3.5 Data-sharing considerations
After your data has been analysed, your next task is to ensure that the information you’ve gathered is used within your public, veterinary and/or environmental health systems.
If you suspect an outbreak or emerging threat, you might need to take immediate public health action based on your results. This could involve alerting a local hospital, a disease-control agency or government health department. You may have findings that should be shared with policy-makers. More information about using data for action in AMR can be found in the course Using AMR data for policy-making.
From a systemic surveillance perspective, you will need to ensure that you comply with national reporting guidelines and follow privacy and confidentiality protections related to data-sharing. Please also see the course Legal and ethical considerations in AMR data for more information on legal and ethical considerations related to data-sharing.
As previously mentioned, one of the advantages of WGS is that the data can be re-analysed at a future time if you have a new question or emerging issue. Therefore, you will want to ensure that you save the raw data, your analysis, your comprehensive metadata and the genome in a secure, accessible and well organised location.
Can you think of a situation when re-analysing data generated from a sample could prove useful?
Answer
You might want to reanalyse data if:
- a new resistance gene is discovered and you want to check whether it was already present in past samples
- a new outbreak is detected and you want to see whether either (a) the older sample has any genetically related strains or (b) the outbreak strain was circulating earlier
- you want to assess historical trends related to a pathogen when a new and improved
bioinformatics tool becomes available and you think you can discover new information.
You can consider saving the data in a public repository such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)’s GenBank, the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) or the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ). These repositories are part of international data-sharing networks that ensure your sequencing data can be accessed by researchers and public health agencies worldwide. Sharing data publicly supports global efforts to monitor AMR, detect emerging threats and respond quickly to outbreaks. It also allows your data to be reused for future studies, making your contribution more impactful.
You could also consider using a commercial cloud service or local storage such as a
3.4 Data analysis
