About PREDICT

The PREDICT Project on HealthMap

PREDICT, a project of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) program strengthened global capacity for detection of viruses with pandemic potential that can move between animals and people. PREDICT was led by the UC Davis One Health Institute from 2009-2020. To learn more about the project, please visit this site.

PREDICT is committed to open data and a summary of project data is at this link.

Key aspects of PREDICT-1 data have been made publicly available here on HealthMap’s interactive platform. Below are descriptions of project data in the HealthMap pop-up windows and data table. To access the data table, click on the "List View" icon at the top right of the map.

Country: Name of the country where the sampling occurred.

Latitude/Longitude: The GPS location in decimal degrees where the sampling occurred rounded to 2 decimal places.

Project: The PREDICT-1 (P1) was implemented Oct 1, 2008 – Sept 30, 2014. PREDICT-2 (P2) was implemented Oct 1, 2014 – Sept 30, 2020. PREDICT-2 data can be found on the USAID Development Data Library at: https://data.usaid.gov/

Sample Date: The month and year when sampling occurred.

Taxa Group: Taxonomic description of animal sampled (e.g., bat, rodent, non-human primate).

Species Scientific Name: The scientific name of the animal sampled. If genus and species are unknown, this will be the next known level of taxonomic classification (e.g., genus, family). An asterisk (*) indicates the animal species identity was established with barcoding. If not followed by an asterisk, the scientific name is based on field morphology.

Virus: The name of the virus detected.

Virus Description: A description of the virus finding, combining data from multiple fields for display in HealthMap pop-up details.

Virus Family: The taxonomic family to which the virus belongs.

Genbank Accession Number: The accession number(s) in the NCBI Genbank database associated with this virus detection.

Interpretation: The interpretation describes the zoonotic potential and threat of the detected virus to human health.

Individual Count: The number of individual animals that tested positive for the indicated virus during the same month and year.

Considerations and Limitations

The sites chosen and animals sampled were selected intentionally to accomplish project goals, which differed by country and considered locality-based nuances, driven by potential risk factors, such as past outbreaks, common types of human-animal interactions, drivers for transmission and emergence specific to the sampled community, and local partner resources in those regions. Data collected should not be considered representative of the broader population and comparisons between different locations should be avoided.

Species identification: Rodents, shrews, and bats species can be difficult to identify correctly in the field to the species level. Species scientific names provided are as they were identified in the field at the time of sampling, except for some animals which were barcoded (indicated by an asterisk after the species name). Analyses including these taxa should consider genus or family level groupings to improve accuracy of interpretation.

Limitations of molecular detection: PREDICT laboratories utilized consensus conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is a broadly reactive assay designed to identify all members (known and new) of a given viral genus and/or family, in addition to other PCR assays with more specific targets. Some unknown viruses may fall outside of the detection limit of these tests. PCR detects nucleic acid only and does not confirm the presence of infectious particles. A negative result only indicates that the virus was not detectable by the method utilized; a negative result does not confirm the absence of infectious particles. Results reported here are from primarily short fragments of conserved genes that have been confirmed to be positive for the virus group (genus or family) by sequencing.