An official website of the United States government.
Todays modern egg industry operates on a just-in-time basis. Each day, eggs move from production sites to food service distributors, retail stores, and distribution centers of fast-food restaurants and grocery store chains. In the event of a disease outbreak and stop movement order, restaurants and retail grocery stores will run out of eggs in 24-48 hours, resulting in economic consequences and a loss of consumer faith in food safety and security. This proposal requests funds to develop and test: <ol>
<li>Biological Risk Management web-based tools to protect poultry operations from becoming infected and <li>Exposure Assessment tools that can be used in an outbreak situation to assure that eggs are safe to move to the market place. <li>Rapid Analysis Algorithms that combine the exposure assessment and surveillance data with location analysis to estimate the flocks risk (mathematical scoring) of exposure to highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) or exotic Newcastle disease (END).</ol> These web-based tools can be used by animal health officials to conduct pre-outbreak risk management, and timely (during outbreak) exposure assessment for individual egg production sites which will quickly allow low-risk egg production premises to resume movement of shell eggs and egg products.
NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Develop the Biological Risk Management tools, Exposure Audit Tool, and surveillance protocols Develop analysis algorithms Develop the software for entry and analysis of surveillance data, BRM assessments, and exposure audits. <P>APPROACH: 1) A biological risk management (BRM) (web based and secured) toolbox will be developed for egg producers to use to evaluate and improve BRM in their facilities. <P>
2) In order to be eligible to be considered for movement of eggs and egg products in the event of an outbreak, producers will be required to submit daily information on egg production, mortality, feed consumption and water consumption for each chicken house on a premises to the BRM database. <P>3) A federal/state official will conduct an exposure audit that evaluates BRM practices and company standard operating procedures. <P>4) If a facility receives approval to move shell eggs and egg products, they will be required to submit to the web-based server daily information on egg production, mortality, feed consumption and water consumption for each chicken house on a premises in a control area. <P>5) Location data for houses in the control area will be combined with current location data on infected premises. GPS coordinates of infected and non-infected buildings will allow accurate real-time assessment of a premises exposure risk.<P> 6) By using the proposed on-line data entry system, the data will already be available for analyses to be conducted using the latest updated pre-designed risk assessment criteria, developed in collaboration with APHIS risk assessors. <P>7) During an outbreak, on-going surveillance data and location analysis will be entered daily. All data will be processed using pre-designed analysis protocols.