The GLOWORM project, funded in part with EU funds, will study various changing environmental factors that affects parasitic worms and it causes infections in livestock. In general terms, the new project intends to mitigate the economic and welfare burden that these worm infections put on the European ruminant livestock industry.

The GLOWORM ('Innovative and sustainable strategies to mitigate the impact of global change on helminth infections in ruminants') project, which received nearly €3 million of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and brings together researchers from 14 partner institutions across Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, has as main objective to study parasitic worms that wreak havoc among farm animals, and various changing environmental factors that are only exacerbating the problem.

Worms are omnipresent pathogens present on every animal farm, and animals grazing in fields are particularly at risk from worm infection. Most worms have a development stage that occurs outside the animal host, and as a result, they are sensitive to any changing environmental factors: disease epidemics, seasonality and geographic distribution of parasitic worm infections - all changes that are attributed to climate change.

The GLOWORM project will work in obtaining a detailed understanding of how all these factors contribute to worm infections: the researchers will design improved innovative diagnostic tests to enhance surveillance of infection levels in Europe. They will also work on EU-wide modelling of infection risk with the aim of both supplying farmers with improved, up-to-date information on changing patterns of infection, and translating this information into practical new worm-control strategies, which will be tested on farms.