Impact of Removing the Monitoring Requirements for Holdings with Atypical Scrapie in Great Britain.

Atypical scrapie (AS) is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) that affects sheep and goats. Low within-flock incidence suggests that AS is not transmissible between animals, and testing of all animals that exit positive flocks for two years following detection (i.e.

Assessing the quality of data for drivers of disease emergence.

Drivers are factors that have the potential to directly or indirectly influence the likelihood of infectious diseases emerging or re-emerging. It is likely that an emerging infectious disease (EID) rarely occurs as the result of only one driver; rather, a network of sub-drivers (factors that can influence a driver) are likely to provide conditions that allow a pathogen to (re-)emerge and become established. Data on sub-drivers have therefore been used by modellers to identify hotspots where EIDs may next occur, or to estimate which sub-drivers have the greatest influence on the likelihood of their occurrence.

Challenges involved in the collection of appropriate data for the completion of disease outbreak risk assessments.

Risk assessment is an essential tool used in the control of disease outbreaks. Without it, key risk pathways might not be identified, resulting in potential spread of disease. The devastating effects of disease spread can ripple through society, affecting the economy and trade and having considerable impact on animal health and potentially human health.

A framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of output-based surveillance systems against zoonotic threats.

Output-based standards set a prescribed target to be achieved by a surveillance system, but they leave the selection of surveillance parameters, such as test type and population to be sampled, to the responsible party in the surveillance area. This allows proportionate legislative surveillance specifications to be imposed over a range of unique geographies. This flexibility makes output-based standards useful in the context of zoonotic threat surveillance, particularly where animal pathogens act as risk indicators for human health or where multiple surveillance streams cover human, animal, and food safety sectors.

A review of qualitative risk assessment in animal health: Suggestions for best practice.

Qualitative risk assessment (QRA) can provide decision support in line with the requirement for an objective, unbiased assessment of disease risk according to the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures of the World Trade Organization. However, in order for a QRA to be objective and consistently applied it is necessary to standardize the approach as much as possible. This review considers how QRAs have historically been used for the benefit of animal health, what problems have been encountered during their progression, and considers best practice for their future use.