[Morbidity registries of animal diseases: development, examples, trends].

The earliest registries of animal morbidity were established at the end of the nineteenth century and concerned contagious diseases. In the 1970s, the development of modern managerial methods on stock farms implied more systematized collection of statistics on clinical disorders. Since breeders are the principal observers of diseases, and because such sources of information as hospitals do not exist for animals, morbidity analysis must be based on surveys especially constructed and relying upon the participation of volunteers. We have cited here the example of ecopathological surveys based on volunteer stock farms and conducted in France at the level of cattle herds. The future of animal pathology registries should be based upon procedures using randomly selected samples, as in the system recently established in France by the Agronomic Research and Statistical Services of the Ministry of Agriculture.