
Project
NGRA
Risk assessment (RA) is a valuable tool to support decision makers by providing an objective and transparent evaluation of health risks and its underlying causes at a particular point in time. RA provides risk managers with an estimate of the effectiveness of risk mitigation measures and supports policies to prevent infection of animals and people. NGRA makes high resolution typing and within strain level differentiation of pathogens possible. By doing this RA can also lead to the identification of “potential" genetic markers (e.g. mutations associated with virulence/pathogenicity, host adaptation) which can be the focus for surveillance.
A risk assessment (RA) is carried out to estimate the effectiveness of risk-mitigating measures and to support decision-making with the aim of preventing animal and human infections. The current RA uses data at animal, herd and zone/country level, as well as the genus/species of the pathogen. The variation within the species of the pathogen is therefore ignored. This can lead to an over or underestimation of the risk, for example the presence or absence of virulence genes can have a major effect on the effectiveness of the spread of a pathogen. This information about the variation within a pathogen can be obtained from the genomic sequence data. The generation of this data has grown enormously in recent years, but the RB models have not yet been adapted to fully utilize this wealth of data. That is why we want to work towards Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA), where RB is improved by integrating the sequence data into the models.