Environmental Surveillance: OSMA and OSD

The FSA has awarded a contract for delivery of a research and evidence project to strengthen the FSA’s environmental surveillance capability for foodborne disease (FBD) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The project will generate robust, transferable evidence to support a One Health approach to environmental surveillance, demonstrating the feasibility, operational value and cost effectiveness of combining a One Sample Many Analyses (OSMA) approach with targeted On Site Diagnostic (OSD) technologies, using environmental samples that are already collected across government. The requirement is to deliver a structured, phased programme of work that enables the FSA to determine where and how OSMA and OSD approaches provide added value relative to existing laboratory based, single organisation surveillance models, and where they do not. The emphasis is on evidence generation, evaluation and decision support, rather than deployment at scale.