Availability of articles on veterinary epidemiology in an open access virtual health library

Open access virtual health libraries are an important source of clinical and epidemiological information that support the routine practice of veterinary medicine. There, it can be obtained full text of scientific articles presenting statistical data of several animal diseases. For public health undergraduate education, especially the disciplines of epidemiology and biostatistics, it is important the access of data related to the national disease profile, in order to support students on building and integrated view on the local reality they will exercise their professional practice. The objective of this study was to perform a search on Brazilian open access virtual health libraries, in order to find articles published in veterinary medicine journals, whose contents were related to epidemiology, and describe its features. The search used the terms “incidence”, “prevalence”, “mortality”, “morbidity”, “mean”, “median”, “standard deviation”, “relative risk”, “attributable risk”, “odds ratio”, “sensitivity”, “specificity” and “predictive value”, and the results retrieved 164 articles from 3 journals. We observed that few articles presented mortality indicators and association measurements (analytic epidemiology). The subjects were concentrated on infectious and parasitic diseases. The majority of studies were developed in more developed areas in Brazil (Southeast and South Regions), and there was association between the place the study was performed and the location of the journal. We concluded that there is a need for more integration between epidemiology studies and the scientific production on veterinary medicine in Brazil.