Developments in Animal Health Surveillance

The emergence of new pathogens and other threats to public and animal health offers unique opportunities to develop innovative surveillance methods, particularly when implementing a “One Health” approach, encompassing wild and domestic animal hosts as well as humans. Despite recent advances, there is still room for improvement in surveillance for common zoonoses. Wild animal surveillance is in itself a challenge, given the scarcity of data on wildlife population distribution, abundance, behaviour, or health status and the difficulties in collecting and interpreting wildlife surveillance information. New developments in companion animal surveillance and in the sourcing and analysis of surveillance data across other populations and sectors have emerged, aiming at a more integrated approach. Pressure on budgets for national surveillance activities has driven the development of new cost-effective methodologies such as syndromic surveillance, event- and risk-based surveillance, and new diagnostic techniques for simultaneous detection of multiple pathogens. In an increasingly multidisciplinary environment, new approaches to surveillance design and implementation are being developed that incorporate applied mathematics, analysis of multiple sources of data, and use of robotics or less invasive sampling techniques, each of which can improve timeliness and cost-effectiveness as well as sensitivity of surveillance systems.

This Research Topic aims to cover the wide variety of developments in animal health surveillance, including collaborative approaches between surveillance practitioners in the human and animal health sectors. We would like to encourage the submission of manuscripts that describe new insights in the context of research, policy or delivery of surveillance.