Absence of MERS-CoV antibodies in feral camels in Australia: Implications for the pathogen's origin and spread

Crameri, Gary; Durr, Peter A.; Barr, Jennifer; Yu, Meng; Graham, Kerryne; Williams, Owen J.; Kayali, Ghazi; Smith, David; Peiris, Malik; Mackenzie, John S.; Wang, Lin-Fa

The concept of "active surveillance", whereby surveys are undertaken to detect and measure the extent of a disease or pathogen is well established in public and animal health. While such active surveillance has a role in emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), it has obvious limitations in that it can only occur after the disease has emerged. Furthermore, there are challenges with diagnostics and the difficulty and expense of surveying for diseases of low prevalence, which is the situation for many EIDs in their initial stages. An approach which is gaining increasing recognition in the EID sciences is the use of "proactive surveillance" whereby potential "hotspots" for emergence and/or "reservoirs" are selected for surveys. We have provided an example of this "new" type of surveillance whereby we were able to recommend specific bat species to proactively target for sampling, and propose that this is particularly appropriate within the "One Health" approach to emerging infectious diseases.