Veterinary Epidemiology and Zoonosis

SPORADIC DISEASE INVESTIGATION 

• Sporadic diseases occur rarely and haphazardly in the population.
• Sporadic diseases are unpredictable with low frequency and with no obvious temporal pattern.
• It doesn’t mean that the sporadic diseases are of no consequences.
•  In fact, some of the most interesting animal diseases from an epidemiological point of view belong to sporadic diseases.
• Example: chronic diseases (paratuberculosis), neoplastic, genetically related problems etc.
• Many sporadic diseases are with an unknown or multifactorial etiology and complex involvement and most time non expressive of clinical features like ice-perk phenomenon.
•  Increased insight into the etiology, pattern and frequency of these sporadic diseases and epidemiological investigations may help practicing veterinarians to recognize with a high risk of a particular sporadic disease and thus improve the likelihood of proper diagnosis, treatment, prevention and control and in turn help to maintain good animal health and increasing the productivity.
• Insufficiently accurate availability of epidemiological data about sporadic diseases is the major problem with sporadic disease investigation.
• Most methods are in retrospective in their approach; these include surveys of existing records, laboratories, practicing veterinarians, established central data bank etc.