Development of Reporting Guidelines for Animal Health Surveillance—AHSURED

Abstract

With the current trend in animal health surveillance toward risk-based designs and a gradual transition to output-based standards, greater flexibility in surveillance design is both required and allowed. However, the increase in flexibility requires more transparency regarding surveillance, its activities, design and implementation. Such transparency allows stakeholders, trade partners, decision-makers and risk assessors to accurately interpret the validity of the surveillance outcomes. This paper presents the first version of the Animal Health Surveillance Reporting Guidelines (AHSURED) and the process by which they have been developed. The goal of AHSURED was to produce a set of reporting guidelines that supports communication of surveillance activities in the form of narrative descriptions. Reporting guidelines come from the field of evidence-based medicine and their aim is to improve consistency and quality of information reported in scientific journals. They usually consist of a checklist of items to be reported, a description/definition of each item, and an explanation and elaboration document. Examples of well-reported items are frequently provided. Additionally, it is common to make available a website where the guidelines are documented and maintained. This first version of the AHSURED guidelines consists of a checklist of 40 items organized in 11 sections (i.e., surveillance system building blocks), which is available as a wiki at https://github.com/SVA-SE/AHSURED/wiki. The choice of a wiki format will allow for further inputs from surveillance experts who were not involved in the earlier stages of development. This will promote an up-to-date refined guideline document.

Foot‐and‐mouth disease seroprevalence and reporting behaviours in nine northern provinces in Lao PDR: The current situation and challenges for control

“…Historical data are essential for monitoring changes in the epidemiological situation of FMD in the country and can provide information on potential spatial and temporal changes or patterns (Aman et al., 2020). This information can be vital for forward‐planning of disease control programmes and provides donors with evidence of the need for ongoing support (Comin et al., 2019). As trade between Laos and China increases in the future, there may be increased pressure for the Lao government to be able to provide quality evidence of FMD freedom in zones of the country.…”

Post‐outbreak African horse sickness surveillance: A scenario tree evaluation in South Africa’s controlled area

“…While the outputs presented provide a quantitative estimate of the surveillance sensitivity and probability of freedom over a period of time, there are other factors which influence the ability of surveillance to detect disease. Well‐described frameworks for the evaluation of surveillance activities in animal health have been published (Calba et al., 2013; Cameron et al., 2014; Comin et al., 2019; Drewe et al., 2015; Hoinville et al., 2013; Muellner et al., 2018); the results of this study would be best contextualized within one of these frameworks to provide a more holistic evaluation of AHS surveillance in the controlled area of South Africa.…”

Key Learnings During the Development of a Generic Data Collection Tool to Support Assessment of Freedom of Infection in Cattle Herds

“…Example include the RISKSUR (Risk-based animal health surveillance systems) project in which decision support tools were developed to assist in the design of surveillance programmes ( 11 ) and the HOTLINE (Harmonization Of Transmissible disease Interpretation in the EU) project which sought to make disease information from different countries comparable and interpretable ( 12 ). As part of this latter project, guidelines were developed for the reporting of animal health surveillance (AHSURED: Animal Health Surveillance Reporting Guidelines) ( 13 ). A list of key surveillance items, such as geographical area, susceptible population, historical situation etc., has been published to guide the reporting of surveillance activities, such as confidence of freedom from infection or prevalence estimation ( https://github.com/SVA-SE/AHSURED/wiki ).…”