Research laboratories

Through multiple collaborations within national epidemiological surveillance networks and field studies, the laboratory contributes to national knowledge of the health status of wildlife. As wildlife may act as reservoirs of zoonoses or diseases that are transmissible to domestic animals, monitoring their health status is both a public health and an economic issue. The Laboratory plays a part in national surveillance of the health status of wildlife:
• it studies pathogenic agents (viruses and parasites);
• it monitors the emergence and/or spread of diseases, analyses their causes and assesses the health risks of some of them;
• it thus participates in gathering and interpreting data for monitoring the health of wild animals.

The laboratory’s areas of specialisation are:
• animal rabies, with a current focus on rabies in bats;
• certain wildlife zoonoses, in particular alveolar echinococcosis, but also Lyme disease, tick-borne encephalitis and hantaviruses.