Evaluation of global outbreak surveillance performance for high pathogenicity avian influenza and African swine fever

Younjung Kim (), Guillaume Fournié, Paolo Tizzani, Gregorio Torres, Raphaëlle Métras, Dirk Pfeiffer and Pierre Nouvellet
Additional contact information
Younjung Kim: Institut Pierre Louis d’Épidémiologie et de Santé Publique (IPLESP)
Guillaume Fournié: Royal Veterinary College
Paolo Tizzani: World Organisation for Animal Health
Gregorio Torres: World Organisation for Animal Health
Raphaëlle Métras: Institut Pierre Louis d’Épidémiologie et de Santé Publique (IPLESP)
Dirk Pfeiffer: Royal Veterinary College
Pierre Nouvellet: University of Sussex

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Timely outbreak notification is critical for successful disease control. For high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) and African swine fever (ASF), surveillance performance within and across countries remains largely unknown, despite their continued global spread. We assessed surveillance performance in reporting HPAI outbreaks (2020–2023) and ASF outbreaks (2016–2023) amongst World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) member countries/territories using WOAH outbreak notification data. We employed a modelling approach using the number of fatalities reported at initial notification as a performance measure, where fewer fatalities relative to the size of the affected premise—after accounting for other premise-level and country-level factors—were assumed to indicate better performance. For both diseases, fatalities were strongly associated with factors including country/territory, number of susceptible animals, premise type (commercial farms, backyard farms, and villages), season, and spatiotemporal outbreak clustering. The number of susceptible animals and country/territory explained the most variance in fatalities. While a few countries/territories appeared to perform exceptionally well or poorly, significant overdispersion suggested substantial heterogeneities within countries/territories after controlling for other factors. Our findings highlight the need for more targeted national and global efforts to strengthen animal health surveillance capacities.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60094-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-60094-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-60094-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().