AHL interactive animal pathogen dashboards: New poultry disease dashboards
Tanya Rossi, Tatiana Petukhova, Cathy Bauman, Michele Guerin, Zvonimir Poljak, and Maria Spinato
Animal Health Laboratory, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON.
AHL Newsletter 2025;29(2):18.
The Interactive Animal Pathogen Dashboard (IAPD) project was initiated in late 2020 with the goal of using Animal Health Laboratory data in real-time animal disease surveillance efforts. The resulting dashboards were built with input from practicing veterinarians and government animal health experts to address needs in clinical decision making, client education, and regulatory strategy. The dashboards display temporal, and where possible, spatial trends in laboratory test submissions, positives and percent positivity from the previous ten years. Where appropriate, subtyping information is also available to track emerging strains and inform prevention plans such as vaccination. Displayed data are presented in aggregate to protect client confidentiality and are refreshed daily. Free dashboard accounts are available to veterinarians in Ontario and government agencies in Canada, and at a nominal (cost-recovery) fee to commercial entities and research laboratories working in animal or public health.
Since the launch of the IAPD in December 2022, the project team has striven to supplement and enhance dashboards by listening to our stakeholders in production, veterinary medicine, and public health. This has been especially true of the poultry IAPDs which have been expanded from displaying three dashboards (infectious bronchitis virus, adenovirus, and infectious laryngotracheitis virus) upon the project’s public launch, to eight dashboards in spring 2025.
The first of these additions were influenza A dashboards for both turkeys (Fig. 1) and chickens. The first two dashboard pages display influenza A matrix PCR results from the previous, three and ten-year periods. A third dashboard page displays subtype specific PCR results for H1, H3, H5 and H7. In the case of highly pathogenic avian influenza strains, a 7-day lag in IAPD reporting has been structured to allow time for formal reporting, as required by the Canada Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)’s regulatory mandate. In the past five years, there has been an increase in diagnostic testing for influenza A in poultry, especially in 2022, 2023 and winter/spring 2025. All identified cases have been the H5 strain with a few submissions “too weak to type”. Confirmatory testing performed by CFIA’s National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases (NCFAD) identified the currently dominant H5N1 strain in all of these cases. This increase in laboratory testing for influenza is consistent with observed increases in disease incidence in North America, and has been expanded to include other domestic species - felines, pigs and cattle especially. The IAPD team has also published influenza dashboards for swine, bovids and equids, and is planning a feline dashboard in the near future.
In response to suggestions by poultry practitioners and public health officials, the IAPD team has created a dashboard for Salmonella in chickens. This dashboard includes separate graphs for bacterial culture results in clinical samples and environmental samples submitted from the Ontario Hatchery and Supply Flock program (OHSF). All positive culture results were subtyped by public health and are displayed in the second Salmonella dashboard page. Over the previous five years, submissions and positives for both clinical and OHSF samples have remained relatively consistent, as has the proportional prevalence of specific subtypes (Fig.2 ) S. Kentucky remains the most commonly-isolated species.
The most recent addition to the poultry dashboards has been avian metapneumovirus (AMPV) dashboards for both turkeys and chickens. AMPV incidence in Canadian poultry, especially turkeys, sharply increased in spring 2024, and has remained endemic to date. Both subtypes A and B have been detected. Creation of these dashboards has highlighted the IAPDs’ active response to new and reemerging pathogen surveillance.
To sign up for a dashboard membership please go to https://iapd.lsd.uoguelph.ca/ and click “get access”. As membership is restricted to veterinarians, regulatory agencies, and animal health researchers, approvals are conducted manually and may take a few days. Accounts are free for food animal practices and government workers. For additional accounts or for commercial agricultural companies (pharma, feed, genetics), accounts are $300/year (our cost for viewer licenses). Please reach out to us at iapd@uoguelph.ca with any questions or feedback.
Figure 1: The Animal Health Laboratory's influenza A in commercial turkeys. Data displayed includes test results from a matrix PCR performed for clinical and monitoring purposes from 01-01-2016 to 08-05-2025. Research samples were excluded.
Figure 2: The Animal Health Laboratory’s interactive animal pathogen dashboard for poultry Salmonella species isolated from clinical and environmental Ontario Hatchery and Supply Flock program samples from 01-01-2020 to 09-05-2025. Research samples were excluded.