The passive surveillance of ticks using companion animal electronic health records.

Tulloch, JSP ORCID: 0000-0003-2150-0090, McGinley, L, Sánchez-Vizcaíno, F, Medlock, JM and Radford, AD ORCID: 0000-0002-4590-1334 (2017) The passive surveillance of ticks using companion animal electronic health records. Epidemiology and Infection, 145 (10). pp. 2020-2029.

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Official URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiolo...

Abstract

Ticks represent a large global reservoir of zoonotic disease. Current surveillance systems can be time and labour intensive. We propose that the passive surveillance of companion animal electronic health records (EHRs) could provide a novel methodology for describing temporal and spatial tick activity. A total of 16 58 857 EHRs were collected over a 2-year period (31 March 2014 and 29 May 2016) from companion animals attending a large sentinel network of 192 veterinary clinics across Great Britain (the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network - SAVSNET). In total, 2180 EHRs were identified where a tick was recorded on an animal. The relative risk of dogs presenting with a tick compared with cats was 0·73 (95% confidence intervals 0·67-0·80). The highest number of tick records were in the south central regions of England. The presence of ticks showed marked seasonality with summer peaks, and a secondary smaller peak in autumn for cats; ticks were still being found throughout most of Great Britain during the winter. This suggests that passive surveillance of companion animal EHRs can describe tick activity temporally and spatially in a large cohort of veterinary clinics across Great Britain. These results and methodology could help inform veterinary and public health messages as well as increase awareness of ticks and tick-borne diseases in the general population.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	companion animals, electronic health records, Great Britain, one health, surveillance, ticks
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	08 May 2017 10:09
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 07:04
DOI:	10.1017/s0950268817000826
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3007287