• Contact to animal (e.g. poultry) with a laboratory-detected infection, or contact to its secretions or consumption of its products (e.g. eggs). * terms marked with an asterix are defined in more detail in a glossary of the case definitions next level would have been forwarded according to the case definition category, given that the correct disease was identified. Inversely decision on reporting was also seen to be correct if a case that should not have been reported to the next level was in fact classified in a way that the case would have been held back. However, cases forwarded with wrong disease identification (see above) were a priori considered incorrect. Thus reporting was based on the question whether the case needed to be forwarded to the state level or not, which is a direct result of the disease identification and the case definition category. Sensitivity of reporting was defined as the number of cases that would have been correctly forwarded divided by the number of cases that should have been forwarded according to the gold standard. The positive predictive value of reporting was defined as the number of cases that should have been forwarded among those that would have been forwarded. Precision of reporting is defined as the number of cases that would have been either correctly forwarded to the state level, or would have been correctly held back at the local health department level, divided by the total number of case examples. Unless stated otherwise, reporting precision was the outcome parameter used in the following analysis.