KC/BSAVA Scientific Committee 2004 Purebred Dog Health Survey - more information below.
Surveillance is the ongoing, and often continuous, collection, analysis, interpretation and communication of health information. Surveillance allows us to follow, in both time and space, the health status and risk factors associated with disease in a given population. The information obtained via surveillance can be used in the planning, implementation and evaluation of disease control schemes.
Surveillance programs may be designed to meet a variety of objectives, including the following:
1) To estimate the relative importance of a disease
2) To detect an increase in disease or an outbreak of disease
3) To describe the natural history of a disease
4) To monitor changes in disease occurrence
5) To identify research needs and to provide information for such research
6) To help plan and evaluate disease control strategies
5) To provide information to assist in political, social and economic decision making
Carried out under the auspices of the Kennel Club/British Small Animal Veterinary Association Scientific Committee. Results are summarised by breed on The Kennel Club website: www.thekennelclub.org.uk/ - follow the links from Dog Breeding to Dog Health and DNA Schemes and finally to Health Survey Results.
The purpose of this large epidemiological survey was to obtain baseline information on the health status of pedigree dogs in the UK.
Epidemiology is an essential tool for the study of the ecology and description of the natural history of disease, health surveillance, disease detection and disease outbreak investigation. What has been described as "shoe-leather" epidemiology refers to the door-to-door interviews that have been used to identify affected individuals (cases) and unaffected individuals (controls) in an outbreak or disease investigation. This type of epidemiological technique is invaluable in identifying risk facors and potential causes of disease.
The field of clinical epidemiology is said to be ‘clinical’ as it seeks to answer clinical questions and to guide clinical decision making and ‘epidemiology’ as it focuses on the care of individual patients in the context of the larger population and the methods used to answer clinical questions. At the clinical level, the principles of epidemiology provide tools for evaluating methods of diagnosis and treatment in the clinical environment. The principles of epidemiology are essential in clinical medicine because there are wide variations in the expression of disease between individuals. If all individuals responded identically to a disease or its treatment, then we would be able to do detailed experiments on one animal and know how to diagnose, treat and prevent that condition in all others of that breed.
