Decision Support Tool for One Health Risk Assessment

The One Health EJP COHESIVE project focuses on improving and implementing One Health risk analysis when dealing with zoonotic disease. Integrating these analyses and ensuring a One Health approach is adopted is possible and has been demonstrated in BSE outbreaks in the UK and Q-fever in The Netherlands. Creating these integrated approaches has long term advantages when responding to (re-) emerging zoonoses, including antimicrobial resistance and foodborne zoonoses. For this reason, the COHESIVE project aims to strengthen and improve structured collaboration between One Health domains in the area of risk-analysis for zoonoses in EU member states.

With this in mind, the project has created a decision-support tool for One Health risk assessment which can be found at https://cohesive.onehealthejp.eu/. The tool provides a broad introduction to the field of risk assessment, and a way of classifying different risk assessment approaches against criteria such as timescale, geographical location or level of expertise. It also provides One Health and sector- specific examples of these approaches for further research. This tool has been designed to be used by anyone across the globe, and would be of particular use to new risk assessors. It works best with a particular risk question in mind.

The tool aims to support risk assessors in several ways, including to facilitate more rapid risk assessments, to educate new risk assessors on the approaches available, to help prioritise a truly One Health approach to risk assessment, and also to act as a repository for examples of risk assessment. With its fifteen risk assessment approaches, accompanied by examples to demonstrate successful utilisations of each, this tool informs decision-making between risk assessment methods and teaches best practice.

Try it today, and find out more in the most recent COHESIVE publication: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771421000562?via%3Dihub