Factors Influencing Equine Affiliate Opinion on Reporting of Equine Strangles in the United States

•About 78.5% of the sampled equine stakeholder community participating in a study on equine strangles believe that reporting of this disease should become either monitored with mandatory notification, notifiable on a national level, or notifiable and actionable.•Factors significantly associated with a desire for increased reporting included being female, familiarity with the disease, perception of their horse's risk of disease acquisition (i.e., medium or high risk), and ranking strangles as a disease of high importance among equine infectious diseases.•Further information regarding the distribution, accessibility, and source of educational materials for equine affiliates on strangles would be useful. Although equine strangles is reportable in all states, synchronous reporting of this disease does not occur across the country. States have variable regulations on reporting (actionable, notifiable, and monitored) and no mandatory comprehensive databases exist for tracking prevalence. In this study, which is a companion to our recent publication on veterinarians’ opinions on this topic, we solicited equine affiliates’ (including horse owners, horse business owners/trainers, breeders, and barn managers) opinions on reporting of strangles and factors influencing their opinion. A total of 518 equine affiliates/stakeholders living within the United States. A structured survey was administered online. Eighty-one participants (17.8%) believed that strangles should continue to be nationally monitored and that individual states should have jurisdiction over laboratory confirmed positive cases; 124 (27.2%) believed strangles should become nationally monitored with mandatory notification of positive cases to a central forum; 77 participants (16.9%) thought strangles should become notifiable nationally; and 157 (34.4%) thought strangles should become notifiable and actionable. Participants who ranked strangles as “important” or “very important” compared to other infectious disease were more likely to want increased reporting (OR = 3.62, P = .054), and participants who were more familiar with the disease were more likely to rank it as important: for every 1-point increase in correct total score on the 5-question basic knowledge exam included, there was a 49% increase in odds of ranking strangles as important or very important (P = .003). Equine stakeholders who perceived their horses to be at medium or high risk of acquiring the disease were 2.76 times more likely to ran