Disease surveillance systems can be based on two components of surveillance: active surveillance in which the diseases are looked for on a regular basis in a defined population, and passive surveillance where the diseases are looked for whenever specific sanitary events are notified. The first type of surveillance is fundamental to detect clinically unexpressed infections and to estimate the prevalence of the disease in the global population. The second type of surveillance is essential to detect new disease cases as early as possible after their appearance, and necessitates a clinical expression of infections. Active surveillance is more complete but also takes more resources to be implemented. As for passive surveillance, although it has the advantage of sparing resources, it is subject to variability in data reporting according to the reporters. A recent study was conducted in France on a specific data reporting in veterinary public health: the declaration of bovine abortions1. It is the main clinical sign for some diseases that can have a serious economic impact on the production and that can be transmittable to humans. This study has highlighted individual obstacles to abortion declaration by farmers and veterinarians, but it has also shown that in different departments of France with the same bovine farming characteristics (similar types of production, mean sizes of the farms, density of farms, etc.), large differences could be observed regarding their abortion declaration rate (a department is a French administrative and territorial division covering a mean surface area of 5,800 km2). This result suggests that there is another level of factors influencing data reporting, different from the individual factors related to the characteristics of the farms. We formulated the hypothesis that these other factors were related to the local governance of animal health surveillance data collection. Our study was thus developed in the continuity of this previous research to explore the variation of data reporting in relation with the organisation of animal health surveillance actors of bovine production at the local level. In France, an official organisation chart sets how actors should act and interact with one another at the national, regional and departmental scales, and yet some differences can be observed at the departmental level, mostly regarding the relations between actors, due to a difference in the resources available for each actor according to the local context.
Objective: The objectives were to understand the functioning of the local network of actors involved in the French bovine infectious diseases surveillance system and the influence of their organisation on data reporting from the field.