A pilot program for clinical Q fever surveillance as a first step for a standardized differential diagnosis of abortions: organizational lessons applied to goats farms

Publication date: Available online 11 September 2017 Source:Small Ruminant Research Author(s): Renée de Cremoux, Kristel Gache, Elodie Rousset, Carole Sala, Soline Hosteing, Philippe Nicollet, Frédéric Lars, Raphaël Guatteo, Françoise Dion, Didier Calavas, Anne Bronner, Jean-Baptiste Perrin, Anne Touratier Multiple challenges have to be faced both for animal and public health in the fields of infectious abortion surveillance especially when zoonotic diseases are concerned: ensuring early detection of brucellosis, improving outbreak surveillance as well as animal health management. Thus, a global approach to diagnosis of abortive infectious diseases was discussed within the framework of the French platform for animal health surveillance by a collaborative multi-stakeholder group. Q fever appeared as a relevant target to initiate this new approach in order to test the different steps, from the implementation in the farms to the analysis of the results. Therefore, a pilot study was set up in 2012, for three years, in ten départements (administrative unit of 5500Km2 on average) covering 1,493 goat farms. It focused on abortive episodes defined as at least three abortions over seven days or less. A farm-level diagnosis approach, i.e. the interpretation of combinations of results from several animals was used. Therefore, the decision-making was based on the results of two qPCR applied on vaginal swabs (individual or pooled analysis) and, if necessary, on furthe...
Source: Small Ruminant Research - Category: Zoology Source Type: research