Novel methodologies for design and analysis of dairy health surveillance programs

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The dairy sector represents a very important part of the Canadian economy with net farm receipts of $ 6.6 billion in 2018. Infectious diseases already present in our herds take a significant toll on profitability and sustainability of Canadian dairies. These diseases also have an impact on animal welfare, use of antimicrobials, and food safety. Moreover, the introduction of new diseases in a herd can have devastating impacts on profitability of that herd, but also on our ability to export our products, our animals, and our genetics on international markets. For these reasons, it is now crucial for our Canadian dairy producers to implement animal health surveillance and control programs that are based on strong scientific evidences. I am pursuing my research program with the long-term overarching goal of improving surveillance programs and biosecurity practices for control of various animal diseases. Specific short-term objectives will be to: 1)quantify the impacts of imperfect sampling strategies on the performances of animal health surveillance systems and develop sampling AND statistical modelling strategies for preventing biases; 2)validate fit for purpose diagnostic strategies for animal health surveillance for a few diseases of great importance in dairy production; 3)develop novel tools for easy and flexible data visualisation of multiple, large provincial and national datasets containing active and passive animal health surveillance information. To achieve these short-term objectives we will conduct a series of studies under three themes: 1) sampling strategies; 2) statistical modelling strategies; and 3) data visualisation. Research under the `sampling strategies' theme will help comparing different sampling approaches (e.g., choice of sampling materials, number of animals sampled per herd, frequency of sampling, number of herds sampled, choice of diagnostic tests) for five dairy cattle diseases identified as high priorities in the National Dairy Research Strategy (contagious mastitis, leucosis, bovine viral diarrhea, paratuberculosis, salmonellosis). Research under the `statistical modelling strategies' theme will evaluate existing, and propose novel cutting-edge statistical modelling approaches designed specifically for animal health surveillance systems. Finally, research activities under the `data visualisation' theme will lead to the development of easy and flexible data visualisation interfaces that will completely transform the way we currently interact with active and passive surveillance data. The proposed research program will have an outstanding impact on the Canadian industry. It will support the establishment of state-of-the-art animal health surveillance and improvement programs. Moreover, the novel data visualisation tools developed will make the surveillance data available in real-time for dairy practitioners and other end users, thus allowing for prompt response to infectious disease threats.