Summary
The
author describes the characteristics of surveillance systems and
the use of surveillance in the three following scenarios: absence
of infection, appearance of an exotic/emerging infection and endemic
infections. In a population free from an infection, surveillance
is used mainly to protect, by means of early detection systems,
the population itself from the introduction of the infectious agent
from other populations, and to document the health status of the
population for international trade purposes. When an exotic infection
enters a country, the information required to foresee its possible
spread and to plan control and eradication activities is very often
missing. As an example of the use of surveillance to collect the
information needed to plan control and eradication activities, the
author describes the response to the incursion into Europe of bluetongue
in the early 2000s. The European brucellosis programme (from 1964
to the present) is taken as an example of the use of surveillance
to monitor the control/eradication activities and to steer the control/eradication
programme. Finally, the principal challenges currently faced by
animal health surveillance professionals are discussed, namely:
the methods for gathering information from the wild animal populations,
and the methods used to evaluate the equivalence between different
surveillance systems based on structured non-random activities and
random surveys.
Keywords
Control,
Early detection systems, Eradication, Freedom from infection, Notification
systems, Surveillance. |