Last week, IDAlert organised its 3rd General Assembly in the historic heart of Athens, Greece, hosted by the Benaki Phytopathological Institute (BPI). The meeting brought together the project’s partners for 3 dynamic days of scientific exchange, strategic planning, and field demonstrations.
The opening day focused on updates from 5 work packages, highlighting their research and progress to date:
- Presentations covered climate-health modeling and socioeconomic indicators, insights into risk mapping and forecasting for infectious diseases, novel surveillance systems and citizen science tools, interventions, and vulnerability and adaptation assessments.
- Leaders of the case studies in Sweden, Germany, and Greece shared field insights on sampling, surveillance techniques, and vector management.
- The day concluded with a user testing session of the EpiOutlook platform, developed by BSC as an early warning system for infectious diseases, followed by a collective discussion on how best to disseminate, use, and enhance the uptake of the project’s results.
Day two continued with insights from the case studies in the Netherlands, Spain, and Bangladesh, along with discussions on the methodologies used in the project. The day ended with a feedback and testing session involving all partners, focusing on an educational game which was developed based on the Climate-Fresk. This IDAlert educational game game aims to explain and raise awareness of the link between climate change and the increasing risk of infectious diseases, emphasising the need for a One Health approach.
The final day took participants out of the conference setting and into the field. The group traveled to the Marathonas region, one of the project’s case study sites, to observe a demonstration of IDAlert’s intervention: a drone-based larvicidal application using an eco-friendly biological agent.
ℹ️ Learn more about the project’s interventions in Greece 🦟 https://lnkd.in/en2y2zZx
As the IDAlert project moves into its final two years, this General Assembly was a great opportunity to discuss its impact and share knowledge and insights from each partner’s work.
