Animal Health
Challenge
Coping with infectious diseases whether at a global, national, farm, or animal level all comes down to figuring out how to assess and manage risk to make informed decisions. This requires understanding transmission dynamics, and evaluating how complex factors, from trade to diagnostic testing, affect the health of animals.
Organizing information and making sense of these health risks is not straightforward. The team at EpiX Analytics can help you gain insight into the probabilities of an imperfect, uncertain system.
Solution
Our team develops models and conducts analysis to get you the answers you need. First, we listen and research to acquire a deep understanding of your original question, exploring the basis of the query and learning about the populations and factors involved. We scope the system and keep our analysis and modeling as simple as possible while still addressing complexities, risks and uncertainties.
We are extremely skilled in probabilistic modeling and analytical methods—and our expertise enables us to distill your issue down to the important factors. We have learned how to hone our approach and figure out what really matters. Our real-world experience and applied mindset provide you with actionable answers.
Service Areas
Whether you are trying to assess the risk of disease in a population and evaluate how to mitigate it or want to identify risk factors associated with a disease, there are a myriad of elements to consider. We build quantitative models to predict disease introduction and/or spread, and to assess the impact of disease mitigation options. We also conduct advanced statistical analyses of data sets to provide valuable insight for herd health management.
The Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures allows countries to protect the health of their populations while ensuring that protective measures do not result in unnecessary barriers to international trade. As an independent party, we work with organizations and national entities to teach, review, or perform risk assessments that evaluate the validity of SPS measures
This disease is a global issue which has expanded in reach since the early 2000’s, to now include Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. With no vaccine or treatment yet available, prevention and control are vital. We work with government and pig production organizations in countries free of the disease on risk analysis to quantify the probability of ASF introduction, identify pathways of introduction and/or spread or areas at higher risk, and evaluate risk reduction measures. We also support affected countries with analyses to provide insight on effective disease management and control.
AMR is the epitome of One Health, where the health of people, animals, and the environment are deeply intertwined. Yet, much work remains to be done to quantify how the use of antibiotics results in resistance at the animal level. We apply statistical and systems dynamics models to analyze existing data, synthetize evidence on the subject, and provide quantitative measures of the link between AMR and AMU that acknowledge the uncertainty in the evidence. This is key to prioritize AMR mitigation strategies.
Diagnostic tests are essential tools in determining the health status of individual animals and populations. However, no test is perfect, leading to possible false results, which can make the effective use and accurate interpretation of diagnostic tests ‘tricky’. We apply probabilistic analyses to help you answer key questions regarding test performance, test selection, testing sample size, meaning of test results in an imperfect environment, and more.
Case Studies
Beef Risk Assessment
PRRSv and international trade
