Accuracy of herdsmen reporting versus serologic testing for estimating foot-and-mouth disease prevalence

• Published in: Emerging infectious diseases 2014-12, Vol.20 (12), p.2048-2054
• Main Authors: Morgan, Kenton L, Handel, Ian G, Tanya, Vincent N, Hamman, Saidou M, Nfon, Charles, Bergman, Ingrid E, Malirat, Viviana, Sorensen, Karl J, de C Bronsvoort, Barend M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accuracy of Herdsmen Reporting versus Serologic Testing for Estimating Foot-and-Mouth Disease Prevalence; Analysis; Animals; Cattle; Cattle Diseases - diagnosis; Cattle Diseases - epidemiology; Cattle Diseases - virology; Cross-Sectional Studies; epidemiology; FMD; Foot-and-mouth disease; Foot-and-Mouth Disease - diagnosis; Foot-and-Mouth Disease - epidemiology; Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus - immunology; herdsmen; Neutralization Tests - methods; Neutralization Tests - standards; participatory; Prevalence; Prevalence studies (Epidemiology); Reproducibility of Results; Sensitivity and Specificity; Serologic Testing
• ISSN: 1080-6040; 1080-6059
• DOI: 10.3201/eid2012.140931

Herdsman-reported disease prevalence is widely used in veterinary epidemiologic studies, especially for diseases with visible external lesions; however, the accuracy of such reports is rarely validated. Thus, we used latent class analysis in a Bayesian framework to compare sensitivity and specificity of herdsman reporting with virus neutralization testing and use of 3 nonstructural protein ELISAs for estimates of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) prevalence on the Adamawa plateau of Cameroon in 2000. Herdsman-reported estimates in this FMD-endemic area were comparable to those obtained from serologic testing. To harness to this cost-effective resource of monitoring emerging infectious diseases, we suggest that estimates of the sensitivity and specificity of herdsmen reporting should be done in parallel with serologic surveys of other animal diseases.