Use of local animal care intake data for disease surveillance: The Orange County experience

Objectives: Local health jurisdictions are continually looking for novel methods for improving disease surveillance. This presentation will discuss Orange County Health Care Agency, Epidemiology & Assessment's (E&A) use of their local Orange County Animal Care Services (ACS) electronic animal intake data for monitoring the health of the local community and as a form of syndromic surveillance since 2004. Methods: E&A obtains data set on a regular basis from ACS. The data is then analyzed following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's SAS based Early Aberration and Reporting System methodology as well as an SPSS based Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) methodology. Based on internal protocols, E&A follows up with ACS regarding any aberrations in the data Results: Using these methodologies, we found that a statistically significant increase in the total number of bird intakes as well as dead birds, especially corvids, in 2004 signaled the start of the local West Nile Virus epidemic. Conclusions: Local health jurisdiction's use of animal care and control intake data may be a useful component of an overall disease surveillance system to monitor the health of the local community, especially for zoonotic diseases.