Interview: Marieta Braks

when you do not have it in the country. You can investigate all you want, but there is nothing to investigate. So with these new viruses you have to look. Physicians look things up in the encyclopaedia and they think, 'Come on, why have you not done this?' And we have to find out how to try and translate that. It would help.

"Also, if they ask us something, we have to really share our knowledge instead of stressing the things we don't know. Scientists are always very keen to discuss the things which are variable such as the tick population in a forest, but physicians don't care if it is 50 or 55 ticks, it is not zero!...We are developing a lot of knowledge now, but we only talk about the scientific, the variable things, and we should learn to lean back and be more informative...This is anecdotal but on one occasion a woman had a sand fly bite and was working on the sixth floor. The question was, do sand flies fly that high? Somebody gave the sand fly distribution in the country but that is not what was asked. They asked was she bitten there, should we do something? If you can answer maybe, but it is 99.9% sure she was not bitten there, then say it is probably not. Just give an answer instead of giving data. We know so much and you have to be able to make statements."

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## Interview: Hervé Zeller

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Hervé Zeller is currently senior expert, head of the Emerging and Vector-borne Disease programme, Office of the Chief Scientist, at the European Centre for Disease prevention and Control, Stockholm, Sweden, with special focus on surveillance, risk assessment and prevention of these diseases in the European Union and neighbouring countries. A pharmacist virologist from Lyon University, France (1976), he worked for more than 20 years within the International Pasteur Institute network as a virologist in several countries in Africa and the Americas, mostly on the diagnostics of viral emerging viral diseases: influenza, hepatitis, HIV and emerging and vector-borne viruses. He was involved in field work with multi-disciplinary teams on the eco-epidemiology of arboviral diseases (yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever, Rift valley fever, West Nile) and other zoonosis (hantavirus) mainly in Africa. He was director of the French National Reference Centre and WHO Collaborative Centre on arboviruses and viral haemorrhagic fever in the Pasteur Institute Paris/Lyon in France for 10 years (1998-2008) and has participated in several outbreak responses through the WHO Global Outbreak response network (GOARN) in Africa and Europe.

What are your impressions of the EDEN and EDENext projects and the transfer of this knowledge for Public Health?

**Hervé Zeller (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control):** "Out of these two projects funded by DG Research, EDENext was more focused on the biology of vectors and reservoirs and was a continuation of EDEN with a clear link to Public Health and Animal Health... The Public Health component was well integrated from the start in the team work on the field and we see that from the data presented at the end of the project. There were really good results which can be used for Public Health and Animal Health... What we have seen today [GERI 2015] is, I would say, a good example of integration of the results from research for assessing the risks, for models for prediction and so on, which is very important for the future."

Do EDENext and EDEN provide useful expertise for ECDC and other agencies?

**Hervé Zeller (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control):** "We are using, through EDENext, a large community of contacts; we have many experts involved in different projects under the ECDC, such as the VectorNet project with its network of medical and veterinary entomologists, and Public Health specialists. We have also the possibility to have access to the data which have been produced, and need to be sustained as discussed this morning [GERI 2015, see Sharing scientific data: 1+1=3]. Regarding data sharing I would mention

that some of the databases would be of main interest for animal or human health and should be shared with these agencies. We need to find the best ways to keep these data available for further use. On one hand a lot of work has been achieved, and there could be a potential risk of under-use of these results which should be avoided. On another hand we have in ECDC the E3 project, a European Environmental Epidemiology portal which links epidemiology and the environment. It hosts already the data from the project EDEN, and discussions should take place in the next months to establish which databases could be provided by the project and integrated in this portal in the future for use by the wider Research Human and Animal Health community. I think that the talks this morning [GERI 2015, see Sharing scientific data: 1+1=3] illustrated the need to sustain a network through an external project/portal to extend the network to a wider range of people for decision-making and scientific purposes."
EDEN and EDENext
partners

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cirad

* Agence Nationale de Sécurité Sanitaire de l'alimentation, de l'environnement et du travail - France²

* Université Aix-Marseille - France²

* Avia-Gis - Belgium¹,²

* "Béla Johan" National Centre for Epidemiology - Hungary¹

* Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - France¹,²

* Centre for Communicable Diseases Prevention and Control - Lithuania¹

* Charles University in Prague - Czech Republic²

* Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - Spain¹,²

* Danish Technical University - Denmark²

* Danube Delta National Institute for Research and Development - Romania¹,²

* Ege University Medical School - Turkey¹,²

* Entente Interdépartementale pour la Démoustockation du littoral méditerranéen - France¹,²

* Euro-Aegis - United Kingdom¹,²

* Faculty of Medicine, Medical University of Białystok - Poland¹

* Fondazione Edmund Mach (ex CEALP) - Italy¹,²

* Friedrich Loeffler Institut - Germany²

* Hacettepe University, Faculty of Science - Turkey¹,²

* ID-VET - France²

* Institut Agronomique et Vétérinaire Hassan II - Morocco¹

* Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - France¹,²

* Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - France¹,²

* Institut National d'Hygiène - Morocco¹

* Institut Pasteur - France¹,²

* Institut Pasteur d'Algérie - Algeria¹

* Institut Pasteur Dakar - Senegal¹

* Institut Sénégalais de Recherches Agricoles - Senegal¹,²

* Institut of Vertebrate Biology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic - Czech Republic¹,²

* Institute of Zoology, Slovak Academy of Sciences - Slovakia¹,²

* Institute of Public Health - Albania²

* Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade Nova de Lisboa - Portugal¹,²

* Instituto de Salud Carlos III - Spain¹,²

* Instituto Vasco de Investigacion y Desarrollo Agrario - Spain¹

* IRTA-Institute for Food and Agricultural Research and Technology (ex CRESA) - Spain²

* Istituto Superiore di Sanità - Italy¹,²

* Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell'Abruzzo e del Molise "G. Caporale" - Italy¹

* Kafkas Universitesi - Turkey²

* London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine - United Kingdom¹

* Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Germany¹,²

* National Center for Disease Control and Public Health - Georgia²

* National Institute for Health Development - Estonia¹

* National Institute of Research and Development for Microbiology and Immunology "Cantacuzino" - Romania¹,²

* Natural Environment Research Council - United Kingdom²

* Natural History Museum - United Kingdom¹

* Natural Resources Institute Finland (ex METLA) - Finland¹,²

* Public Health Agency - Latvia¹

* Research Center Borstel - Germany²

* Robert Koch Institut - Germany²

* Sine Institut GmbH - Germany²

* Szent Istvan University, Faculty of Veterinary Science - Hungary¹,²

* The Pirbright Institute (ex IAH) - United Kingdom

* Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza - Italy¹,²

* Universitat de Barcelona - Spain¹

* Universitat de Valencia - Spain¹

* Universitat de les Illes Balears - Spain²

* Université Catholique de Louvain - Belgium¹,²

* Université Libre de Bruxelles - Belgium²

* Université de Montpellier I - France¹

* University of Antwerp - Belgium¹,²

* University of Crete - Greece¹,²

* University of Helsinki - Finland¹

* University of Liverpool - United Kingdom¹

* University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Microbiology and Immunology - Slovenia¹

* University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna - Austria²

* University of Zurich - Switzerland²

* University of Oxford - United Kingdom¹,²

* University of Utrecht - Netherlands¹,²

* Uppsala University (ex Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control) - Sweden¹,²

* Veterinary Medical Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Science - Hungary¹

1 EDEN project

2 EDENext project