Roadmap for the research to underpin the development of control strategies for FMD

What are we trying to achieve and why? What is the problem we are trying to solve?

To assess the prevalence and cost of FMD at the country and global level.

What are the scientific and technological challenges (knowledge gaps needing to be addressed)?

• Assess the direct and indirect cost, and control cost of FMD outbreaks in different contexts.
  Measure whether efforts to control FMD are having a positive impact upon burden of disease in the different regional roadmaps.
• Use a standardised design and analysis to allow clearer estimation of the burden of disease and accurate comparison of that burden between different serosurveys.

What approaches could/should be taken to address the research question?

What else needs to be done before we can solve this need?

Adequate surveillance.

Existing knowledge including successes and failures

Although a disease of low overall mortality, FMD places a huge burden on both individual livestock keepers and national economies. As a collective body of work, FMD seroprevalence studies are undermined by a lack of consistent and rigorous sampling methods, and the outcome, seropositivity, has an uncertain period at risk. In a given setting, animals that have a longer period at risk are more likely to have been infected at some point, and unless this is adjusted for, estimates of incidence will be confounded