MOOD: A project to improve the detection of emerging diseases
Coordinated from Montpellier by Renaud Lancelot, a researcher at CIRAD, the MOOD project has been bringing together 12 countries and 25 partners, including the University of Montpellier, since January. Its goal is to unify and improve global health surveillance in order to better combat emerging diseases.
The project should have been officially announced in Stockholm in the next few days... had it not been for the current crisis. With COVID-19 spreading across the globe, the importance of unified and effective global health monitoring has never seemed so urgent. And that is precisely the mission that the MOOD project has set itself, working to improve epidemic intelligence tools and services.
12 countries and 25 partners
Conducted as part of the European H2020 program by European and North American researchers, this project is coordinated by CIRAD, an expert in emerging diseases, most of which are of animal origin. It brings together 12 countries and 25 partners, includingthe ECDC (European Center for Disease Control),the WHO (World Health Organization), the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), and the OIE (World Organization for Animal Health).
The emergence of COVID-19 has, of course, greatly intensified exchanges between the members of this consortium and redirected the project towards this priority situation. Researchers have therefore been working on modeling the virus, as explained byInserm researcher Vittoria Colizza on the France Inter radio program "Le virus au carré"on Tuesday, March 24.
As Renaud Lancelot, Mood coordinator and researcher at CIRAD, points out:
“With the arrival of COVID-19, we are working twice as hard, while staying on track with the initial program.”
An initial program aimed at improving the detection of certain threats, such as the risk of a new pathogen being introduced into Europe, the risk of it spreading, or areas conducive to its spread.
Case studies in 5 countries
With a budget of €14 million over four years, researchers have developed a multi-stage plan. The first stage, already underway, involves conducting a case study in five countries with different socioeconomic, geographic, and climatic conditions. France, Italy, Spain, Finland, and Serbia were selected for this purpose. The objectivesare to analyze existing surveillance methods and epidemic intelligence systems and to assess new needs with the help of epidemic intelligence actors working in each country.
Currently, agents use two types of sources: "official" sources relayed by health agencies and "unofficial" sources such as internet forums, online newspaper articles, and social media. While the latter are very effective in detecting the emergence of new diseases, they also have their limitations, notably the huge amount of data to be processed. How can relevant information be selected from this mass of data? How can it be prioritized and interpreted to help detect new pathogens? These are the questions our European experts will be addressing.
Tools distributed in Europe and the South
The tools and services devised by MOOD researchers will then be developed and made available tothe ECDC and the project's public health agency partners, before being distributed across Europe and beyond, particularly in southern countries, and then shared at a reasonable cost and, where possible, as open source.
This scientific approach is essential at a time when, as current events brutally demonstrate, population growth, deforestation, and climate change—with the animal and human mobility that it generates—are greatly increasing the risk of new diseases emerging and spreading rapidly around the world.