Table 1.

Definitions for terms used to describe type of control programme (CP) and country status for disease in this survey of CPs among countries in Europe.

Definition	Description
Control	It is the reduction of the morbidity and mortality from disease. It is a general term embracing all measures intended to interfere with the unrestrained occurrence of disease, whatever its cause.
Eradication	Most commonly in veterinary medicine, eradication refers to the regional extinction of an infectious agent. However, it could also be applied at individual herd level.
Surveillance	The collection, collation, analysis and dissemination of data; a type of observational study that involves continuous monitoring of disease occurrence within a population.
Endemic	Endemic is an adjective used in two senses: 1. the usual frequency of occurrence of a disease in a population; 2. the constant presence of a disease in a population.
Sporadic	Is the type of disease that presents irregularly and haphazardly. This implies that appropriate circumstances have occurred locally, producing small, localised outbreaks.
Officially free	Means that a country is officially recognised as free by EU laws.
Perceived free	Means the country does not have an officially free status because it is not available or that they have not had disease cases in the past few years and believe they are free of the disease.
Unknown	Means that the countries (or the members from the country) do not know if they have a CP and/or their disease status.

The definitions are based on Thrusfield and Christley (17).