Decision-support for a global disease control effort

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) is a highly contagious disease that affects cloven-hooved animals such as cows, sheep, goats and pigs. It is a major global biosecurity threat that has significant ongoing impacts on agriculture and trade. openFMD Tools was created to bring the complexities of FMDV surveillance, data and decision making together in a convenient hub. Users can interactively query and visualise historical and recent FMD trends and generate customised epidemiological and genotyping reports through the portal interface.

Together with the multi-disciplinary research team from The Pirbright Institute we developed three highly customised tools to address the project goals to create epidemiological intelligence to support global and national disease control efforts. As part of this we consulted with The Pirbright Institute’s IT team to ensure the platform complies with all internal requirements.

An important part of the project was consulting stakeholders, such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations and contributing experts from the World Reference Laboratory networks, working to ensure the tools meet practical needs and are well supported within the user community.

FMDwatch integrates detailed FMD surveillance data detected, assessed and reported by both the WOAH/FAO FMD Laboratory Network and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) through the World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS) portal, providing an advanced tool to interactively explore the historical and current FMD epidemiological situation worldwide. FMDwatch provides a real-time monitoring tool of FMD events at different geographical levels thorugh an effective digital surveillance system that enhances early FMDV threat detection and assessment.

FMDtype is a tool that performs quality checks, annotation, genotyping, genetic sequence alignment and phylogenetic reconstruction of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) VP1 coding sequences. FMDtype assigns user uploaded sequences to the most-likely FMDV lineage out of all currently designated FMDV prototypes, reconstructs their phylogenetic placement and generates ad-hoc genotyping reports in PDF format.

PRAGMATIST is an interactive tool developed to assist risk managers to select which FMDV vaccine strains are most important to maintain in their antigen bank. This tool provides a transparent and accessible, evidence-based decision framework to evaluate available vaccine antigens that can be adopted based on current risks to country covered by the bank.