EZ Sentinel Animal Health Surveillance
Purpose EZ Sentinel Animal Health Surveillance is a public health research project whose aim is to evaluate the potential contribution of animal health practitioners to emerging zoonosis surveillance.
Overview
Emerging infectious diseases of animal origin that are potential zoonoses are of high importance to human public health. Recently, interest has arisen in using animal health data for early warning in human public health surveillance. Animal health data, however, has not been evaluated for this purpose. This project will enable the evaluation of animal laboratory data submitted to a publicly-funded provincial laboratory for surveillance, by enabling the calculation of measures such as representativeness, sensitivity, specificity, and timeliness of such laboratory diagnostic data. This will be done by comparing laboratory information to information from sentinels; sentinels are not required to submit any additional laboratory samples for this project.
This surveillance project is limited to collection information from birds and mammals in the following two groups: 1) agricultural and large companion animals: including poultry, cattle, swine, bison, sheep, goats and horses 2) wildlife: including deer, raccoons, white-footed mice, bats, beavers and wild birds Laboratory samples for companion animals (pets) other than horses are often submitted to private laboratories that are not readily available for potential surveillance initiatives at this time. Supported by
