About Us

Center for Emerging Issues

CEI is made up of four groups. The four groups include Business Intelligence(BI), Compensation, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Emerging Disease Tracking Analysis and Forcasting team (TAF).

Business Intelligence
The Business Intelligence group promotes innovative, systematic thinking
processes that identify broad change drivers that have the potential to shape Veterinary Service's future operating environment. The team uses scanning techniques and a variety of futuring tools such as scenario planning to describe plausible futures resulting from change drivers. Products are provided to VS decision makers and others to provide planning insights.

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Compensation

The compensation specialist supports VS programs by developing compensation guidelines and procedures, providing advice on particular indemnity situations, tracking livestock market developments, and providing training.

Spatial Epidemiology Team

CEAH's SET unit is a multidisciplinary team with expertise in many areas
including:

Spatial data infrastructure development
Global positioning systems
Remote sensing applications
Geodata networks
Geodatabase development and administration
Internet-based mapping services
Spatial modeling and analysis
Invasive species

The unit's specialized knowledge and geospatial development experience are used to provide expert guidance concerning GIS to all programs and operations within Veterinary Services (VS).

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Emerging Disease Tracking Analysis and Forecasting

Within the Center for Emerging Issues, the Emerging Disease Tracking, Analysis, and Forecasting team (TAF) works to identify potential emerging animal health issues, assess and analyze emerging animal health issues, and forecast disease emergence.

Towards accomplishing these functions, TAF also devotes resources to methods development, as well as finding and evaluating existing methods and data sources to apply to our work.

1) Identification of emerging animal health issues

The Center for Emerging Issues (CEI) acts as Veterinary Services’ (VS) “eyes and ears” outside the usual VS information channels. Within CEI, the Emerging Disease Tracking, Analysis, and Forecasting team (TAF) examines the external environment to identify emerging issues. Surveillance for emerging issues includes electronic scanning of information http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/ceah/ncahs/nsu/
outlook/issue3/pathfinder.pdf and text mining. Information gleaned from these sources may, upon filtering and analysis, indicate the emergence and/or spread of animal diseases in the US and abroad.

In order to routinely sort through the ever-increasing amount of information available on the internet, the CEI uses an electronic scanning methodology that is focused around software called Pathfinder. Pathfinder, originally developed for military use, has the ability to input large amounts of text and evaluate that text against complex pre-defined queries in order to extract articles of possible interest. Potential and confirmed disease outbreaks that are identified via electronic scanning are verified and tracked. They are also prioritized for further action, including follow-up, assessment, analysis, and communications.

2) assessment and analysis of emerging animal health issues

After CEI identifies a potential emerging animal health issue, assessment
http://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/ceah/ncahs/nsu/outlook/issue4/early
_assessment.pdf of the issue takes place. The first step of assessment is that analysts verify the authenticity and accurateness of the event and its reporting. Once details of the event have been verified, CEI may develop an analytic report.

An Impact Worksheet is one type of report produced by CEI. Impact Worksheets are designed to rapidly provide an assessment of risk, including critical trade information, to VS decision-makers in order to determine if the disease event has the potential to substantially affect the U.S. livestock industry.

The Emerging Disease Notice is another type of analytic report published by CEI. Emerging Disease Notices are published on emerging or reemerging animal diseases relevant to the U.S. agricultural community. The notices provide an in-depth overview of the epidemiology and ecology of a disease.

In addition to Impact Worksheets and Emerging Disease Notices, CEI produces analytic reports on various topics as issues emerge. Past projects and reports include:

3) Forecasting disease emergence

Current pathways analysis and risk assessment methodologies focus on predicting the likelihood of movement of known diseases to new locations. Attempts to date have focused on predicting the potential movement of vector-borne diseases by examining climate and ecological factors.

CEI’s document Overview of Predictive Infectious-Disease Modeling provides a discussion of important considerations for developing predictive infectious-disease models, a brief overview of model types and methodologies used to predict known and new infectious diseases, and it describes examples of early warning systems utilizing models.

To be able to predict emergence and movement of novel or evolving diseases, new approaches are needed from those discussed above. Numerous authors have suggested utilizing the biological, ecological, environmental, and societal factors associated with disease emergence as a way to improve prediction; however, interactions among these emergence factors can be complex making modeling difficult.

In attempts to address this issue, CEI has undertaken a project titled “ Methods Development: Creating a tool for assessing disease emergence potential in food fish aquaculture industries of the United States.”

4) Methods development for analysis, surveillance, data sources

TAF devotes resources towards the development of new methods for use in surveillance for emerging animal health issues and for analysis of identified issues. TAF also devotes resources towards identifying and evaluating existing methods and data sources to apply to our work.

Go to Taf home page