An overview of faecal parasitological investigations in Estonian animals

Author: Brian Lassen

The data presented here is collected from the official reports of the Estonian Veterinary and Food Laboratory (VAFL) and presented using the Gapminder motion chart tool, which is available through Google Documents.

With this chart, we encourage you to explore the history of samples sent to VAFL from 2000 to 2010. You can adjust the X and Y axis to what you wish to observe and press the play button. You can mark specific animal species of interest and follow the development over time by clicking on the bubble or tick it in the side menu.

Different animal species were investigated every year. Faecal samples were investigated for different pathogens (parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungi). One type of animal, such as "cattle", will make up a proportion of these samples and is represented by the Y-axis. For larger or smaller proportions of samples sent for diagnostics were faecal samples - this proportion is represented by the X-axis. The size of the bubble represent the number of faecal samples submitted that year from that animal. You can also alter the axis' to the sums by choosing in the pull-down menu.

As example, mark "Cattle" and run. Notice how the proportion parasitological faecal samples investigated from cattle make up a large proportion of the faecal samples every year, but with huge fluctuations. At the same time the number of samples sent for investigations from cattle increase over time, but the proportion of parasitological faecal samples out of all kinds of investigations in cattle do not pass 20%.
One interpretation of this is that cattle is seen as important compared to other kinds of animals (horses for example) by those who submit samples to VAFL for parasitological investigations. Still the number of submitted samples are not very large. At the same time the focus of cattle investigations switched towards other types (bacteriological). 

For exploring the graph try answering the following questions by exploring the interactive figure.

• Which animals are most frequently submitted faecal samples from? Does it change over time?
• Is it mainly small or large animals that are submitted to the laboratories? Does it change over time?
• Is the diversity of sample types (different species of animals) changing over time?
• Do the submission of samples from different animals reflect what you would expect for that animal group regarding parasites that could be detected in faecal samples?
• Are the number of faecal samples from different animals having large or small variations?

We remind you this is not research data, but simply what is submitted to the diagnostic laboratories in Estonia and should be viewed as such. Still, exactly what is being submitted over time tells interesting stories. We encourage to explore.