Jessica Enright, a senior lecturer, and computer scientist from the University of Glasgow, is leading the NordForsk funded research project DigiVet which focuses on the digitalisation of veterinary public health services.
“Livestock play a pivotal role in ensuring food security, encompassing safe, affordable, and disease-free food. Therefore, in this project we have investigated data about livestock and how they're raised and how they move. The United Kingdom, the Nordics and Estonia are quite advanced in terms of gathering data on these various topics. However, the countries are not always necessarily making best use of the data”, she begins and continues:
“Thus, this project was about discovering and mapping what data is gathered, who holds it, and very importantly: what are the differences across our partner nations. And this, to me, has been the most fascinating and important part of the project. Fundamentally, the project is about comparing and finding the best use of data across the countries. This means that we couldn't do it alone in every single country.”
Enright describes the work within DigiVet as very diverse, with several workshops where the researchers have met stakeholders and done a lot of social science-style work to find out how people use data, what it's used for, where it's stored, what the legal and ethical implications of it are.
For instance, the DigiVet project recently ran a workshop hosted by the Swedish National Veterinary Institute. The theme of the workshop was how antimicrobials are used, as antimicrobial resistance is a crisis facing us all. In the workshop we looked at how antimicrobial usage is recorded in our different nations and how it's used, how we can use it to understand the relative contribution of different industries and issues concerning privacy issues and so on.
Why is your research so important?
“Livestock are important for food security in a number of other ways in our nations. We need safe food, and we need to deal with things like foodborne pathogens which are factors that trigger morbid processes in the body such as malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, toxins and bacterias. One of our case studies was about pathogens that might cause illness in animals, which could also cause illness in humans. So, basically, we need our food to be safe,” she says and adds:
“There are also issues concerning economic security. The pig producing industry in Denmark is very economically important, and indeed in our other partner nations as well. Threats such as African swine fever, are a major threat to pig production. Should it be present in your country, it has serious implications for your ability to sell pigs or produce pigs. Therefore, the research is important firstly as we all eat food, but further in economic and heath safety ways. The livelihoods of a lot of people depend on our ability to produce healthy animals and continue to support many communities, particularly in rural areas.” Enright states.
The significant value of breaking down borders
In total there are three United Kingdom partners in the DigiVet project, and Enright explains that the interest for collaborating with the Nordics and Estonia stems from a fascination of how different the countries deal with these data and the social systems of agriculture.
“A central issue that we always face in this kind of research is that each of our countries has their own data and we need to do essentially the same analysis on lots of it. But typically, we’re not allowed to share data between countries because of strong privacy protections. Ideally, it would be better to coordinate efforts, but we can’t compare data directly,” she says.
“As an example, Denmark has very strong Freedom of Information laws. Thus, in Denmark it’s much easier for journalists or the public to get access to certain kinds of veterinary public health data, which of course in some ways is great. However, having data interpreted directly without context can sometimes be damaging to the industry. In comparison, many kinds of data that are more freely available in Denmark are more strictly protected in the UK.”, Enright explains and continues.
“Within the DigiVet project, we have aimed to overcome these barriers by developing software, tools and models that allow for the comparison of data while at the same time preserving data privacy. One example is a piece of software that can take in data that describes how animals have been moved from one agricultural holding to another, but then assists in making these movements pseudonymous. The aim is to preserve the characteristics of these data that allow us to analyse them, but while also protecting privacy. The aim then is to make data sharing safer and easier.”
Impact Beyond Academia
What are your hopes and ambitions for the impact of your research project?
“I hope that the project will have a significant impact, both within academic circles and beyond. The tools and models developed within DigiVet are intended to empower researchers and institutions in their ongoing efforts to control and understand livestock-related diseases,”
“The intention is for our own partners to be able to use our findings in the future. The software that we have created is open source and online, and we're looking into how to develop it further to make it more practical after the end of this project,” she says and concludes:
“If it all goes according to the plan, there are a couple of concrete outputs of the project itself which are insights into how data are used in the countries, and our ambition is to help understand what the blockers are in data sharing.”
