS and economic models has greatly increased the potential to use these systems in planning for epidemics, risk mapping and resource allocation as well as exploring different strategies such as stamping out, vaccination and combinations of these.

The use of mathematical models during outbreaks to predict spread has proved more controversial. Some comparisons are given between the competing models and attention is drawn to the new model by ‘Risk Solutions’, which as well as being explicitly spatial also includes a novel intra-herd spread component.

Imperial Edinburgh/ Cambridge Interspread ExoDis (Risk Solutions) No. parameters few few many Some Spatially explicit Different species Airborne spread Different transmission mechanisms Intra-herd transmission dynamics Logistic/resources Vaccination strategies Conclusion

1. These DSSs have a very important role in many areas of decision making including risk assessments, contingency planning, identifying high-risk farms or dealers. However, it should be emphasised that they are support systems and that mathematical models in particular should be interpreted with great care as many of the assumptions are not explicit and the output can appear very seductive without making any of the uncertainty explicit.

Recommendations

1. Efforts should be made to combine trade and animal movement data across the EU with data on the global occurrence of FMD and to incorporate this information in risk assessment systems to allow rapid and consistent decision making. 2. Effort should be made to identify gaps in knowledge where models could be usefully applied such as in the area of transmission of infection and different sizes of vaccination zone to compare likely costs and resource requirements. 3. Efforts need to be made to assess the epidemic and economic models particularly in the light of the new Risk Solution model and identify any data sets that might be appropriate to validate and understand how these models might be better used in epidemic planning and during outbreaks.