Defining health and welfare for the UK horse population – time for action

He restated the central role of the 2007 Equine Health and Welfare Strategy for Great Britain in its future success. Aim 2 (Health Surveillance) of the Strategy recognizes that accurate disease prevalence data are a vital prerequisite for defining health and establishing benchmarks for equine welfare and management at both individual horse and population level. Four years on, through a project led by The Blue Cross and the British Equine Veterinary Association, we now have a practical way of collecting disease data through the National Equine Health Surveys (NEHS) and finally have a means of delivering Aim 2. This is a significant step forwards.

Disease surveillance is more complex than might first be imagined and is conducted for a variety of different reasons. To many people, I suspect, disease surveillance means exotic disease surveillance or perhaps contagious or infectious disease surveillance in the broader sense. Surveillance of exotic (notifiable) diseases is provided by Defra and we can be confident that unrecognized notifiable diseases are not circulating in our horse population.