Wild animal care, disease observation and early-warning for infectious animal diseases and zoonoses

Since the COVID-19-pandemic, the enormous societal, medical and financial impact associated with the transfer of infectious pathogens from wild animals to humans and other animals urged for further follow-up in early signalling management of zoonotic diseases. Consequently, the Raad-voor-Dierenaangelegenheden and the Dutch government currently recommend to set up a surveillance system and cooperation with (applied-)scientists to detect zoonotic diseases using data and samples from animals entering wildlife rehabilitation centres.
Each year approximately 100,000 wild animals are submitted to ±78 Dutch wildlife rehabilitation centres. This would potentially generate an enormous amount of currently unutilized information, which could reduce disease incidence and avoid the problems of scaling-up disease control if early detection can be improved. The current wild animal health surveillance system could be much enhanced if wild animals taken into care by wildlife rehabilitation centres would be consistently registered, processed and shared. However the processes, technology and biological knowhow to do this are currently not up to standards. Besides for this to work, wildlife rehabilitation centres need to be more strongly aligned and strongly embedded in the current health networks.
Therefore, our objective is to develop a sustainable participatory collaboration system in the current health networks, on which first the focus is on valid and reliable data bundling of animals and their diseases from wildlife rehabilitation centres. These data can be made applicable to scientific research and the professional field to be able to signal the risks of (inter)national zoonotic diseases. We will focus our methodology on the societal, technical and biological elements involved.
Van Hall Larenstein Hogeschool, Wageningen University, the Dutch Wildlife Health Centre, the National-Institute-for-Public-Health-and-the-Environment, Falcon together with Dutch wildlife rehabilitation centres will develop the fundaments of the surveillance system. The Foundation DierenLot, the Ministry-of-Agriculture-Nature-and-Food-quality, Flemish wildlife rehabilitation centres, vets, and governmental organisations are partners, among others.