The Role of Animal Health Components in a Biosurveillance System: Concept and Demonstration

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I very much enjoyed reading through this paper – well done

It is clearly written from a US perspective but good effort has been made to bring in case studies and examples from all over the world. 

Perhaps surprising not to have some reference to the Q fever outbreak in the Netherlands https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0399077X14000535?via%3Dihub –a very interesting One Health example involving small ruminants

Some small details -

Table 1 – the formatting here makes it difficult to read (definitely not helped by spanning across the end of the page).  I would remove the bullet points and the indents and start each separate section with a capital letter at least.  Also would be helpful to have references for the different definitions in the table description line 116.

Figure 4 – Risk-based not a single word.

Bottom left corner - More logical to have Demonstrate freedom above Early detection above Detect cases above Measure frequency

SPS needs to be written out in full

Author Response

Please check attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the narrative review submitted by Tan et al. This paper describes the relationship between animal health surveillance and the broader aims of biosurveillance, drawing on definitions, reports, and codes published by intergovernmental organizations and several government agencies (of US and Australia), the Handbook of Biosurveillance, and several relevant published manuscripts. The paper highlights the One Health nature of biosurveillance and how animal health surveillance requires a One Health framework, contributes to the concept, and should be integrated into policy on that basis.

The paper is very written overall. I offer the following comments and suggestions for the authors’ consideration.

The title of the article is a bit unclear. I think the thrust of the review is that the contributions of animal health components in a biosurveillance system are important and possibly under-appreciated. Focusing the title on the contributions, i.e., “The contributions of animal health components . . .”, and leaving off the colon and its trailing words might be more effective. If anything should be added, it should relate to One Health.

Next, I noticed that the word “components” is used in two different senses in this review. There are the components of a surveillance system: data sources, data collection/database creation, data synthesis/analysis, data evaluation and decision-making. And there are components of a biosurveillance system: public health related, plant health related, and animal health related. Presenting figures purporting something different in the “system” than the “process” doesn’t exactly make the nesting of components clear. It is unclear if you are really interested in addressing the process, or mostly the data sources going into the system.

There could be more discussion of the difference between panels a and b in Figure 2. I would dub a “the process view” and b “the fusion center view”. There is a very important distinction between data collection and use by a single entity (or group of related entities) (illustrated in panel a) and synthesis of data among entities or agencies (as in panel b). Along those lines, inclusion of a discussion of how the swine industry has mounted the Swine Health Monitoring Program and Swine Health Information Center is warranted. (That discussion may belong later in the paper, e.g. under data streams.)

The iterative process model of data -> analysis -> action -> evaluation shown in Fig. 4 would be good to introduce in the previous section where process is described. That should not be unique to animal health surveillance systems.

Line 94 struck me as odd. Yes, humans, animals, and plants made it into the definition from reference 4, but I’m not sure the shared ecosystem is the underlying concept. It might make more sense to present the early parts of section 3 as “Biosurveillance and One Health.” That appears to be the linkage being made in sections 3.1 and 3.2.

The remaining sections seem to differ from following what is expected based on lines 105-106.

In Fig 3, it might be helpful to clarify that the level of policy being considered is public policy. Also, I would add policy-makers as a stakeholder of the biosurveillance system. Government has both law makers and law enforcers (aka bureaucrats) which have different needs and roles in the biosurveillance process.

Also in Figure 3, perhaps you envision this group of stakeholders within one of the other categories, but I thought it was odd not to list “producers or agriculturalists.” Perhaps they are “commercial.” But then what about the zoological preserves and botanical gardens that enrich lives? Are they commercial, too?

In section 3.4, there seems to be lack of consistency between the discussion of stakeholders as users/beneficiaries of biosurveillance and their role as data generators/providers. A brief mention of US networks engaged in raising awareness and facilitating diagnoses (EDEN, NPDN, and NAHLN) might fit here.

I strongly support the inclusion of the information in section 3.7, but wonder if it belongs with the discussion of stakeholders.

In the conclusion (section 4), the concept of One Health seems to supplant the article’s purpose of reviewing biosurveillance and the contributions of animal health components. If the goal is fostering public policy to enable animal health components to contribute more to biosurveillance, the message can be made more clear.

In addition to the comments above meant to improve the article overall, there are a few minor items that need attention to be sure you are conveying the intended meaning as well as possible.

Lines 156-159: unclear: the strategy reflected or the plan reflected?

line 194: a singular verb “has” may work better

line 212: spell out TSE

line 228: agendas should be plural

line 247: consider “of accessing” in place of “to access”

line 263: AMR can be abbreviated here as previously

line 269: “by” should be “as”

line 305: “had” should be “have”

line 310: foot (not food)

line 341: insert “used to” before “inform”

line 274: “was” should be “were”

line 396: “or” should be “of”

line 415: should be “shortages”

line 417: should be “sometimes”

line 442: should be “diseased”

line 462: there should not be a comma after pandemic

Reference # 33. The chapter title seems odd. Please double check.

Reference #49. Is the year repeated in error?

Author Response

Please check attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf