L’ORA – A Living One Health Risk Assessment tool to assess the incursion risk of zoonotic diseases.

Abstract

Safeguarding global health is a moving target, with changes in climate and human activity raising new threats to public health, animal health and animal welfare. Decision support in the context of health management requires tools capable of making sense of large volumes of complex and multidisciplinary evidence. A One Health living risk assessment tool, L'ORA, was developed to assess the incursion risk for zoonotic and animal diseases using a One Health approach and allowing for automatic updates of the risk assessment. L'ORA estimates the incursion risk as the resultant of four steps: 1) Disease occurrence in source areas based on the distribution of diseases worldwide; 2) Rate of incursion based on the individuals or products moved from source areas to target areas and their probability of infection or contamination and contact with susceptible hosts in target areas; 3) Extent of disease spread in target areas, considering both domestic and wild host populations, vectors if the disease is vector-borne, and humans if the disease is zoonotic; and 4) Impact of the disease outbreak and concurrent control measures on public health, animal health and animal welfare, accounting for economic, societal, and environmental impacts. L'ORA is a decision support tool that was built as a generic tool comparing the relative risks of multiple diseases across multiple target areas. L'ORA monthly evaluates the incursion risk for each NUTS2 region in the European Union. Results can be used to identify areas of greater risk for each of the diseases to inform risk managers on where to focus attention and resources, and to inform, e.g., risk-based surveillance.