Summary
The
tracking of sentinel health events in humans in order to detect
and manage disease risks facing a larger population is a well accepted
technique applied to influenza, occupational conditions and emerging
infectious diseases. Similarly, animal health professionals routinely
track disease events in sentinel animal colonies and sentinel herds.
The use of animals as sentinels for human health threats, or of
humans as sentinels for animal disease risk, dates back at least
to the era when coal miners brought caged canaries into mines to
provide early warning of toxic gases. Yet the full potential of
linking animal and human health information to provide warning of
such ‘shared
risks’
from environmental hazards has not been realised. Reasons appear
to include the professional segregation of human and animal health
communities, the separation of human and animal surveillance data
and evidence gaps in the linkages between human and animal responses
to environmental health hazards. The ‘One
Health initiative’
and growing international collaboration in response to pandemic
threats, coupled with development in the fields of informatics and
genomics, hold promise for improved sentinel event coordination
in order to detect and reduce environmental health threats shared
between species.
Keywords
Animal,
Biodiversity, Comparative medicine, Environment, Genomics, Health,
Medical informatics, Medicine, One Health, Sentinel, Surveillance,
Zoonosis. |