The majority of farmed animals are sent to slaughterhouses, making them a focal point for potential collection of health data. However, these data are not always available to health officials, and remain under-used for cattle health monitoring. Meat inspection data are mainly non-diagnostic (condemned portion and reasons for condemnation) and cover a large population. These characteristics make them a good candidate for syndromic surveillance. Whole carcass condemnation rate is linked to acute infections which reduces the dilution bias due to the variable period of time between cattle infection and the detection of lesions at the slaughterhouse.
Objective
The objective of the work was to assess the performance of several algorithms for outbreak detection based on weekly proportions of whole carcass condemnation