Australia's wildlife health surveillance system

Surveillance not only allows early detection, but also allows the gathering of baseline information to help the assessment of significance of wildlife disease events.

Australia’s Animal Health Surveillance System sup­ports emergency disease preparedness and response activities, underpins market access, and drives better outcomes for animal, human and environmental health, and biosecurity.

The purpose of Australia’s general wildlife health sur­veillance system is to:

• identify exotic or emerging diseases and changes to the pattern of endemic diseases

• determine the occurrence and distribution of wildlife diseases

• provide data to improve management of disease outbreaks

• provide data to inform risk analysis, decision making and development of policies

• provide data to support claims of freedom from speci­fied diseases and to meet Australia’s national and international reporting commitments (e.g. to WOAH).

Australia’s wildlife health surveillance system includes general surveillance, via investigation of unusual signs of disease or deaths in wildlife. Data is collected from events in the following categories: notifiable animal diseases, diseases listed by WOAH, diseases with potential impacts on biodiversity (including EEPL listed native animal dis­eases), diseases with potential impacts on public health (e.g. zoonotic diseases, evidence of AMR), poisoning events, mass mortality events, emerging diseases, and events considered interesting or unusual. The system also includes targeted surveillance (sometimes referred to as ‘active’ surveillance) focused on specific diseases.

Disease risk analysis is a commonly used repeatable, transparent and evidence-based process that can inform disease risk management decision making in the face of uncertainty and determine the potential impact of infec­tious and non-infectious diseases on ecosystems, wildlife, domestic animals and people (Jakob-Hoff et al. 2014). Though primarily used to inform management of risks associated with movement (e.g. import) or translocation of animals, it is increasingly being used to assist in wildlife management and to inform surveillance at a national scale. National risk assessments conducted for Australian mam­mals include for Erhlichia canis, SARS-CoV-2, white-nose syndrome and koala diseases. The Koala Disease Risk Analysis Report is the first national-scale species-specific wildlife disease risk analysis in Australia (Vitali et al. 2023).

In recognition that both government and non-govern- ment agencies and organisations can contribute to wild­life disease surveillance, a number of national programs provide and support Australia’s general wildlife health surveillance system (see below).

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