Detecting new and emerging diseases on livestock farms using an early detection system

Abstract

The monitoring and surveillance of animal diseases is becoming increasingly important to policy-makers in Great Britain particularly given recent incursions of avian influenza and the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. To meet this surveillance objective, data from British livestock is collected and analysed retrospectively on an ongoing basis. However, these data can also be analysed prospectively within an early detection system which raises alerts to significant increases in disease reporting soon after they occur in the field. The feasibility of such an approach has been examined previously for Salmonella. This paper applied the approach to a further subset of surveillance data to alert those monitoring disease to increases in potentially new and emerging diseases. Thus far, the analysis, conducted on a quarterly basis, has proved a useful additional tool in enhanced surveillance by raising alerts to significant increases in several syndromes in both sheep and cattle.

Ovine and Bovine Congenital Abnormalities Associated With Intrauterine Infection With Schmallenberg Virus

“…Since 2002, a system for monitoring and surveillance of animal diseases has been developed in the Netherlands to rapidly detect emerging diseases, 7,27 which is of utmost importance to government and livestock policy makers as well as the livestock industry. 6,22 The sudden, frequent occurrence of stillborn malformed lambs and calves in December 2011 eventually resulted in the association between the arthrogryposishydranencephaly syndrome and the recently discovered SBV. Until that moment, SBV was associated with an unidentified disease, affecting dairy cattle in the Netherlands and Germany, Figure 11.…”

Animal health syndromic surveillance: a systematic literature review of the progress in the last 5 years (2011–2016)

“…Rather than monitoring the number of test requests, they were based on the assumption that the introduction of novel diseases will result in an increase in the number of samples that are not positive for the test requested by the veterinarian 54 , 55 or that do not reach a diagnosis for any disease after reasonable testing. 53 , 57 O’Sullivan et al 54 , 55 demonstrated a positive association between the volume of submissions of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus tests and the occurrence of a porcine circovirus-associated disease (PCVAD) outbreak, 54 as well as an increase in the proportion of negative tests, 55 confirming that such data sources can also contribute to the knowledge of new and existing disease patterns in the population.…”

“…Perrin et al 66 , 67 introduced an approach for mortality based on the use of movement data to calculate the population at risk and monitor mortality as a rate rather than counts. Negative laboratory results can also be monitored as proportions, 53 – 55 , 57 while rates were used by Marceau et al 10 , 94 and Bronner et al 14 for their reproduction indicators.…”

Utility of algorithms for the analysis of integratedSalmonellasurveillance data

“…Animal data likely violated the assumptions required for the algorithms (Table 1). Animal surveillance data (especially diagnostic data) are influenced by changing economic circumstances within the livestock industry, such as large outbreaks [18], with outbreaks potentially affecting independence as well as denominators (see Table 1). Further, while animal samples submitted for routine surveillance and monitoring to comply with various legislative or industry requirements (e.g.…”