COHESIVE workshop
APHA (Animal and Plant Health Agency in New Haw, U.K.) hosted the first workshop for the One Health European Joint Program funded COHESIVE Project. The COHESIVE project (One-Health Structures in Europe) started in Jan 2018. This workshop was a combined Inventory and Ambitions workshop on ‘One Health collaboration dealing with new and (re)emerging zoonoses’ with a workshop on ‘Data platforms to facilitate risk analysis and outbreak control’.
Group picture around the Christmas tree, Day 2
The workshop was divided in plenary sessions for both workshops and interactive sessions. In the first plenary session, Valentina Rizzi from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) presented an overview of foodborne pathogens in Europe, followed by a series of inspirational talks from scientists that are currently working in One Health and the organisational structures that have been set up in each country, showing different approaches.
A separate stream of the workshop was devoted to one of the work packages that is focused on data platforms to facilitate risk analysis and outbreak management. This stream started by looking that the systems that are already developed or in place across Europe for depositing data and the different types of data collected. The group then looked at how the different data repositories could be leveraged to add value by combining it with additional data collected within individual countries.
The rest of the workshop was mainly devoted to interactive sessions that were designed to inform the work packages of the COHESIVE project. These sessions included; identifying barriers that obstruct organisations working together, dilemmas encountered when data sharing (presented by colleagues from the COMPARE project), the new European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) event and threat management system (presented by Karin Johansson), the EFSA national reference laboratory network, development of guidelines for effective One Health collaborations and the design of a structured decision making tool to support risk assessment.
There was a lot of lively debate that highlighted some of the common problems that many different countries are experiencing. The discussions will be used as input for further developments within COHESIVE.
-Kitty Maassen
