The Role of Animal Health Components in a Biosurveillance System: Concept and Demonstration

Biosurveillance defines the process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information related to all-hazards threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, or plant health to achieve early detection and warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of an incident, and to enable better decision making for action at all levels. Animal health surveillance is an important component within biosurveillance systems comprising a continuum of activities from detecting biological threats, to analyzing relevant data, to managing identified threats, and embracing a One Health concept. The animal health community can strengthen biosurveillance by adopting various developments such as increasing the alignment, engagement, and participation of stakeholders in surveillance systems, exploring new data streams, improving integration and analysis of data streams for decision-making, enhancing research and application of social sciences and behavioral methods in animal health surveillance, and performing timely evaluation of surveillance systems. The aim of this paper is to explore components of a biosurveillance system from an animal health perspective and identify opportunities for the animal health surveillance community to enhance biosurveillance. Structural and operational diagrams are presented to demonstrate the required components and relevant data of animal health surveillance as an effective part within a biosurveillance system.