Resumeq: A Novel Way of Monitoring Equine Diseases Through the Centralization of Necropsy Data

Background Emerging animal and zoonotic diseases and increasing international trade have resulted in an increased demand for veterinary surveillance systems. However, human and financial resources available to support government veterinary services are becoming more and more limited in many countries world-wide. Intuitively, issues that present higher risks merit higher priority for surveillance resources as investments will yield higher benefit-cost ratios. The rapid rate of acceptance of this core concept of risk-based surveillance has outpaced the development of its theoretical and practical bases. Discussion The principal objectives of risk-based veterinary surveillance are to identify surveillance needs to protect the health of livestock and consumers, to set priorities, and to allocate resources effectively and efficiently. An important goal is to achieve a higher benefit-cost ratio with existing or reduced resources. We propose to define risk-based surveillance systems as those that apply risk assessment methods in different steps of traditional surveillance design for early detection and management of diseases or hazards. In risk-based designs, public health, economic and trade consequences of diseases play an important role in selection of diseases or hazards. Furthermore, certain strata of the population of interest have a higher probability to be sampled for detection of diseases or hazards. Evaluation of risk-based surveillance systems shall prove that the efficacy of risk-based systems is equal or higher than traditional systems; however, the efficiency (benefit-cost ratio) shall be higher in risk-based surveillance systems. Summary Risk-based surveillance considerations are useful to support both strategic and operational decision making. This article highlights applications of risk-based surveillance systems in the veterinary field including food safety. Examples are provided for risk-based hazard selection, risk-based selection of sampling strata as well as sample size calculation based on risk considerations.

This paper reviews recent progress in the development of syndromic surveillance systems for veterinary medicine. Peer-reviewed and grey literature were searched in order to identify surveillance systems that explicitly address outbreak detection based on systematic monitoring of animal population data, in any phase of implementation. The review found that developments in veterinary syndromic surveillance are focused not only on animal health, but also on the use of animals as sentinels for public health, representing a further step towards One Medicine. The main sources of information are clinical data from practitioners and laboratory data, but a number of other sources are being explored. Due to limitations inherent in the way data on animal health is collected, the development of veterinary syndromic surveillance initially focused on animal health data collection strategies, analyzing historical data for their potential to support systematic monitoring, or solving problems of data classification and integration. Systems based on passive notification or data transfers are now dealing with sustainability issues. Given the ongoing barriers in availability of data, diagnostic laboratories appear to provide the most readily available data sources for syndromic surveillance in animal health. As the bottlenecks around data source availability are overcome, the next challenge is consolidating data standards for data classification, promoting the integration of different animal health surveillance systems, and also the integration to public health surveillance. Moreover, the outputs of systems for systematic monitoring of animal health data must be directly connected to real-time decision support systems which are increasingly being used for disease management and control. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Necropsies were performed on 496 horses that had a fatal injury or illness at a California racetrack during the period February 20th 1990 to March 1st 1992. The primary cause of death was categorised by breed, activity at time of injury or illness and organ system affected. Most of the submissions were Thoroughbred horses (432) and Quarter Horses (46). Most of the injuries occurred while racing (42%) and in training sessions (39%); with fewer non-exercise (12%) and accident (7%) related injuries or illnesses. Musculoskeletal injuries accounted for 83% of the Thoroughbred and 80% of the Quarter Horse submissions. The Thoroughbred horses incurred 306 fractures with 263 in the limbs and 90% of those in the forelimbs. The proximal sesamoid bone(s), third metacarpal bone and humerus were the most common bones fractured in Thoroughbred horses and Quarter Horses. Other major causes of death included respiratory, digestive and multi-organ system disorders.