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Defra launches 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Database

June 18, 2003

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today launched a database relating to the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak. The data is being used to model control strategies for future outbreaks of FMD and FMD-like diseases, and could prove a valuable resource for the research community.

Early in April 2001 Defra staff in the Joint Co-ordination Centre (JCC) for Foot and Mouth Disease in London began to appreciate that an enormous volume of data from the outbreak was being generated in a semi-random fashion. From the very beginning of the outbreak getting the correct facts at the right time to take control decisions had been a monumental struggle. The structure of the FMD effort: the fact that the staff had been gathered at short notice from many departments and the transitory role played by the army; made us very aware that the whole data history of the outbreak might become indecipherable once the key players who created the initial data-sets were lost back to their normal professions.

There were two other powerful incentives for collecting and protecting the data. This was the first major outbreak where the major elements of the data-set were recorded at second hand in electronic media. It was also clear that with such a massive and costly exercise questions many and various would be asked of the data set for some time to come. Defra staff saw clearly that there was a public duty to capture and protect these datasets as best we could. The notion was supported and the Data Reconciliation and Recovery Project was launched in May 2001.
In the first phase of this project Defra staff and consultants gathered intelligence on all the known data sources for the outbreak. Next we assessed all the sources both to impress upon their owners how important this data was and to establish that it was robust and adequately protected.

For each data-set identified we worked out how it might be checked and reconciled against paper records and other correlating information and agreed with data owners how the data-sets were to be brought up to standard and what residual problems remained on accuracy of data or completeness.

The data were stored in a range of diverse systems, involving several proprietary databases, spreadsheets, paper records and electronic documents, none of which could be easily interrogated. Thus the second phase of the project involved copying all the data into one modern, relational database for posterity. The data should be in as finalised, complete and correct a form as possible. We spent some six months with data owners reconciling and improving their data-sets and took a number of improved copies into the database.

All through this process we had a vision of making these data available to the veterinary and scientific communities for future research into epidemiological or other scientific areas. Mindful of our duties to protect personal information, yet wishing to make maximum use of the data we decided to make the complete data set available to bona-fide research workers under agreement to keep personal data confidential. To meet our commitment to open government, summaries of general and non personal statistics only should be available to the general public, compliant with confidentiality under the Agriculture and Data Protection Acts and openness under Environment and future requirements of Freedom of Information Acts.

Defra commissioned The Central Science Laboratory (CSL) to gather together the data-sets and to mount them in a modern and web accessible system. CSL staff had a considerable track record in making complex data-sets on pesticides available via web based systems.
Data was gathered when and as available within and across all of the disease control centres throughout Great Britain. The project has collected data from a range of sources summarised in Appendix 1.

A full data dictionary is available to bona fide research workers. Defra has asked CSL to provide a managed data provision service for academic researchers who need to access the data-sets. This will allow for large data-items to be downloaded to CD-ROM or conveyed by FTP to researchers, rather than trying to download over slow web connections. Dr Miles Thomas at CSL (Tel: 01904 462410) has been asked to provide this service.

We cannot claim that the complete data-set is error free or reconciled in all respects. But this would be true of any complex biological data-set. There was too much frenetic action in the field by hard-pressed staff for this to be a realistic result. But we have spent a lot of time cleaning up the data-sets and they now represent a deep and rich mine of material for the researcher. We hope that this mine will be used productively by those seeking to understand how to control disease better in the future, leading to all the benefits that such a result would bring.

Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA)