Flexible assessment of biosecurity in small- and medium scale poultry farms in low and middle income countries

BACKGROUND: Biosecurity measures are essential for mitigating the risk of pathogen introduction and spread in farms. While standardised tools for monitoring biosecurity implementation exist, they are often not tailored to the specific needs of low and middle income countries (LMICs), where pathogen occurrence and farming practices can be highly variable compared to intensive high income country settings. The aim of our study was to develop a flexible risk assessment tool for evaluating biosecurity practices on small and medium-scale poultry farms in LMICs. The methodology described here allows local experts to adapt the tool to current conditions.

RESULTS: The development process began by combining two existing questionnaires. These were evaluated by nine experts with expertise in diverse farming systems in LMICs. The experts conducted a knowledge aggregation process to assign weights to the different areas and individual questions within the questionnaires. The median scores from the final expert elicitation informed the weighting of questions in the newly developed questionnaire. These weights are adaptable and can be adjusted to reflect population-specific conditions, which may vary in pathogen load and farming practices.

CONCLUSIONS: We have developed a flexible biosecurity assessment tool tailored to small-and medium-scaled poultry farms in LMICs. This tool can be used as presented or adapted to local conditions through the input of local experts, allowing for effective and context-specific biosecurity monitoring.