Small animal care, sentinel network subjects of new survey

Friday, July 4, 2008

by SUSAN MANN

Currently there isn’t an association in Ontario or Canada for these vets but there is an American association of small ruminant practitioners.

Various organizations have associations for professionals to share information or get continuing education, such as the association of bovine practitioners, says Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) veterinarian Jocelyn Jansen, who specializes in disease prevention in small ruminants and cattle.

Jansen adds that one of the purposes of the proposed new association would be to provide continuing education.

The survey is expected to be a short, one page mail-in questionnaire and be sent out this summer to large animal practitioners in Ontario.

Another part of the survey would be to find out if veterinarians are interested in setting up sentinel practices. Survey details haven’t been finalized yet and this question may go out to more than just small ruminant vets.

Many organizations are looking at how surveillance of production, emerging and foreign animal diseases can be done effectively. “There’s a lot of interest in how we can make sure a disease doesn’t get out of control before anybody found out it,” Jansen says.

A sentinel practice would collect information on animal diseases “to get a real idea of what’s going on out there,” she says.

An OMAFRA-funded pilot project on sentinel practices involving swine has been running for about a year, says Kathy Zurbrigg of the ministry’s vet services unit.

The “overall goal (of the swine sentinel project) is to improve early detection of disease outbreaks,” she explains. While many people assume it’s to do with foreign animal diseases, Zurbrigg notes the swine sentinel project involves more than those types of diseases, which happen rarely. The idea of the project is to look at some of the more production-related diseases that “we see every day.”

It gives vets a heads-up on diseases that affect farmers and can be a problem. “With the heads-up maybe they can do a little bit more about controlling the disease,” she says.

The Ontario Veterinary Medical Association’s demographic survey of 2007 showed 392 veterinarians in the province doing work on sheep and goats for a percentage of their time. That percentage of time ranged from 20 to 74. There aren’t a lot of vets who reported doing sheep and goat work on a regular basis for most of their time, says an association spokesperson. BF