Abstract
The existence, stage of eradication and design of control programmes (CPs) for diseases that are not regulated by the EU differ between Member States. When freedom from infection is reached or being pursued, safe trade is essential to protect or reach that status. The aim of STOC free, a collaborative project between six countries, is to develop and validate a framework that enables a transparent and standardized comparison of confidence of freedom for CPs across herds, regions or countries. The framework consists of a model combined with a tool to facilitate the collection of the necessary parameters. All relevant actions taken in a CP are included in a Bayesian network model, which allows prior distributions for most parameters. In addition, frequency of occurrence and risk estimates for factors that influence either the probability of introduction or temporary misclassification leading to delayed detection of the infection are included in the model. Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is used as an example disease. Many countries have CPs in place for BVDV and although elements of the CPs are similar, biosecurity measures and testing protocols, including types of tests and testing frequency, as well as target groups, differ widely. Although the initially developed framework is based on BVDV, the aim is to make it sufficiently generic to be adaptable to CPs for other diseases and possibly other species. Thus, STOC free will result in a single general framework, adaptable to multiple disease CPs, which aims to enhance the safety of trade.
Highlights
Several European countries have implemented national or regional surveillance, control, or eradication programmes for non-regulated infections of cattle, such as bovine viral diarrhea (BVDV), paratuberculosis and salmonellosis
Control programmes (CPs) in European countries generally differ in the way that the free status is achieved and assigned, which makes it difficult to assess whether confidence of freedom from infection is equivalent
There is a lack of agreed methodologies to assess and compare confidence of freedom from infection of cattle that are being moved between EU countries with different CPs
Summary
Several European countries have implemented national or regional surveillance, control, or eradication programmes for non-regulated infections of cattle, such as bovine viral diarrhea (BVDV), paratuberculosis and salmonellosis. There is a need for a tool that enables transparent and standardized comparison of confidence of freedom resulting from different CPs to facilitate safe trade This tool should be able to calculate the confidence that animals moved between regions or countries are truly free from infection to prevent (re-)introduction of the infection in a free herd and/or territory. Several methods have been developed to calculate freedom of infection, including scenario tree models and Bayesian methods where multiple surveillance components are combined, and latent class methods that take time since sampling into account [9, 10] These methods are promising, but further research is need to allow simple and practical field-based application to enable standardized and quantitative comparison of outputs of CPs. A practical tool is needed to support the livestock industry in controlling and/or eradicating livestock infections. Herd level prevalence (breeding herds) Type of programme Type of testing–screening/case finding Type of testing - monitoring freedom of disease Vaccines licensed for use Funding Most important herd level risk factors for introduction: 1
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