Real-time disease surveillance
We offer dashboard visualisations of real-time surveillance for a range of diseases, from fleas in cats and dogs to myxomatosis in pet rabbits.
The Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) collects data from veterinary practices and diagnostic laboratories. We're increasingly able to clean, evaluate and publish this data in near real time.
This allows us to identify trends in the patterns of diseases that affect our pets, either due to seasonality, or potentially, due to an outbreak of a new disease.
Dashboard visualisations
You'll find insights into some of the disease trends we've identified, using the dashboard visualisations we've shared on Tableau, using the links below.
- Grass seed foreign bodies in dogs
- Ear cropping in dogs
- Main reasons for pets presenting in practice
- Myxomatosis cases in rabbits
- Tick activity in companion animals
- Flea activity in cats and dogs
- Syndrome monitor
- How dog breeds change over time
- Vaccine-preventable diseases
- Tumour registry
- Topic modelling using electronic health records of one million dogs.
We only publish these dashboards where they're backed up by a strong scientific base which usually means a peer-reviewed publication.
If you're concerned about the health of your own pet, it's always best to seek advice from your veterinarian. SAVSNET cannot offer advice on an individual animal’s health.
How to use the dashboards
- Use the menus to configure each page. Play with the visualisation to get the data view you want. You can’t break it!
- The map functions are really useful but take a bit of getting used to. You can click on the map to select regions of interest, either singular or multiple. Use the CTRL key on your keyboard
- Various additional selection options are available through the triangle menu which appears when you hover over a map. To return to the full country view, click the selected region again.
Data from veterinary practices
The date used from vets is from individual consultations.
The postcode used is that of the owner. This is mapped to a broader regional scale to further protect the identities of participating owners and veterinary practices.
The denominator used is that of total consultation numbers for the given level of granularity.
Data from diagnostic laboratories
SAVSNET collects data from diagnostic laboratories across the UK for animals being tested for a range of pathogens, recording both the numbers tested and the results.
The postcodes we use to plot the spatial distribution of the laboratory data is that of the submitting veterinary practice, not the owner.
The date we receive can vary between laboratories and might include sample collection date, sample submission date, sample receipt date and/or results data. We treat these different elements of laboratory data synonymously, as they are generally received within a few days of each other.
For most pathogens, and only where an expert deems it appropriate, we amalgamate tests that are broadly suggestive of a current infection. For example, we would typically merge data for those tests based on isolation and those based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We do not include data from serology.
Disclaimers
- While SAVSNET collects data from many of the largest laboratories in the UK and almost 15% of UK veterinary practices, it is not all, so our results may not be representative of all diagnosed disease in the UK. We believe we have a lot of data but cannot formally say it is representative – it may contain hidden biases. Of course, we can only report information for those animals that attend a vet, or where the vet submits a sample to a participating laboratory
- Changes in the crude numbers of animals with a particular disease or syndrome may represent an actual increase, or possibly where a new diagnostic laboratory or veterinary practices have joined SAVSNET, or other external effects such as recent media coverage
- SAVSNET dashboards are based on diseases recorded in health records. It is likely that what we identify is an underestimate of the total levels of disease. For example, a vet may not record the presence of a disease either because they did not notice it, or because it was deemed to be of lesser importance than the reason the owner came to the vet. The method we use to identify cases may also miss them because of changes in spelling or local terminology used by the vet. As such, the dashboards are best used to indicate a relative risk, and how this changes over time, geography, and between species and breeds
- We have made every effort to ensure our visualisation dashboards give an accurate representation of the data we receive. Their use and interpretation is not, however, the responsibility of the SAVSNET team.