An inventory of zoonotic and food borne disease surveillance systems: Expanding and understanding the One Health knowledge base

Effective disease-management decision making is often underpinned by surveillance data. For zoonotic and food-borne diseases that benefit from a One Health (OH) approach, data from multiple surveillance systems may be required. However, identifying and accessing these data can be difficult. To address this problem, we aimed to develop an accessible inventory of the zoonotic and food-borne disease surveillance systems in existence across Europe. We created spreadsheet-based questionnaires to collect uniform data describing relevant surveillance systems from each of the sectors: animal health, public health, and food safety. The spreadsheets were sent to all European Joint Programme ‘ORION’ and ‘MATRIX’ project partners for data contribution. Currently, the inventory contains 216 entries for public health, 299 for animal health and 204 for food safety. Analysis of the data revealed several instances of pathogens under surveillance across all three sectors within a country, demonstrating scope for cross-sectoral surveillance based on existing systems. However, intersectoral differences were observed in the definitions of common terminologies, and various surveillance elements such as system objectives, sampling context and sampling strategy. In summary, this surveillance inventory both improves cross-sectoral understanding of surveillance approaches, and facilitates information exchange across sectors and countries for improved OH approaches to disease management and prevention.