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Animal Health

The recent focus on the 'One Medicine' concept has resulted in an increased awareness that the control of diseases in animal populations, whether zoonotic or not, can be of great public health importance. Zoonotic and foodborne diseases represent an immediate threat to the health of human populations, while rapid spreading diseases in animals can compromise the food-supply and the economy of a country or region. On the other hand, animal populations can serve as sentinels, and continued surveillance can prevent the emergence and/or rapid spread of pathogens potentially harmful to humans. However, awareness of the activities developed in the field of animal health is still low among public health workers. To date, the cooperation between public health and animal health epidemiologists has mainly involved the control of outbreaks of foodborne diseases. Greater cooperation between the two fields, however, could improve prevention and reduce the number of such outbreaks.

Objective

To discuss opportunities to improve the synergy between animal and public health and increase awareness, among public health workers, of the concept of animal health.

Submitted by elamb on

A review of the development of veterinary syndromic surveillance in 2011 indicated that the field was incipient, but fast growing. Many countries are starting to explore different sources of data for syndromic surveillance. Some of the data streams evaluated share similarities with those used in public health syndromic surveillance, such as clinical records and laboratory data. However, many unique animal data sources have arisen, such as abattoir and carcass collection data. We suggest there are three main challenges in the current development of animal syndromic surveillance: The lack of standards in disease classification; The development of statistical methods appropriate to deal with animal data; The creation of ready-to-use tools that employ these statistical methods.

Objective

To summarize the challenges in the development of syndromic surveillance tools in veterinary medicine, and describe the development of an R package to address some of the current gaps.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on

Protecting U.S. animal populations requires constant monitoring of disease events and conditions which might lead to disease emergence, both domestically and globally. Since 1999, the Center for Emerging issues (CEI has actively monitored global information sources to provide early detection impact assessments and increased awareness of emerging disease events and conditions. The importance of these activities was reinforced after September 11, 2001, and these processes are now part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s response to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 9. Electronic information sources available through the Internet have recently changed the way animal health information is gathered, processed and shared. To respond to these changes, CEI developed a dynamic system containing automated and semiautomated components that process information from various sources to identify, track, and evaluate emerging disease situations.

 

Objective

This paper describes a system of automatic and semiautomatic processes for data gathering, assessment, and event tracking used by the CEI to enhance monitoring of global animal health events and conditions.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

In the past year, three major health care organizations – the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Medical Association and the Society for Tropical Veterinary Medicine – have officially endorsed the concept of “One Health” recognizing the continuum of communicable infectious disease from humans to animals and animals to humans. Further, there is widespread recognition that continuous robust surveillance of animals is beneficial not only to animal health but to food safety for humans and for early warning of naturally-occurring novel diseases (all of significance have been zoonotic for the past 20 years in the US and elsewhere) and for detecting bioterrorism events (with only one exception, all human bioterrorism agents are animal diseases.)

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The North Dakota Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (NDVDL) manages animal disease laboratory tests, results and diagnostic services using the software VetStar Animal Disease Diagnostic System (VADDS) (Advanced Technology Corporation, Ramsey, NJ). The North Dakota State Board of Animal Health with the Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with the North Dakota Department of Health (NDDoH), has developed an electronic laboratory reporting system using data streams exported from the VADDS system for statewide animal health and public health surveillance.

Objective

 To describe the North Dakota Electronic Animal Health Surveillance System and data analysis using the CDC EARS V4r5.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

There is a need for regular evaluation of surveillance strategies. The emergence of new diagnostic tests and new sources of data, changes in the spatio-temporal distribution of diseases and other factors must be periodically assessed to guarantee that the objectives of the surveillance effort are met. Underlying this evaluation process is the need to increase the efficient use of resources.

 

OBJECTIVE

We have developed a flexible model which can evaluate surveillance strategies at different hierarchical levels. It identifies key elements in the performance of the surveillance and recommends optimal sampling designs.

Referenced File
Submitted by elamb on

The New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (NYSVDL) receives more than 100,000 diagnostic submissions a year that are not currently used in any formal syndromic surveillance system. In 2009, a pilot study of syndrome classification schemes was undertaken and in 2011 a new general submission form was adopted, which includes a check list of syndromes, as part of the clinical history.

Monitoring submissions to a veterinary diagnostic laboratory for increases in certain test requests is an established method of syndromic surveillance. The new general submission form allows for clinician selected syndromes to be monitored in addition to test request.

 

Objective

To assess the use and utility of a syndrome check list on the general submission form of a high volume veterinary diagnostic laboratory, and compare to the results of a 2009 pilot study

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The Triple-S project (Syndromic Surveillance Systems in Europe, www.syndromicsurveillance.eu), co-financed by the European Commission and involving twenty four organizations from fourteen countries was launched in September 2010 with the following objectives 1) performing an inventory of existing or planned SyS systems in Europe both in animal and public health, 2) building a network of experts involved in SyS 3) producing guidelines to implement SyS systems, 4) developing synergies between human and animal health SyS systems. The project is based on a cooperation between human and animal health experts, as supported by the One Health initiative [1].

Objective: 

The objective of this study, based on the Triple-S project outputs, was to present the existing synergies between human and animal health syndromic surveillance (SyS) systems in Europe and a proposal to enhance this kind of collaboration.

 

Submitted by Magou on

Epidemiological models that simulate the spread of Foot-and-Mouth Disease within a herd are the foundation of decision support tools used by governments to help advise and inform strategy to combat outbreaks. Contact transmission data used to parameterize these models, contrary to assumption, contain a significant amount of variability and uncertainty. The implications of this finding suggest that the resultant model output might not accurately simulate the spread of an outbreak. If this is true, the potential impact due to uncertainty inherent to the decision support tools used by governments might be significant.

Objective

The objective of this project is to understand how parametric un- certainty within intra-herd Foot-and-Mouth disease epidemiological models affects the outbreak simulations and what implications this has on surveillance and control strategy and policy.

Submitted by dbedford on
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