Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference

USDA APHIS Wildlife Services has established a National Wildlife Disease Surveillance and Emergency Response System (SERS). The goal of SERS is to develop and implement a nationally coordinated disease monitoring system aimed at safeguarding wildlife populations, agriculture, and human health and safety from disease threats. The SERS is designed to provide an infrastructure capable of assisting state, federal, and tribal agencies with both routine disease monitoring and in addressing wildlife disease threats. Supplementing existing programs with a nationally coordinated wildlife surveillance system facilitates information exchange among the programs, ensures diseases of national bio-security concern (e.g., plague, tularemia, avian influenza, classical swine fever) are adequately sampled, and additionally, provides field and laboratory infrastructure which is available to assist other agencies with sampling collection and disease diagnosis during emergency outbreaks. The SERS currently consists of national program staff and 23 wildlife disease biologists distributed throughout the country. During 2005, these biologists provided disease surveillance assistance to 17 states for chronic wasting disease, 19 states for West Nile virus, 18 states for rabies, and numerous other states for surveillance of 18 other diseases. In 2005, the SERS program coordinated national level surveillance systems for plague and tularemia (18 states) and for diseases in feral swine (14 states). Currently, SERS is coordinating a National Early Detection System for Asian influenza H5N1 in migratory birds, in collaboration with other federal and state partners.