Role of Geographical Information System (GIS) in Surveillance and Monitoring of Animal Disease

Abstract

Monitoring animal diseases and mapping of affected farms have been arduous challenging task in the field of veterinary epidemiology and it’s the bedrock of coordinated disease control programme. Advances in the discipline of Geography (GIS) have provided tools to evaluate different strategies to manage and prevent the spread of infectious animal diseases. This paper describes an overview of the possibilities and potential uses of a Geographical Information System (GIS) in the field of surveillance and monitoring of animal diseases. The areas in which GIS and spatial GIS-functions could be incorporated and presented are: recording and reporting information, epidemic emergency, cluster analysis, modelling disease spread, and planning control strategies. The paper further presents few examples of where the GIS have been applied to studies of epidemiology and surveillance of animal diseases, which demonstrate the significant value of GIS in these areas.