Monitoring and surveillance

Goals and purposes of monitoring and surveillance

to identify, maintain, and enhance the health status of our country's livestock and poultry populations

What is monitoring?

- focuses on identifying a disease or groups of disease or information on productivity to ascertain changes in prevalence or productivity and to determine the rate and direction of disease spread and productivity

LACKS ACTION to prevent or contorl a health problem

What is surveillance?

the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data needed for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice

INCLUDES AN ACTION to prevent or control the health problem that is being observed

What characteristic can be used to describe monitoring and surviellance programs?

- data collection

- sampling method

- frequency

- level

- reporting

- program assessment

Active vs passive data collection

Active: data collection is mandated. systemic or regular testing or recording of acses for the specific goal of monitoring or surveillance (very costly!)

Passive: collection on a voluntary basis. reporting of clinical cases by health care professionals (inconsistent collection; limited labs; may be influenced by awareness and knowledge level)

What is targeted sampling?

Selection of animals meeting some predetermined characteristic(s), like sampling a 'high risk' group of animals

Increases probability of detecting disease (not for prevalence)

What is on going sampling?

continous sampling for monitoring or surveiallance

What is repeated sampling?

periodic sampling

Objectives of surveillance

1. target agent or disease

2. identify an elevated risk in order to maximize prevention, treatment, control, or the likelihood of eradication and to minimize the impacts of disease

3. report results

4. TAKE ACTION

What is external surveillance?

Goal is to protect a naive population from an agent before it enters the population; test animals before they enter a disease free zone

Risk assessment is often used for this purpose

What is internal surveillance?

Detecting the agent after it has entered the population

What is sentinel surveillance?

Using sentinel animals/herds for detection of the agent in question e.g. canary in the coal mine

Purpose: early detection and warning

What is syndromic surveillance?

practice of using informaiton technology for real time detection and assessment of outbreaks of disease

Why is syndromic surveillance used?

Conventional disease surveillance mechanisms that rely only on active or passive reporting may be too slow or insensitive