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RVC's Veterinary Epidemiology, Economics and Public Health team (VEEPH) has been at the forefront of applying and evaluating new techniques for modelling disease risk, for policy and decision makers to use in surveillance and control of animal and zoonotic infections. Application of their recommendations, including European `Commission Decision' legislation, is contributing to ensuring that Europe remains free from African swine fever (ASF). The status of FAO Reference Centre in Veterinary Epidemiology, awarded by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2012, recognises the RVC as a centre of excellence in this field and reinforces its role in guiding policies relating to animal health.
Loughborough University's Construction Accident Causality (ConCA) framework has:
Research at the University of Sheffield has resulted in FRAX, the first internationally-applicable fracture risk calculator that provides individualised 10-year probabilities of major osteoporotic fractures from readily available clinical risk factors. It has replaced bone mineral density (BMD) as the sole quantitative measure of fracture risk, thus increasing global access to risk assessment and improving targeting of treatment to patients at highest risk. FRAX is incorporated widely into national and international guidelines for osteoporosis management. Launched in 2008, it now provides country-specific calculations for 53 nations, in 28 languages. The online tool alone recently processed its 6.6 millionth calculation.
Researchers at Brunel developed a new algorithm for the computation of residual risk in industrial explosion protection (IEP) installations in collaboration with Kidde Plc, which later became a part of UTC Fire and Security (UTCFS), a 57.7 billion USD company. This was the first algorithm clearly quantifying the safety integrity level versus cost trade-off in buying an IEP for the process plant owners. As the cost of such an installation varies from £40,000 to £700,000, quantifying this trade-off was a real unmet user need. A commercial implementation of this algorithm by a UK-based software vendor Optirisk Systems is now being used by the 31 strong sales force of UTCFS worldwide, as their main tool for negotiating the sales of IEP installations.
Research by Reimer Kühn (RK) and collaborators has produced a framework to study and quantify the influence of interactions on risk in complex systems, including default risk in economy-wide networks of financial exposures. This work has had impact on practitioners and professional services dealing with financial risk, including research groups at central banks, who — partly in response to the recent financial crisis — have adopted such network oriented approaches to analyse and quantify systemic risk. The Financial Stability Division at the Bank of England has, for instance, developed refined versions of the network-oriented models proposed by Kühn and collaborators to specifically assess risk in the British banking system.
Research on the theoretical and experimental assessment of the stability of damaged ships in the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the mid-1990s to the present day has been pivotal in the development, adoption and implementation of the latest amendment of the International Convention on Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS 2009) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN body regulating maritime safety. The impact of these regulations has been a significant reduction in the risk to human life at sea by enabling ship design and operation with higher standards of damage stability. SOLAS 2009 represents a step change from deterministic to probabilistic rules and from rule compliance to goal-based standards; it has improved design and operation of all commercial ships built worldwide from 2009, and has thus resulted in far-reaching and long-lasting impact on maritime safety.
Research by Cathcart, McNeil (both Maxwell Institute) and Morrison (Barrie & Hibbert) during the period 2008-2012 has developed a methodology based on least squares Monte Carlo to value complex insurance liabilities and manage their risks. This methodology has been adopted by Barrie & Hibbert (B&H, part of Moody's Analytics) and has enabled the company to develop an internationally leading proposition for valuing insurance products. This has generated £2.5M in revenue since 2011, through implementation in 5 new products and use in 12 new consulting projects.
Research at the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC) at Loughborough University has led to the development of a new road safety data and knowledge base called the European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO). The European Commission has confirmed in a reference that it has become a standard tool for EU and national level safety policy development and has been praised by the European Parliament. Since being established in 2006 it has been emulated at national level by many EU Member States including the UK, Spain, Czech Republic, Netherlands and France. The ERSO website now receives over 5000 hits each month from road safety policy-makers across the EU. The research, which was led by TSRC researchers, was conducted between 2004 and 2012 and in 2013 was awarded the HRH Prince Michael International Road Safety Award for its impact on road safety.
Credit scoring, the process of estimating the risk of lending to consumers, has traditionally estimated the likelihood of default over a fixed period, usually 12 months. Research carried out at Southampton's School of Management has led to a gradual shift by many financial institutions in the UK and elsewhere towards an alternative method that estimates default over any period. This approach provides accurate risk estimates over any time period. It also allows for the inclusion in the "scorecard" of economic conditions and the lending rates charged — features whose absence from previous scorecards was identified as contributing to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Genotoxicity (DNA damage) can often induce carcinogenesis. Swansea-led work on `genotoxicity thresholds' reassured 25,000 HIV-infected individuals, who had taken anti-viral tablets (Viracept®) contaminated with the genotoxin ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS).
Before 2008, genotoxicity was assumed to increase with dose, and genotoxic drugs were discarded. Research at Swansea University showed that exposure to low-levels of genotoxins did not pose significant risks to DNA. This concept has now been incorporated into regulatory guidelines; in July 2008 the European Medicines Agency accepted that cancer-risk was not increased for patients who received Viracept® tablets contaminated with a low dose of the genotoxin ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS).