Risk factors for hazard of release from salmonella-control restriction on Swedish cattle farms from 1993 to 2002

Abstract

In Sweden, only a few cattle farms are infected with salmonella each year and this can be attributed to the Swedish salmonella control programme. All findings of salmonella in animals, feed and food of animal origin are notifiable and restrictions are always put on infected herds until they have been cleaned up from the infection. However, there has been concern about increasing costs for clean-up of salmonella-infected farms as well as increasing length of the restriction periods. Our aim was to investigate potential risk factors associated with the length of restriction periods on Swedish cattle farms between 1993 and late 2002. All 112 cattle farms that were notified to the Swedish Board of Agriculture as infected with salmonella during the study period, were included in this longitudinal and retrospective study. The putative risk factors were analysed using the proportional-hazards model. There was a lower hazard for release from salmonella control restrictions after the European Union (EU) accession in 1995, and/or change of testing from one to two negative herd tests for release of restrictions (hazard ratio (HR)=0.56, 95% confidence interval (CI)=0.38, 0.84), for every additional number of 100 cows (HR=0.83; CI=0.7, 0.97), if rodents and/or wild birds were abundant (HR=0.5, CI=0.27, 0.98) and if there was more than one farm site in the company (HR=0.47, CI=0.28, 0.81).