Our day to day work
We look for notifiable diseases on the ground, inspecting animals for signs and undertaking clinical tests. This is known as animal disease surveillance, and the amount of surveillance that we do depends on the risk: if the known risk of any particular exotic disease increases, for example, then we increase our surveillance for it, knowing that the sooner we find any infection the better the prospect of dealing with it quickly.
When we find endemic disease we implement control measures. These can differ depending on the exact nature of the disease, but generally we stop animals moving off farm or cull infected animals. At the same time we trace known contacts of diseased animals – for example, animals that have been moved to another farm – and we test them for disease.
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