Animal Health and Disease Monitoring in the Abattoir

All slaughter animals are examined before and after slaughter by an Official Veterinarian. Findings of diseases and conditions that could affect public health or animal health have to be reported to the management of the abattoir and the private veterinarian as well as the farmer of the farm of origin. The abattoir provides a vast amount of information on zoonotic and notifiable diseases, as well as diseases relevant for animal husbandry or on-farm animal health. Notifiable diseases can be identified through clinical signs (e.g. foot-and-mouth disease), but in specific cases samples are taken for serological surveillance (e.g. Aujeszky's disease). Surveillance and monitoring schemes are generally based on the Terrestrial Animal Health Code of the World Organisation for Animal Health. Bovine tuberculosis is another example of a disease for which monitoring and surveillance is often entirely based on abattoir detection. For transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) abattoir sampling constitutes an important proportion of all samples taken. Monitoring of public health threats, including diseases such as trichinellosis and cysticercosis, remains an important element of the inspection practices in the abattoir. Monitoring of trichinellosis can be risk based: only pigs expected to be at a higher risk of infection are included in the testing regimen. Abattoir sampling is also used for assessment of compliance with legislation on residues of antimicrobial drugs in meat. The number of samples is small, but the sampling itself has a preventive effect. An important category of diseases are those relevant for the performance on farm. Some examples are lung and heart lesions, as well as several parasitic diseases such as liver fluke. Indicators for welfare problems on-farm may also appear at slaughter. Foot lesions in poultry and tail biting in pigs are some examples. Abattoir information is easy and cheap to come by and is underutilised at the moment, particularly to feed into animal health management on farm. It would be advisable to design a feedback system in which post-mortem findings are described with the interest of the farmer and her/his veterinary surgeon in min

Rapid risk assessment tool (RRAT) to prioritize emerging and re-emerging livestock diseases for risk management

Increasing globalization and international trade contribute to rapid expansion of animal and human diseases. Hence, preparedness is warranted to prevent outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases or detect outbreaks in an early stage. We developed a rapid risk assessment tool (RRAT) to inform risk managers on the incursion risk of multiple livestock diseases, about the main sources for incursion and the change of risk over time. RRAT was built as a relational database to link data on disease outbreaks worldwide, on introduction routes and on disease-specific parameters. The tool was parameterized to assess the incursion risk of 10 livestock diseases for the Netherlands by three introduction routes: legal trade in live animals, legal trade of animal products, and animal products illegally carried by air travelers. RRAT calculates a semi-quantitative risk score for the incursion risk of each disease, the results of which allow for prioritization. Results based on the years 2016-2018 indicated that the legal introduction routes had the highest incursion risk for bovine tuberculosis, whereas the illegal route posed the highest risk for classical swine fever. The overall incursion risk via the illegal route was lower than via the legal routes. The incursion risk of African swine fever increased over the period considered, whereas the risk of equine infectious anemia decreased. The variation in the incursion risk over time illustrates the need to update the risk estimates on a regular basis. RRAT has been designed such that the risk assessment can be automatically updated when new data becomes available. For diseases with high-risk scores, model results can be analyzed in more detail to see which countries and trade flows contribute most to the risk, the results of which can be used to design risk-based surveillance. RRAT thus provides a multitude of information to evaluate the incursion risk of livestock diseases at different levels of detail. To give risk managers access to all results of RRAT, an online visualization tool was built.</p