Health Monitoring Programmes and International Standards

Health monitoring aims at investigating the microbiological status of laboratory animals and is therefore an important prerequisite to get reliable and reproducible results from animal experimentation. A proper health monitoring program must be established in order to evaluate the efficiency of hygienic measures. To obtain optimal information from testing, all the critical variables must be taken into account, and all the procedures need to be adapted to local and scientific needs. Variables include the various housing conditions (e.g., open cages and individually ventilated cages) and different types of samples (e.g., colony animals, sentinels, and environmental samples). Diverse agents such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, or parasites require suitable sampling strategies and specific test methods. The prevalence of agents and their importance must be considered. This chapter also provides some advice for the shipping of samples. The importance of comprehensive health reporting including test methods applied and the handling of unexpected or positive test results are stressed, and some suggestions are made on what to do in the case of an infectious outbreak. Finally, the authors give an outlook on future developments of health monitoring and the definition of the microbiological status of laboratory rodents.