The EDEN Project, which was launched in 2004 on the initiative of CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development), IRD ((Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement) and the Institut Pasteur in Paris, to run for five years, associates 49 partners in 24 countries, most of them European.
As Renaud Lancelot, Project Coordinator and CIRAD researcher, says: “EDEN’s biggest scientific success has been to combine the approaches of specialists in the biology and ecology of vectors and the diseases they transmit and of modelling teams with complementary points of view regarding the interactions between health and the environment and the scales on which diseases are perceived. These teams, from a wide range of places and disciplines, have agreed to work towards shared objectives, using the same concepts, methods and tools.” The teams intend to quantify the impact of environmental change on the risk of seeing emerging diseases introduced, become established and spread in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Model diseases and at-risk ecosystems
The EDEN Project (see the list of its Steering Committee members below*) became a European reference for vector-borne disease epidemiology and ecology, and covers the whole range of manmade ecosystems in Europe, from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, and their connections in Sub-Saharan Africa, a “reservoir” for several of the diseases under study. Its work is based on diseases that are sensitive to environmental change. Most of them are zoonoses: diseases shared by animals and man. They are transmitted by ticks, rodents or insects. Most are already found in Europe (tick-borne encephalitis, haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, leishmaniasis, etc). Others may emerge or reappear, such as malaria, West Nile virus or Rift Valley fever.
Innovative shared approaches using the latest research successes (remote sensing and mathematical tools for epidemiology, ecological science and biodiversity studies) have enabled the scientific network set up by EDEN to understand and model the mechanisms of emergence and identify at-risk ecosystems. Several CIRAD internal research units and joint research units are involved in the project, either in disease studies (West Nile virus, Africa platform, rodent-borne diseases) or in integration activities (modelling and remote sensing).