For many reasons, the health of wildlife is of major concern throughout the world. Apart from important influences on the health of many wildlife species, infectious diseases of wildlife have significant impacts on public health and health of livestock. Effective disease surveillance is essential in order to inform control strategies and this depends critically on the development and application of methods of disease diagnosis which are both accurate and rapid. The WildTech project has been established specifically to address these problems and to set up a technology centre that may be exploited in Europe and elsewhere as a basis for high throughput disease diagnosis in wildlife.

The project combines:

• Technological development to enable high throughput nucleic acid- and peptide-based array screening of samples from a wide variety of wild animals
• Surveillance of terrestrial, aerial and marine wild animal species within Europe and from countries which act as portals of disease entry into the EU
• Epidemiological analysis and risk assessment using data generated during the project and from other sources
• Development and proposal of a model framework for disease surveillance within Europe

The project will place the EU at the centre of wildlife disease surveillance and enables the translation of high throughput array-based technologies to human and veterinary medicine.