Demonstration of Disease Freedom (DDF).

freedom

An R package to calculate probability of freedom from disease in a population based on surveillance data.

Background

At SVA, we perform calculations of probability of freedom from disease based on ongoing surveillance activities in animal populations that over a period of time have had negative results. This is referred to a Demonstrating Disease Freedom (DDF) and the tools and results from this are very important as a foundation for affecting and maintaining trade relationships as well as trade restrictions to avoid future introductions.

These calculations have been successfully done in @risk software which is add-on toolset to the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet programme. In order to make these calculations more reproducible and based on openly available tools that are tailored to our needs, this package has been produced in R. The vision is ultimately to have an adaptable tool that can quickly be used to perform these calculations for various surveillance systems.