Food securityReal-time livestock disease situational awareness

Veterinarians are the U.A. first responders for animal health. They act as the primary line of defense against animal disease outbreaks and are essential to the protection of our animal industries and economy. Food animal veterinarians, or those that treat livestock and poultry, are often responsible for monitoring the health of thousands of animals spread across vast geographic areas. While some diseases can be readily diagnosed, others are harder to identify in the field. In these cases, veterinarians typically ship samples to a diagnostic laboratory where it may take days to analyze the samples and disseminate test results.

Greater awareness of the health status of livestock at neighboring farms would change the way veterinarians operate in these situations. What seems like a series of unremarkable findings to a single veterinarian may have greater significance when associated with reports from other veterinarians nearby. With this expanded clinical picture, veterinarians may be able to determine whether the symptoms of concern are isolated or widespread and alter their diagnosis accordingly.

DHS Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) says that unfortunately, veterinarians often have limited access to information about animal health in their region due to lack of connectivity with other veterinarians. Combined with slow test results, this lack of information sharing can delay the detection of a disease outbreak, thereby affecting producers, international trade, and business continuity across the country.

To address this issue, researchers at the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense (FAZD Center) are working with veterinarians, federal and state animal health officials, and industry partners to improve real-time situational awareness of animal diseases. The FAZD Center’s primary mission is to develop solutions to support the needs of these stakeholders and help protect the agriculture economy, food supply, and public health. With funding from S&T, the FAZD Center collaborated with these end users to design, develop, and pilot the Enhanced Passive Surveillance (EPS) system.

EPS builds upon an information-sharing framework developed with funding from the S&T Office of University Programs (OUP). S&T says that this framework is designed to leverage mobile technologies for information collection that can aid in the early detection of disease outbreaks or changes in the health status of the U.S. livestock and poultry populations. By integrating and aggregating the data, decision-makers, veterinarians, and producers can more easily access and visualize animal health data from multiple sources within a common integrated picture.

— Read more in “Preventing Disease Outbreaks in Livestock — Now There’s An App for That”