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Manuals & Guidelines

Guidelines for the use of performance indicators in rinderpest surveillance programmes.
A part of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme (GREP) prepared by the Animal Production and Health (APH), Joint FAO/IAEA Programme IAEA-TECDOC-1161, IAEA, Vienna (2000).

Summary

This publication will provide practical guidelines for chief veterinary officers (directors of veterinary services, etc.), rinderpest control co-ordinators, sero-surveillance co-ordinators and laboratory directors at national level on the use of performance indicators designed for rinderpest surveillance, as a part of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme (GREP).
It aims to guide the reader through a comprehensive indicator system capable of assisting routine monitoring of a national surveillance programme and identifying any deficiencies the programme may possess to prompt appropriate action.

Disease Performance indicators

Performance indicators provide assurance that a surveillance system, consisting of both active and passive surveillance (refer to Section 2), would be able to detect disease or virus if these were present in a population or country.
Moreover, performance indicators are specifically designed key measures of quality, sensitivity and quantity of a surveillance system, which evaluate whether achievements of a national disease surveillance programme are on target. They comprise time-delimited, denominator-based statistics.

Rinderpest specific performance indicators

Rinderpest specific performance indicators are management tools for countries to objectively measure and assess their ability to detect rinderpest disease or virus. Furthermore, performance indicators would assist GREP countries in demonstrating the presence of statistically valid, passive and active rinderpest disease surveillance capable of rapidly recognizing a disease outbreak.
Indicators are system dependent. Therefore, in order to formulate performance indicators for a rinderpest surveillance system, the objectives and methodologies of the surveillance system must be clearly defined.

All rinderpest surveillance activities, with the exception of sero-surveillance and possibly passive disease reporting, should be targeted to detect and diagnose field outbreaks of stomatitis–enteritis rather than rinderpest. It can be assumed that all countries experience outbreaks of stomatitis–enteritis and therefore should be finding and investigating these outbreaks, if surveillance programmes are sensitive.

Contact: aph-webcontact@iaea.org.