Lyme disease, Usutu virus, and Bluetongue are spreading further across the UK as warmer temperatures allow the insects and ticks that carry them to survive and multiply. The problem is that no single agency or research group tracks all these diseases together—veterinary scientists study Bluetongue in sheep, ecologists monitor ticks in woodlands, and public health officials watch for Lyme in humans, often without sharing data or coordinating responses. This project will build a central hub that connects these separate efforts, creating shared databases, standardised surveillance methods, and predictive tools that link environmental conditions—such as rainfall, temperature, and land use—to disease risk. If successful, the hub will allow the UK to spot emerging threats earlier, model how climate change will shift disease patterns, and coordinate responses across human, animal, and plant health sectors. The work is applied and infrastructure-focused: it does not aim to discover new biology, but to fix the fragmented information systems that currently slow the country’s ability to prepare for vector-borne disease outbreaks.
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Vector-borne diseases, in which infection is spread by insects, ticks, and mites, affect the health of humans, animals, and plants. They include familiar diseases like Lyme disease, Bluetongue, and Louping Ill, and new infections like Usutu virus. Over the next 20 years, risk of these types of infections is predicted to increase in the UK. It is critical that we establish the key networks and platforms needed to coordinate the UK's response to these looming threats. Formulating plans to prevent and control vector-borne diseases is complicated by the fact that their transmission cycles often involve not only vectors but also several domestic and wildlife animal species and are extremely dependent on environmental conditions. This project will establish a Defra-UKRI One Health VBD Hub which will improve the accessibility and sharing of information about the infectious agents, hosts, and vectors involved in vector-borne disease transmission in the UK. The project includes building improved infrastructure that allows researchers working across different vector and pathogen species and ecological, veterinary, and medical contexts to combine their knowledge to deliver more coordinated responses to vector-borne disease threats. We will provide tools to help understand the relationship between our environment and vector-borne disease transmission and predict how changes in the environment will impact risk going forward. The project will support the sharing of data and findings on these diseases among the UK research community and with policy makers. In the end, the project will deliver a platform and network for dealing with UK vector-disease threats.
Christopher Sanders (Co-Investigator)Hannah Vineer (Co-Investigator)Lauren Cator (Principal Investigator)Marion England (Co-Investigator)Robert Jones (Co-Investigator)Samraat Pawar (Co-Investigator)Steven White (Co-Investigator)William Pearse (Co-Investigator)
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