Veterinary syndromic surveillance in practice: costs and benefits for governmental organizations

Abstract

Background

We describe a veterinary syndromic surveillance system developed in Sweden based on laboratory test requests.

Materials and methods

The system is a desktop application built using free software.

Results

Development took 1 year. During the first year of operation, utility was demonstrated by the detection of statistically significant increases in the number of laboratory submissions. The number of false alarms was considered satisfactory in order to achieve the desired sensitivity.

Discussion

Besides the demonstrated benefit for disease surveillance, the system contributed to improving data quality and communication between the diagnostic departments and the epidemiology department.

• animal health
• laboratory data
• aberration detection

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the diagnosticians who contributed to the development of the system, in particular: Dr. Anna Lindhe, Dr. Eva Osterman-Lind, Dr. Karin Persson-Waller, and Dr. Erik Ågren. They also thank Martin Bergström for the support with the Oracle database. System development was funded by the Swedish Board of Agriculture.