Abstract
Ticks represent a large global reservoir of zoonotic disease. Current surveillance systems can be time and labour intensive. We propose that the passive surveillance of companion animal electronic health records (EHRs) could provide a novel methodology for describing temporal and spatial tick activity. A total of 16 58 857 EHRs were collected over a 2-year period (31 March 2014 and 29 May 2016) from companion animals attending a large sentinel network of 192 veterinary clinics across Great Britain (the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network - SAVSNET). In total, 2180 EHRs were identified where a tick was recorded on an animal. The relative risk of dogs presenting with a tick compared with cats was 0·73 (95% confidence intervals 0·67-0·80). The highest number of tick records were in the south central regions of England. The presence of ticks showed marked seasonality with summer peaks, and a secondary smaller peak in autumn for cats; ticks were still being found throughout most of Great Britain during the winter. This suggests that passive surveillance of companion animal EHRs can describe tick activity temporally and spatially in a large cohort of veterinary clinics across Great Britain. These results and methodology could help inform veterinary and public health messages as well as increase awareness of ticks and tick-borne diseases in the general population.
Highlights
After adjusting by the amount of agreement which would be expected by chance, a ‘substantial agreement’ (K = 0·7; 95% confidence intervals (CIs) 0·63–0·78) with 305 electronic health records (EHRs) agreed was achieved
After reappraising this first dataset, the exercise was repeated on a new random sample of 365 EHRs, this time achieving an ‘almost perfect’ agreement (K = 0·82; 95% CI 0·77–0·88) with 332 EHRs agreed; the remaining EHRs were categorised independently by the two authors
The relative risk of a dog being recorded as presenting with a tick compared with that for a cat was 0·73
Summary
The aim of this paper is to explore the feasibility of using such EHRs from a large sentinel network of veterinary clinics as the basis of a novel surveillance system to provide efficient temporal and spatial estimates of tick activity risk in GB that complement existing TSS
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