Can North American animal poison control center call data provide early warning of outbreaks associated with contaminated pet food? Using the 2007 melamine pet food contamination incident as a case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2007 melamine pet food contamination incident highlighted the need for enhanced reporting of toxicological exposures and development of a national quantitative disease surveillance system for companion animals. Data from poison control centers, such as the Animal Poison Control Center (APCC), may be useful for conducting real-time surveillance in this population. In this study, we explored the suitability of APCC call data for early warning of toxicological incidents in companion animal populations by using a-priori knowledge of the melamine-related nephrotoxicosis outbreak. Patient and household-level information regarding possible toxicological exposures in dogs and cats reported to the APCC from 2005 to 2007, inclusive, were extracted from the APCC's AnTox database. These data were used to examine the impact of surveillance outcome, statistical methodology, analysis level, and call source on the ability to detect the outbreak prior to the voluntary recall issued by the pet food manufacturer. Retrospective Poisson temporal scan tests were applied for each combination of outcome, method, level, and call source. The results showed that month-adjusted scans using syndromic data may have been able to help detect the outbreak up to two months prior to the voluntary recall although the success of these methods varied across call sources. We also demonstrated covariate month-adjustment can lead to vastly different results based on the surveillance outcome and call source to which it is applied. This illustrates care should be taken prior to arbitrarily selecting a surveillance outcome and statistical model for surveillance efforts and warns against ignoring the impacts of call source or key covariates when applying quantitative surveillance methods to APCC call data since these factors can lead to very different results. This study provides further evidence that APCC call data may be useful for conducting surveillance in the US companion animal population and further exploratory analyses and validation studies are warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.100 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".