More than 80% of the global population lives in areas at risk of at least one major Vector-Borne Disease (VBD), with more than 700.000 deaths at a global scale (WHO, 2020). Mosquitoes are the protagonists of these vectors, transmitting pathogens to living beings with the most important being the Mosquito-Borne Diseases (MBDs) in Europe, namely West Nile Fever linked to Culex mosquitoes, Malaria linked to Anopheles mosquitoes and Chikungunya, Dengue and Zika linked to Aedes mosquitoes.
There is a constantly increasing need to innovate on how the continuous threat of MBDs are confronted, treated but most of all foreseen. This gave birth to the idea of EYWA, an integrated and contemporary EarlY Warning System (EWS) for MBD, which utilizes state-of-the-art AI/ML technologies and furthermore assimilates big EO data and geo-spatial information, embodying a complete, adaptable (scalable, and replicable) and operational European EWS. EYWA offers operational and pre-operational services for MBD outbreak (TRL >7 up to 9) in five countries (France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Serbia).
Under the e-shape pilot EYWA will seek to further augment the database of entomological data from non-European territories and evolve the suite of predictive models to include non-European areas where the climate conditions are very different to those found in Europe. This will help make the model predictions even more robust in the face of different inputs. Furthermore, there will be an assessment of the combined accuracy gain of the mosquito abundance model MAMOTH with the dynamic epidemiological model MIMESIS for the West Nile virus (WNV) risk.
All relevant communities that are involved in the control of Vector Borne Diseases:
Entomological data:
Mosquito abundance data as collected in-situ by partners
Epidemiological data:
Pathogen data that are collected in-situ
The final outcome of the pilot is two-fold. The first expected outcome is an enrichment of the EYWA project database with data from non-European sites, which will also be used to adapt, train and evaluate the epidemiological and entomological models. A second outcome is the investigation of the synergetic usage of the entomological and epidemiological models.
The e-shape project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 820852