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The mission of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network is "to provide accessible, timely, accurate and consistent animal disease laboratory services nationwide and maintain the capacity and capability to respond to a foreign animal disease outbreak and to focus on diseases of livestock, but also including non-livestock species." On-going surveillance is performed at Colorado State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory (CSUVDL)for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), Scrapie, Avian Influenza (AI), Exotic Newcastle's Disease (END), Vesicular Stomatitis (VS) and Classical Swine Fever (CSF). This on-going surveillance is planned to continue for the next year. Various diagnostic laboratory faculty and staff will continue to serve on the NAHLN Steering Committee (Powers, Kammerzell) and Methods Technical Work Group (Pabilonia) and Information Technology Committee (Kammerzell). The technical methods working group designs and standardizes the assays to be used for testing in the laboratories, and the steering committee helps guide the progress of the NAHLN IT committee to ensure the data is input accurately to the repository in a timely fashion. Other infrastructure efforts will continue to enhance detection, response and recovery from an animal agriculture catastrophe or early detection of an emerging disease. Outreach efforts to stakeholders in the region will continue.
NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: The mission of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network is "to provide accessible, timely, accurate and consistent animal disease laboratory services nationwide and maintain in the capacity and capability to respond to a foreign animal disease outbreak and to focus on diseases of livestock, but also including non-livestock species." This protects the nation's public health, and the nation's food supply from a foreign animal disease outbreak, such as foot and mouth disease, or avian influenza. This may save the country millions of dollars protecting the agriculture systems, and protecting public health. The laboratory system also detects for new and emerging diseases that may occur.
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APPROACH: The methods used to test samples for the described disease are USDA approved methods only, and follow USDA protocols per the NAHLN checklist. Most assays are realtime polymerase chain reaction assays. Also ELISA testing, complement fixation, and immunohistochemistry techniques are utilized. The numbers of tests performed are summarized by The Laboratory Information Management System that stores the data. The transfer of results is done as determined by the USDA NAHLN IT sub-committee working with USDA's staff. The educational outreach efforts are tabulated and listed.