Suitability of sentinel abattoirs for syndromic surveillance using provincially inspected bovine abattoir condemnation data.

Ken G Bateman,David L Pearl,Olaf Berke,Gillian D Alton,W McNab

doi:10.1186/s12917-015-0349-1

Abstract

BackgroundSentinel surveillance has previously been used to monitor and identify disease outbreaks in both human and animal contexts. Three approaches for the selection of sentinel sites are proposed and evaluated regarding their ability to capture overall respiratory disease trends using provincial abattoir condemnation data from all abattoirs open throughout the study for use in a sentinel syndromic surveillance system.ResultsAll three sentinel selection criteria approaches resulted in the identification of sentinel abattoirs that captured overall temporal trends in condemnation rates similar to those reported by the full set of abattoirs. However, all selection approaches tended to overestimate the condemnation rates of the full dataset by 1.4 to as high as 3.8 times for cows, heifers and steers. Given the results, the selection approach using abattoirs open all weeks had the closest approximation of temporal trends when compared to the full set of abattoirs.ConclusionsSentinel abattoirs show promise for integration into a food animal syndromic surveillance system using Ontario provincial abattoir condemnation data. While all selection approaches tended to overestimate the condemnation rates of the full dataset to some degree, the abattoirs open all weeks selection approach appeared to best capture the overall seasonal and temporal trends of the full dataset and would be the most suitable approach for sentinel abattoir selection.

Highlights

Sentinel surveillance has previously been used to monitor and identify disease outbreaks in both human and animal contexts
We proposed three sentinel site selection approaches and compared their ability to detect respiratory disease trends in bovine abattoir condemnation data for use in a sentinel-based syndromic surveillance system
Descriptive statistics Three approaches for sentinel abattoir selection were compared to pneumonic lung condemnation rates for each animal class from the full set of abattoirs (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

Sentinel surveillance has previously been used to monitor and identify disease outbreaks in both human and animal contexts. Sentinel surveillance has been previously used in both human and animal health settings for a variety of disease outcomes. Following the emergence of Bluetongue virus serotype 8 in Central Europe in 2006, causing a large scale outbreak in 2007 in several countries in Europe, a Bluetongue sentinel surveillance program was established in Belgium in 2010. This surveillance program was intended to demonstrate the absence of Bluetongue virus [4].

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