Risk Assessment to Prevent Infectious Diseases
All facilities and environments have risk factors which increase the risk of infectious disease spread before or during a disease outbreak. A risk assessment is used to identify possible horse, human or environment factors that increase the possibility of disease spread. An example is the common practice put horse that has been traveling and mingled with horses back in the home environment without taking any precautions such as isolation and monitoring to make sure the horse isn’t sick with the potential to spread a disease.
Risk assessment during an outbreak is also important to decrease the possibility that the unaffected horses in quarantine are not a risk contacting an affected horse.
Determining the risks for disease spread include assessing the potential for the following. Risk assessment can differ for different type of facilities and event activities. The following contains the topics for all risk assessments
- Horse to horse contact:
- Horse to objects (fomites)
- Watering
- Feeding
- Tack
- Tools-Implements
- Equipment
- Human transfer by going horse to horse
- Horse traffic and risk for exposure
- Human traffic and risk of transmission
- Pet traffic
- Visitor traffic
- Vector control
- Facility and environmental sanitation
- Ventilation
- Drainage
- Disinfection
- Manure-Bedding disposal
- Entry of a new horse to the facility protocol
- Isolation
- Monitoring
Link to risk assessment checkoff
Link to horse show biosecurity protocol
Link to CDFA toolkit