Collaboration project
The project consists of creating a Versatile Observatory of Emerging infectious diseases (VEO) that makes it possible to bring together high-quality information from which to develop early warning tools. The observatory will monitor emerging infectious diseases, as well as the emergence of bacterial resistance, in order to carry out a risk assessment.
The global changes of the last half century have produced an increase in emerging infectious diseases and a greater residence of bacteria in treatments, altering the dynamics of these diseases and challenging current health infrastructures. Rapid identification is essential to reduce the health impact and costs of these outbreaks.
To anticipate a serious public health problem caused by these emerging infectious diseases, the VEO team is made up of data scientists, technology experts, infectious disease specialists, sociologists and citizen science experts. The objective is to take advantage of the digital revolution and combine it with the use of new technologies and innovative analyzes for early detection of risks.
The majority of emerging infectious diseases have an animal origin, so to be able to foresee threats it is necessary to revolutionize the ways of detecting them, both in humans and in animals, wild fauna, domestic animals and commensal animals that inhabit our diseases. cities (rats, mosquitoes, etc.).
VEO has the vision of being able to revolutionize the detection and prediction of threats to human and animal health derived from global changes. This revolution involves creating interdisciplinary teams, versatile infrastructures and technologies, working with open code and data, combining very diverse data (Big data) and data mining techniques to analyze a large volume of information to deduce patterns and predict risks. . That is why the project has seven specific defined objectives.
Objectives 1 and 2 are to develop a data platform that allows the integration of very diverse data, the exchange between experts and data mining. Tools to support interdisciplinary collaboration and international teams that make up the VEO system. Objective 3 is to generate, update and validate inventories of genetic signatures associated with relevant pathogens, identify the relationship between genetic variations and the pathogenicity of a virus or bacteria in order to evaluate the risk based on genetic monitoring. Objective 4, integrate serological data from new antibody profiling technologies in the VEO database. Objective 5 will evaluate the VEO system in five specific scenarios to ensure that it meets the needs of users and assess the functionality of the techniques and tools developed. Objective 6 is to develop a commitment to the general needs when exploring data, emerging challenges, and seeking solutions. Finally, objective 7 is to develop a guide to the ethical, legal and social implications of collecting and integrating large amounts of epidemiological data, as well as the ethical and legal implications of health research aided by citizen science.
VEO has the vision of revolutionizing the detection and prediction of threats to human and animal health arising from global changes
One of the specific scenarios of objective 5 is that of mosquitoes that transmit diseases, led by the CEAB-CSIC with the Mosquito Alert project. Citizen science developed by Mosquito Alert will be used to provide real-time information on mosquito abundance and human-mosquito interactions, on the VEO platform. This information combined genetic data looking for pathogens in mosquito populations, detected human cases with diseases and other data pools will serve to alert about outbreak risks, as well as guide sampling and control measures.
The study will address the expansion of invasive mosquitoes of the Aedes genus (Aedes albopictus, Aedes japonicus, Aedes koreicus, Aedes aegypti) that can transmit diseases such as dengue, Zika, chikingunya or yellow fever. The Mosquito Alert app will also be modified to include the common mosquito (Culex pipiens) to follow and study zoonotic viruses that affect animals and can jump to humans, such as West Nile fever or the Usutu virus, which are increasingly common. in Europe.
