The impact of environment on infectious diseases is well–known. It can affect pathogen abundance, survival, and virulence, host susceptibility to infection as well as human behaviour.

Our Aim is: to develop a general tool to assess the risk of infectious diseases (in particular zoonosis) when we have information of relevant environmental factors.

Accordingly, we are interested in the following over-arching questions:
• Can we identify and access “big data” – existing information that can be interrogated to yield new evidence for decision-making in One Health? The generation of new analytical approaches would provide tools that could then be adapted to specific animal or human health issues where environment plays a key role in aetiology.
• Can we identify the key environmental processes triggering and propagating zoonoses?
• Can we disentangle the role of animal, human (including socio-economic factors) and environmental factors in zoonoses?
• Can we identify the delay between variations in the environment (e.g. increase in the temperature or behavioural change) and the occurrence of a foodborne outbreak?
• How can we quantify their impact on Animal and Public Health?

As proof of concept, we will use Salmonella, for which we have plenty of data from Public Health England (PHE). This case study will be used to validate our approach (e.g. Leptospirosis).