Rodent Health Surveillance and Monitoring
Purpose:
Animal health surveillance is necessary to monitor the health status of research animals. These procedures provide guidance on the method for performing rodent health surveillance to maximize the potential to detect subclinical infections that can confound research results.
Background:
Rodent health monitoring programs, rodent health surveillance, or sentinel monitoring programs, are designed to detect subclinical infections of rodents that potentially have detrimental effects to research, in a cost effective manner. There are many variations to developing and implementing a health monitoring program, but to maintain a constant standard of care at UC Davis, the Office of the Attending Veterinarian has developed a program of minimum standards. This program will provide essential information to vivarium managers, the veterinary staff, and the investigator. A complete rational for the program is here.
Procedure:
1. Sentinel animals should be immunocompetent and proven seroconverters to adequately detect circulating antibody to rodent pathogens.
- Recommended mouse sentinels: CD-1 (or other outbred stock), BALB/c, FVB, C3H
- Recommended rat sentinels: SD, Long Evans, Wistar
- Immunocompromised rodents and rodents that are poor seroconverters are not recommended for routine sentinel monitoring. Such mouse strains include C57BL/6, nude mice, scid mice, rag knockout mice, or other genetically modified mice.
- Cohort and clinical cull animals are excellent adjuncts to a sentinel monitoring program.
2. Sentinel animals should originate from a known pathogen free vendor. The Health Monitoring Coordinator maintains a list of approved vendors and can be contacted at 752-7244.
3. One pair of dedicated sentinels per 80 cages of mice is required to achieve enough confidence using the most current testing modalities.
4. Rodents are submitted on a quarterly basis to the Comparative Pathology Laboratory for testing.
5. Exposure Procedure for Soiled Bedding Sentinels.
- Soiled bedding from each colony cage on the rack will be pooled in a suitably sized container and mixed.
- ½ of the bedding in a sentinel cage will be clean dry fresh bedding.
- ½ of the bedding will be mixed soiled bedding collected and pooled.