Epidemiological studies assessing disease prevalence are critically important to both the identification and control of pathogens in humans and animals (including zoonosis and food borne outbreaks). However, countries typically collect data in a way that is best suited for their specific needs, and non-standardized sampling strategies and diagnostic methods produce prevalence estimates that cannot be directly compared. Hence, the need for harmonization, which has been often highlighted in reports of relevant EU institutions, like the ECDC and EFSA. Despite the availability of appropriate statistical methods – Bayesian Latent Class Models (BLCMs) – that adjust for the imperfect accuracy of the diagnostic process and produce comparable prevalence estimates, the number of research studies and scientific reports that use them is small compared to the number of instances that use of such methods would have been optimal.
Project funding:
COST actions
Project results:
Action publications:
1. Diagnostic Accuracy Estimates for COVID-19 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction and Lateral Flow Immunoassay Tests With Bayesian Latent-Class Models. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwab093
2. Bayesian latent class models to estimate diagnostic test accuracies of COVID?19 tests. doi:10.1002/jmv.26405
3. The Epidemic Volatility Index: an early warning tool for epidemics. doi:10.22541/au.161918947.77588494/v2
4. Diagnostic Accuracy Estimates for COVID-19 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction and Lateral Flow Immunoassay Tests With Bayesian Latent-Class Models. doi:10.1093/aje/kwab093
5. Examples of proper reporting for evaluation (Stage 2 validation) of diagnostic tests for diseases listed by the World Organisation for Animal Health. doi:10.20506/rst.40.1.3225
6. tPRiors: A tool for prior elicitation and obtaining posterior distributions of true disease prevalence. doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1019762/v1
Period of project implementation: 2019-10-23 - 2024-04-24
Project partners: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic
