An international disease monitoring tool to estimate the likelihood of entry of animal health hazards from legal trade of live animals and products of animal origin imported from different countries (IDM+)

Abstract

Trade of live animals and products of animal origin (POAO) carries an inherent risk of spreading pathogens. As such, it is essential for any country to have effective early detection and/or horizon scanning systems in place to be aware of the potential entry risks of pathogens. To this end, the United Kingdom has a number of horizon scanning and risk assessment tools to carry out international disease monitoring. Here we develop these ideas further in a generic, semi-quantitative risk assessment tool; the International Disease Monitoring Plus (IDM+) tool.

The IDM+ tool utilises publicly available data on the presence of terrestrial animal health pathogens and volumes of commodities imported into Great Britain (GB) from multiple trading partners. Identifying the likelihood of a pathogen arriving at the GB border involved >550 individual commodity types, 125 pathogens and 55 countries. It also includes expert opinion on country and commodity specific mitigation measures, to derive a likelihood of entry score for each country, commodity, and pathogen combination.

This paper presents an example of the model used to assess commodities being imported into GB. However, the principle could be applied to any country accepting imports of live animals or POAO.

The IDM+ model considers changes in global pathogen distribution and trade volumes to provide ongoing and rapid appraisal of the likelihood of entry for different commodities, countries, and pathogens. It is designed to be quick to run with a largely automated process, further enabling rapid updates with new disease and trade source and volume data. The model can present results with and without trade volume weighting and with different likelihoods. When a specific import disease risk is identified to be of concern, carrying out a comprehensive import risk analysis is still recommended. However, this model is a valuable tool to provide a holistic overview and comparison of the likelihood of entry to GB of a large number of potential threats to animal health. It can be utilised in time-constrained environments and when limited data are available. The results can be of direct use for a variety of purposes, including, but not limited to, prioritisation of border inspections and in-country audits, rapid output generation for emergency outbreak assessments and/or assessing risk from specific imported consignments.