Pour la version française, veuillez cliquer ici : https://ifea-istanbul.net/projet-tickrisk/

TICKRISK: Understanding and Preventing Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever in Europe

(Duygu Şendağ, Başak Can, Léa Delmaire)

TICKRISK examines the production, circulation, and public interpretation of scientific knowledge surrounding Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) across Europe. While CCHF is considered an imminent public health risk in Turkey and along Europe’s borderlands, it is often framed as a potential “future threat” in countries like France. The disease was included in the World Health Organization’s 2018 R&D Blueprint list of priority diseases due to its epidemic potential and the absence of sufficient preventive measures.

Bringing together researchers from anthropology, history, virology, social epidemiology, political science, tick ecology, and citizen science, TICKRISK is conducted across four countries — Turkey, France, Spain, and Romania — each presenting different levels of epidemic risk.

The two main objectives of the project are as follows:

1. To compare how CCHF is perceived, studied, and managed across different contexts.
2. To develop health education and risk communication tools for epidemic preparedness and prevention.

Through comparative ethnographic and historical research conducted across multiple sites, TICKRISK aims to contribute a much-needed social sciences perspective to a field largely dominated by biomedical research.

The Turkey component of the project is led by the Pasteur Institute in partnership with IFEA and Koç University.