2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

A Novel Zoonotic Disease Outbreak Course to improve 
Surveillance and Response for the USDA
Julianna B. Lenoch*

Office of Health Informatics, Wisconsin Dept of Health Services, Madison, WI, USA

Objective
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) created a 

new course in 2013 to meet needs of the veterinary epidemiologists 
within the Veterinary Services (VS) division. The objective of this 
training was to provide a standard framework to investigate animal 
disease outbreaks, and apply practical solutions. VS has expertise 
in animal surveillance, this training course demonstrated how 
to incorporate the fundamentals of surveillance into an outbreak 
scenario. The goal of course was to give epidemiologist skills and 
practice to more quickly and efficiently conduct an investigation, 
allow rapid identification of a cause, apply control measures, and limit 
economic and health impacts of a disease.

Introduction
Outbreak Investigations course consisted to a series of 8 online 

modules, covering:
•Confirm that an outbreak is occurring and confirm diagnosis
•Case definition
•Descriptive Epidemiology
•Hypothesis Generation
•Analytic Epidemiology
•Preliminary control and Prevention
•Communication of findings
•Establishing disease surveillance and monitoring
The online modules were followed by live webinars, taught by

the instructors who wrote each unit of the online webinar. Finally, 
select epidemiologists from Veterinary Services were invited to a 
3-day classroom course, to collaborate with other team members and 
practice outbreak detection, surveillance and control. Three scenarios 
were created to highlight economic impact, severe consequences of 
an uncontrolled outbreak, OneHealth approach and the collaboration 
needed during a zoonotic disease outbreak.

Methods
The epidemiologists that attended were required to complete a 

self-assessment before and after the course to determine their comfort 
level, understanding of basic and advanced epidemiology processes, 
and ability to formulate and test hypothesis during an outbreak 
situation. These questions required answers in a 1-10 ordinal scale. 
Participants were also asked baseline information on their years of 
service for USDA-VS and education level.

A separate standard evaluation report was completed by the 
Professional Development service of VS. Participants were required 
to evaluate the 3-day live course within a standard questionnaire and 
allowed to assess 1-5 scoring in several measurement areas.

Results
Results of the pooled data from pre and post course evaluations 

were compared using a T-test for equality of means.
Results of the standard evaluation by Professional Development 

were pooled, and responses were reported with mean, median and 
standard deviation.

Knowledge in all nine areas improved after the training, statistically 
significant improvement in knowledge base was observed in five of 
the nine measured areas.

Conclusions
This training method was highly successful in meeting the goals 

of Veterinary Services, and will be offered again to selected team 
members. Participants valued the knowledge and expertise of the 
scenario facilitators, and the quality and realism of the scenarios 
presented. The participants appreciated the ability to work through 
scenarios in stages and to work in teams.

Keywords
training; surveillance; zoonotic disease; public health workforce; 
preparation

Acknowledgments

The USDA- VS epidemiology team at the Western Region office in 
Fort Collins Colorado was heavily involved in producing this outbreak 
investigation course. Special thanks to Brian McCluskey, Jason Lombard, 
Jason Baldwin, Tracey Linn and Alicia Humlicek.

*Julianna B. Lenoch
E-mail: julielenoch@gmail.com    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e144, 201