Research Accomplishment Reports 2009

Kentucky Statewide Food Animal Health Risk Surveillance and Disease Cluster Detection Initiative

Carter, C. N., W. Northington, J.L. Smith
Livestock Disease Diagnostic Center

 

Non-Technical Summary

The overall goal of this project is to fully implement an integrated Kentucky-wide animal health information system that fuses diagnostic and farm-level syndromic health data streams from two full-service veterinary laboratories and the Office of the State Veterinarian (OSV). The integration of these data will aid animal health officials to manage day-to-day disease outbreaks, emerging diseases, and provide early detection of a possible agroterrorist event.

This will be accomplished by electronically processing all active clinical cases (over 200,000) from two laboratories through the new system for a period of two years to include accessioning, test order entry, test resulting, automated case reporting and data base archiving. At the close of business each day, a sophisticated statistical system will analyze important health events and reported syndromes which will generate alerts to key animal health officials regarding emerging diseases and clusters of disease. The system will also publish disease alerts and trends on the web for public access. All medical terminology utilized at the two laboratories will be mapped to an internationally-recognized standardized nomenclature, thereby allowing the seamless integration of multiple data bases for disease cluster and trend reporting.

This novel system will provide near-real time animal health situational awareness for farmers, practicing veterinarians, and state and federal animal health officials, thereby helping to conserve precious animal agricultural resources. The resultant system could become a model for the entire U.S.

2009 Project Description

1. Configured, implemented and tested a clinical case accessioning system for the Lexington (8/1/2009) and Hopkinsville (12/1/2009) veterinary diagnostic laboratories. The system has successfully processed over 25,000 cases.

2. Configured, implemented and tested a diagnostic test order entry system that dovetails with the accessioning system in #1. Over 200,000 live diagnostic tests have been successfully ordered and resulted since implementation.

3. The animal health events captured in the system (abortions, deaths, etc) are passed daily to a statistically driven cluster detection system. Alerts are generated by the system which are read by the laboratory epidemiologist. The alerts are reviewed and an appropriate response is mounted (email bulletins to practitioners, field investigation, alerting of state and federal animal health officials).

2009 Impact

The major outcome and impact thus far in this project is the creation of a veterinary diagnostic data warehouse that is utilized for daily disease cluster detection processes, disease/etiology trend reporting, GIS thematic product production and queries in support of retrospective studies. As this warehouse grows it will become more valuable as a trending/epidemiological investigative tool.

2009 Publications

Carter CN, Odoi A, Smith J, Dwyer R, Riley J, Stepusin R: Laboratory-based animal health event cluster detection systems: improving the outcome of disease outbreaks. Proceed of the XIV International Symposium of the WAVLD, Jun, 2009, p26.

Odoi A, Carter CN, Riley, J, Smith J: Laboratory-based early warning syndromic surveillance system using a scan statistic: application on mare abortion outbreak in Kentucky, Am J Vet Res, 2009;70:247-256.